December 12: What Do Trump’s Latino Gains Mean for Democrats?
Amid all the conflicting takes on how Donald Trump won the presidency after losing it in 2020, there’s a strong consensus that gains among Latino voters mattered a great deal. I examined this CW at New York:
Definite judgements about how the 2024 presidential election turned out should await voter-file based data that won’t be available for some time. But it’s pretty clear one of the biggest and most counter-intuitive shifts from 2020 was Donald Trump’s gains among Latino voters. Yes, there’s a lot of controversy over the exact size of that shift. Edison Research’s exit polls (which have drawn considerable criticism in the past for allegedly poor Latino voter samples) showed Kamala Harris winning Latinos by a spare 51 to 46 percent margin, while Edison’s major competitor, the Associated Press VoteCast, showed Harris’s margin at a somewhat more robust 55 to 43 percent. Other estimates range up to the 62 to 37 percent win claimed for Harris in the American Electorate Voter Poll.
But most takes showed sizable Republican gains from 2020, and for that matter, Trump did measurably better among Latinos in 2020 than in 2016 (Pew’s validated voter studies showed Trump winning 28 percent in 2016 and 38 percent in 2020). As Equis Research puts it, “this looks and sounds like a realignment.” And while close elections lend themselves to exaggerated focus on specific voter groups, the size and potential future magnitude of the Latino vote make it a natural source of deep concern for Democrats and optimism for Republicans. A New York Times analysis of the startling losses in vote share by Democrats in urban core areas in 2024 concluded that the most consistent pattern was significant Latino populations, which also showed major Republican gains in non-urban areas as well.
To state the obvious, it’s surprising that a politician so associated with nativist rhetoric and policies as Donald Trump is setting records for support in what has traditionally been a Democratic “base” constituency. Is this a trend that would have occurred without Trump leading the GOP, and if so, could it actually intensify once he’s left office for good?
It’s important to understand that this isn’t the first time a pro-GOP Latino “wave” seemed to be developing. While there was immense controversy over the exact numbers (in part because of uniquely flawed exit polls in that particular year), George W. Bush appears to have won about 40 percent of this vote, beating Ronald Reagan’s earlier record of 37 percent in his 1984 reelection landslide. According to the more reliable exit polls in subsequent elections, the GOP share of the Latino vote dropped to 31 percent in 2008 and then to 27 percent in 2012. Some reasons for this reversal of the trend that appeared in 2004 weren’t that hard to discern: the Great Recession that appeared late in Bush’s second term hit Latino households really hard, even as Republicans retreated rapidly from Bush’s support for comprehensive immigration reform (by 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney was promoting policies to make life so unpleasant for undocumented immigrants that they would “self-deport”).
But it’s possible that what we are seeing now is the resumption of a slow drift towards the GOP among Latinos that was temporarily interrupted by the Great Recession and a nativist uprising among white Republicans. Whatever unhappiness Latinos felt towards Trump’s immigration views was pretty clearly offset by economic concerns, especially among younger Latino men, who broke towards Trump most sharply. As happened during the Great Recession, the economy mattered most, and the combination of inflation (especially in housing costs) with tight credit eroded already-thin Democratic loyalties. As the above-mentioned Times analysis showed, defections to Trump happened all across the landscape of the Latino electorate, not just among more traditionally Republican-prone groups as Cuban Americans or South Americans. The question as to whether this is a party accomplishment rather than a personal accomplishment by Trump is an open one; Democrats did significantly better among Latinos in down-ballot races in 2024.
A general trend towards a more politically diverse Latino voting population makes some intuitive sense. As former immigrants slowly give way to native-born citizens, particularly those who are entering the middle-class en masse, it’s logical that identification with “the party of immigrants” will decline. Latinos who embrace conservative evangelical–and especially hyper-conservative pentecostal–religious practices also has helped intensify right-leaning cultural attitudes. We may never return to the days of reliable two-to-one Democratic advantages in this community, particularly as young voters who are especially alienated from traditional party loyalties move into the electorate.
While Democrats should be worried about the future of Latino voting behavior, Republicans have no reason for complacency. It’s now Trump and the GOP who are fully responsible for economic conditions which could turn out to be much worse than vague positive memories of the first Trump administration might suggest. And while (as some polling indicates) Latino citizens may have a negative attitude towards the recent surge of migrants that has become so central to Trump’s grip on his MAGA base, it’s less clear the mass deportation regime Trump has pledged to undertake immediately is going to go over well among Latinos, even those who voted for him. A recent Pew survey showed that Latinos were significantly less supportive of a major deportation program than other voters. And if the Trump administration pursues deportation round-ups in a cruel and ham-handed way (which elements of Trump’s base would welcome as a virtue rather than as a vice), or by methods that affect Latino legal immigrants and native citizens (most likely via ethnic profiling by law enforcement officials), we could see a pretty significant Latino backlash.
In other words, while some Latino trend towards the GOP may be inevitable all things being equal, it’s hardly guaranteed and could be sharply reversed. For their part Democrats need to get more serious about Latino voter outreach (particularly among young men) and identify (and learn to explain!) an economic agenda that prioritizes the practical needs of middle-class folk from every background.
Okay, let us have that “intra-progressive” debate then.
I’ll start. My fear is that the way this legislation is shaping up, it is going to turn out to be every bit as disastrous to individuals in need of health care as The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 — an abominable piece of legislation that turned out to be a gift to the credit card companies and a disaster, a complete disaster, for people who are burdened with massive unmanageable debt due to medical expenses, unemployment, or other unavoidable or avoidable losses. Remember Ted Kennedy offering amendment after amendment after amendment as he stood alone on the floor of the Senate attempting to mitigate the impending disaster this abomination visited upon ordinary Americans. The legislation turned out to be so disastrous for consumers that even the credit card and mortgage banking industries decided it was too much of a good thing.
Two things: have you actually done the math with respect to premiums and co-pays and how they would impact an individual’s actual take-home pay? I have, and I invite you to do it too. My math tells me that for someone earning in the neighborhood of $65,000 to $75,000 per year, with a chronic disease that needs consistent medical care, out-of-pocket expenses look to be in the neighborhood of $20-25,000 per year with the current Senate bill. Already Medicaid share-of-cost can be prohibitive in high-cost areas of the country. You think that is going to make people, i.e. voters, happy about health care reform?
Secondly, you can look to the experience in Massachusetts for how the current proposed model of HCR is going to work, and it isn’t very encouraging. Trudy Lieberman over at CJR has an exceptional series on HCR that explores the impact of the Massachusetts experiment here: Health Reform Lessons from Massachusetts, Part VII : CJR. I encourage you and your readers to read the whole series.
Let’s look at your priorities:
1) “covering most of the uninsured” — in my view, any program that will (affordably) cover most of the uninsured is the whole point. Of course, a public health insurance option is the best way of doing that; we cover most seniors with Medicare; we cover most poor children and pregnant women with medicaid, SCHIP covers most children of working families who earn less than 250% FPL. Fine, but the experiment in Massachusetts shows that even with a mandate, the private insurance industry cannot affordably cover “most” of the uninsured. Instead, they opt to pay the fine for not buying it.
2) “more important than the level of subsidies to make coverage practically affordable” — amusing that you use the term “practically affordable” — like in hand grenades, eh? Let me ask you, why do you think that high levels of subsidies to the private health insurance industry is more acceptable — or a better deal — than a competing public insurance program? The public insurance program is CHEAPER for individuals and in the aggregate than high levels of subsidies. Is the point to save the private health insurance industry? We’d be better off dumping pallets of cash in their lobbies, as we did for the banks. Please look at the Healthy Families program in California for a successful public health insurance program that works.
3) “more important than regulation to end highly discriminatory insurance practices” — if there is anything in the bill to support, it is this, of course. This kind of regulation is badly needed, let’s do it. Let’s do it as a health insurance regulatory bill, then. It would be easier to pass standing alone, wouldn’t it?
4) “more important than how and when health reform is phased in” — I suspect this is just a throw-in, this isn’t really an issue but just nuts and bolts. Do you really think that this particular issue should take priority over the actual nature of health care reform itself? To me, it is almost irrelevant as a substantive issue, and certainly should not take precedence as a priority over the actual reform. Please explain why you think that “how and when health reform is phased in” is more important than the issue of whether there is an alternative publicly funded health insurance program available for consumers of health care.
One additional point: Please give public option advocates credit for good will. I find it patently offensive that the “pass anything” crowd dismisses us as unthinking my-way-or-the-highway rigid ideologues. If you really want to have a debate, it helps to treat the other side as if their opinions are worthy of debate. We can surely disagree on the merits of this legislation without your side being so dismissively arrogant, I would hope.
Cheers.
The intra-progessive debate that needs to begin is about formulating a strategy to reduce the super-majority requirement in the Senate, just as that was the necessary condition for the Civil Rights era. The current 60 vote requirement for passage of anything important is a relic of the incomplete job done in the early 60s to pass civil rights legislation — before that the requirement was 66 votes! But as a nation, we really didn’t want Jim Crow forever.
Similarly, we don’t want the prejudices of 12 percent of the people in rural states to determine the direction of a rich, modern country, but that’s what the current 60 vote filibuster does.
How do we move to end this without destroying all checks on short term majority enthusiasms?