Latinos switching parties Dems’ latest problem

Since 2020, one of the major questions hanging over the 2024 election is whether Latino voters will continue to ditch Democrats in favor of the GOP. Now, a new national poll of Latino voters offers some warning signs for Republicans as well as Democrats as the general election crystallizes: A sizable chunk of Latino voters appear to be willing to rethink their party loyalties.

Some 19.4%, or about 1 in 5 Latino voters, say they have considered changing their political affiliation either by switching parties or becoming independents, according to a national survey released by Florida International University (FIU) and the marketing firm Adsmovil. A majority of those wavering voters (61.1%) say they’d be open to leaving the Democratic Party and a plurality of those Democratic waverers (38.1%) would become Republicans.

To be sure, a majority of Latino respondents say they are still pretty firm in their political identity and affiliation. Democrats — including President Joe Biden — still win the support of an outright majority of Latino voters.

Some caveats are also in order when looking at polls: This result is just one data point — a snapshot in time at the end of 2023. And the election is still eight months away, so dynamics could definitely change.

But it’s a large, high-quality piece of data — a nationally representative sample of 1,221 Latino voters instead of an extrapolation from a tiny crosstab sample of a few hundred. Since 2020, other surveys and election results have also shown that Democrats are struggling to retain the support of Latino voters and reverse Republican gains. This FIU report suggests that trend is continuing.

Looking at survey data from 1994 to 2017, the Pew Research Center reports that partisan affiliation among all registered voters has generally not changed in those two decades. The same has been true for Hispanic and Latino voters in the years for which Pew has data available. But more recently, those allegiances have shifted a bit — to Democrats’ detriment. Trump made electoral gains with Latinos in 2020 that Republican candidates were generally able to keep during the 2022 midterms. And the Democratic advantage in Latino partisan affiliation began to shrink during and after Trump’s presidency.

And this is where the FIU/Adsmovil study adds new insights: Those 19% of Hispanic and Latino voters who say they’d be open to switching parties are mostly voters who’d be open to leaving the Democratic coalition.

More specifically, 38.1% of these wavering voters would flip affiliation from Democratic to Republican. An additional 23% would switch from Democratic to independent.

There’s a silver lining for Democrats among self-described independent Latino voters who are considering a change. There, 9% would become Democrats, as opposed to the 5.3% who would become Republicans.

These numbers confirm a finding from Pew after the 2022 midterms that, though partisan affiliation has been relatively stable for most of the last 20 years, the future of these patterns “remains uncertain.” According to Pew, there are about 1 in 10 Latino voters who call themselves Democrat or Republican but hold political and ideological views that are much closer to the opposite political party.

These figures all suggest that Republicans have a big opportunity in 2024 to reorder demographic and political coalitions. But it won’t be easy.

When asked which political party would better handle specific issues, Democrats still receive the support of a majority of Latino voters on traditionally Democratic topics, such as education or health care, in this FIU/Adsmovil study. But they only get a plurality of support on the economy, immigration and foreign policy — areas that make sense for Republicans to center as campaign issues this cycle.

There will be more to complicate the path for Republicans: Latino voters have a lower propensity to vote, to be tuned into the political cycle at this point, and to hear from political candidates, meaning they’ll have to invest heavily in outreach and specific messaging to these communities. Democrats have a slight leg up on this, given how much they have relied on Latino voters before.

But all the signs are pointing toward an electorate in churn. It may still shift a lot in the coming months, and it may surprise a lot of people come November.