Why did so many Latinos back Trump?
Report offers insights into 2020 voters that may prove helpful to Democrats and GOP.
WASHINGTON — One of the major surprises of the 2020 election was President Trump’s relatively strong showing with Latino voters.
Just four years after running a campaign fueled by anti-immigrant rhetoric, including the accusation that many Mexican immigrants were rapists, Trump significantly improved his standing with Latino voters.
Understanding why that happened and what it portends for future elections — whether movement of a sizable minority of Latinos to Trump was a one-time event or the start of a larger trend — involves enormous stakes for both parties.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, analysts offered a lot of guesses about what had happened. Now, detailed, precinct-level voting data have started to yield better-grounded assessments.
The latest and most detailed look comes from the Latino-focused firm Equis Research, which this month published the first part of a detailed analysis of the Latino vote in 2020. The analysis was based on some 40,000 interviews with Latino voters over the 2020 cycle, plus precinct-level returns from battleground states.
An electorate up for grabs
Despite the focus on who among them shifted, Latinos remain an overwhelmingly Democratic group and formed a major part of the party’s coalition in 2020. Democrats would not have their slender majorities in either house of Congress — and President Biden would not have won — without carrying a large majority of Latino voters, the Equis analysis notes.
At the same time, the 2020 results showed that true swing voters make up a much bigger share of the Latino population than Democrats believed. Trump won over many of them, including a large share of young voters and those who rarely take part in elections.
A lot of those Latino swing voters think of themselves as conservatives, and they made up more than one-third of the Latino electorate in 11 battleground states that Equis surveyed.
The swing to Trump was not small. Compared with his vote total in 2016, his share in the Miami area grew by 51% in heavily Cuban precincts in 2020, Equis found, and by an astounding 120% in non-Cuban but heavily Latino precincts. His vote in heavily Latino precincts in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley was up 83%.
And the shift went far beyond those two areas.
In Milwaukee, Trump’s vote in Latino precincts was up 38% from 2016. In Patterson, N.J., the percentage increase in Trump’s vote topped 100%, albeit from a relatively low level. Even in the Phoenix area, which Joe Biden carried strongly, Trump’s Latino vote surged — up 64% in heavily Latino precincts in Maricopa County. The difference in Arizona was that Biden’s vote also rose significantly compared with Hillary Clinton’s in 2016.
Local factors helped drive Trump’s gains with Latinos in some places, such as South Florida. But the fact that the shifts occurred in widely disparate places suggests those local concerns were not at the heart of what happened.
The data contradict some other popular notions, as well: Although Latinas remained heavily Democratic, their vote shifted more toward Trump than that of Latino men, the numbers show. That undermines the assumption that Trump had a unique appeal to Latino machismo.
Instead, Equis’ analysis suggests that Trump reached Latino swing voters in part because of a significant change in his campaign, and in part because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Latino communities.
Immigration rhetoric a footnote
One of the most notable differences between Trump in 2016 and in 2020 was that anti-immigrant rhetoric went from being a primary focus of the first campaign, as well as of Trump’s efforts for Republicans in the 2018 midterm election, to being something of a footnote.
“In 2020, there were no caravans,” said Stephanie Valencia, president of Equis, referring to Trump’s constant warnings in 2018 about groups of migrants moving through Mexico toward the U.S. border.
That may have made a big difference.
While immigration may not be the No. 1 issue for Latino voters, it remains “the gateway,” Valencia said. “It’s still the issue that voters use to measure whether a candidate is with us or against us — do they see us as rapists or as contributors.”
The relative absence of immigration from the 2020 debate opened the door for more conservative Latino voters to shift to Trump, Equis’ analysis suggests.
That underscores the stakes for both parties in the renewed debate over the border and immigration policy.
Republicans run the risk of “overplaying their hand” and reviving their image as an anti-Latino party, Valencia said. For Democrats, the risk would lie in a failure to deliver on long-standing promises to reform immigration laws and provide a pathway to citizenship for millions of long-term U.S. residents, many of them Latino, who lack legal authorization to live here.
Obviously, voters didn’t suddenly forget everything they had learned about Trump’s immigration positions from the earlier campaigns. But in 2020, a different issue — the pandemic and the economic devastation it caused — dominated their attention.
The economic crash disproportionately hurt Latino entrepreneurs and smallbusiness owners, as well as workers in industries like construction. It made many of them receptive to Trump’s image as a businessman and his warnings that Biden would reimpose lockdowns.
“Many Latino voters who are entrepreneurs, especially men, see themselves in Trump; they want to achieve the same levels of success he’s achieved,” Valencia said.
Republicans hope that 2020 will set the pattern for future elections, the way Trump’s success with working-class white voters in the Midwest in 2016 seems to have presaged a permanent realignment.
“You have a lot of Hispanics who are culturally conservative,” said Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, who praised the Equis research. Democrats “have tried to mobilize them based on appeals to group solidarity,” he said, “and that doesn’t necessarily work.”
Biden can hope to blunt that appeal with a booming economy. There’s also little evidence so far that other Republicans can profit from the same outsider image that Trump cultivated.
The question of turnout
But another piece of Equis’ analysis provides reason for Democrats to worry: The surge for Trump among young voters and those who seldom participate in elections contradicts the enduring Democratic assumption that higher turnout, especially in Sunbelt states with large Latino populations, will always be advantageous to their side.
Democrats have spent a lot of money targeting Latino communities with voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts but in some cases have forgotten the middle step — that of persuasion, Carlos Odio, Equis’ senior vice president for research, said on FiveThirtyEight’s Politics podcast last week.
“You can’t treat Latinos like these Democrat robots that all you’ve got to do is plug the batteries in, and they’re going to, in lockstep, turn out and vote,” Odio said.
Trump, by contrast, ran an aggressive campaign aimed at persuading Latino voters — making a huge investment in social media that went beyond what any other presidential campaign has done, Valencia said.
Democrats, she said, need to learn from that and “approach Latinos, and particularly Latino swing voters, with the same level of curiosity and investment they have given to white swing voters.”