GOP failed to win over as many Latinos as predicted

Leading up to Election Day last month, Republicans were poised to claim major victories, from a red wave in the House to control of the Senate. As part of those grand expectations, they hoped the results would show that Latino voters were continuing to join their ranks. That prediction proved off the mark.

Like so much about the midterm elections, what didn’t happen is as important as what did. Democrats did not lose ground among Latinos, but neither did Democrats significantly regain the ground they lost in 2020.

The big exception was Florida, where the two Republicans atop the ticket — Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio — rolled up impressive majorities among Hispanic voters. Elsewhere, however, the story was one of steadiness rather than slippage by Democrats.

“Outside of Florida, we saw a portrait of stability,” said Melissa Morales, president of Somos Votantes, a Latino advocacy and organizing group that worked to support Democratic candidates. “We held on.”

The 2020 election set off alarms among Democrats — and bold predictions among Republicans — about a realignment of the Latino vote. In 2020, President Donald Trump saw his support among Latinos jump 10 percentage points nationally, to 38 percent from 28 percent in 2016. In South Florida and South Texas, Trump made even bigger gains in some heavily Hispanic counties.

There were other reasons to think a major shift could be underway. Latinos are not a monolithic group, and many Hispanics share some things in common with Republicans, among them religiosity and small-business economics. Some analysts have long seen Latinos as a potential swing vote — and still do.

But while Republican gains in South Florida and South Texas drew the most attention, many strategists and academics tracking Latino voting patterns said the true test of whether the Democrats were continuing to lose ground would come this year in Arizona and Nevada, a pair of midterm battlegrounds each with hardfought races for Senate and governor.

“It was going to be the ultimate testing ground,” Carlos Odio of Equis Research said of the two Southwestern states. “While there was no reversal to pre-2020 levels, neither [of the Republican senatorial candidates] improved on 2020. … You have to judge it as a failure of Republicans to exploit what seemed the best opportunity they were going to get.”

Democrats held the Senate seats in both states and picked up the governorship of Arizona while surrendering the governorship of Nevada. Exit polls showed Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona won 58 percent of Latino voters, down slightly from President Joe Biden’s vote share in 2020.

In Nevada, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who was seen as her party’s most vulnerable incumbent, captured 62 percent of Latino voters, almost identical to Biden’s performance in 2020.

One reason Democrats did as well as they did in Arizona and Nevada was because of a significant disparity in resources invested in Spanish-language advertising. Overall in those two states, the Democrats outspent Republicans by a margin of about 5 to 1, according to an ad tracking source.