In both 2020 and 2024, Latino voters were more likely to support Trump than Republican candidates in other recent presidential elections. This trend was visible this week in county-level results and in the preliminary exit poll results.
To many observers, this is a puzzle: How could a candidate as hostile to immigrants and immigration as Trump actually gain support among Latino voters?
The best piece of research about the changes in Latino voting behavior in 2020 is by political scientists Bernard Fraga, Yamil Velez, and Emily West. I interviewed Velez about what they found, what happened on Tuesday night, and what this means for the future.
John Sides: Let’s start with this question. Who are the types of Latino voters who appeared to move to Trump in 2020?
Yamil Velez: In the paper, we examined several demographic and political subgroups. We were interested in exploring if there had been more of a shift among Latino men. We were also curious about educational polarization, where non-college-educated and lower-income voters have been shifting toward the GOP. Finally, we wanted to consider more politically proximal predictors such as partisanship, ideology, and views on issues.
We found that self-identified conservative Latinos and those with more conservative views on topics such as immigration and criminal justice policy shifted the most in Trump’s direction. We also observed shifts among Catholic Latinos, who may have preferred his stance on abortion. And we found some evidence that low-income and lower-education Latinos increased their support for Trump, although socioeconomic status or “class” was a smaller factor.
Among the demographic subgroups we tested, we found limited evidence that the shifts depended on national origin (e.g., Cuban Americans), gender, or age.
It sounds like many of these voters had views that were already out of step with their party affiliation. Why would Latinos have changed in 2020, as opposed to earlier elections?
One explanation is that covid-19 sucked up the “oxygen” and there was less coverage of immigration or other issues. So, 2020 did not become a referendum on Trump’s immigration policies. This may have freed Latino voters to make voting decisions without experiencing significant cognitive dissonance due to Trump’s stances on immigration.
Another possible explanation is that there has been a significant demographic change, with Latinos in America increasingly native born. These Latinos might behave much like their non-Hispanic white counterparts, such that they’re better sorted into the parties based on their ideology. This explanation seems less compelling, given the short time span between 2016 and 2020, but it may account for some of what we observe.
But is it true that the Latino voters who changed to vote for Trump were actually … in agreement with Trump on immigration?
We do observe significant shifts toward Trump among Latinos who favor more restrictions on immigration. But we also see shifts among Latinos who have conservative views on other issues, like criminal justice.
One possibility is that Latinos who had conservative views gravitated to the more conservative candidate. But they may have grown warmer toward Trump and simply brought their views on issues in line with his positions. This is tough to sort out.
In the aggregate, there had been some warming to Trump among Latinos. In 2016, 55% of Latinos viewed Trump as “hostile” to Latinos, but in 2020 this was only 29%. It’s possible that the initial shock of Trump’s hardline stances on immigration wore off, and Latinos began seeing him as more of a “normal” candidate.
Is immigration really a defining issue for Latinos? There is a lot of debate about this.
Immigration generally ranks higher as an issue among Latinos than non-Latinos. However, more recent surveys have found that it tends to rank lower than other topics such as the economy and health care.
In a recent study, I examined how Latinos make trade-offs between different issue positions. I asked them to write about an issue priority. They could cite abortion, climate change, or anything that came to mind. Then they saw match-ups between hypothetical candidates that varied in their positions on that “core issue” and on immigration.
When Latino voters face a trade-off between voting for candidates who align with them on their core issue and those who align with them on immigration, the core issue tends to win out. This holds even when these hypothetical candidates are staking out extreme positions on immigration, such as deporting all undocumented immigrants.
This suggests that treating Latinos as single-issue voters fixated on immigration is too simplistic.
In your analysis of 2020, you argue that “the evidence suggests a more durable shift toward the Republican party.” That conclusion was certainly borne out on Tuesday, when an even larger share of Latino voters appeared to support Trump. Are the changes among Latino voters permanent? Is there anything that the Democratic Party could do to increase its appeal to Latino voters?
When we started working on the piece, there was an assumption that the 2016 to 2020 shift was a simple “reversion to the mean,” given that it was within the range of Latino support for the GOP since 2000. And thus Latino support could easily increase in 2024.
Given that the biggest shifts we observed were among these ideological subgroups, we were skeptical of that possibility. Studies on partisan sorting suggest that once voters learn to connect their ideology to their vote choice, it’s hard to reverse. For us, this suggested that these changes were sticky.
There was some attempt by the Harris campaign to court voters with more conservative immigration preferences. This could have brought some of the more conservative Latinos back into the fold. However, I haven’t really seen any evidence of this. Whether this was because voters fundamentally didn’t trust Harris to be “tough” on immigration is unclear, but staking out a more restrictive position on immigration didn’t seem to move the needle.
Democrats will likely need to grapple with the significant ideological complexity among Latinos if they hope to win them back. While there were some positive efforts this cycle, I worry they may have been too little, too late. Tuesday’s results serve as a wake-up call: The Latino vote may be up for grabs, but the old assumptions about what drives these voters no longer hold.
