Latinos are the new voters, they are young, ambitious and desperate to build a future for their lives and those of their families.
Young Latinos have become an unknown quantity and a headache for the Democratic and Republican parties. Many analysts mention that these economic objectives of their lives have benefited the Republicans, who have been working on a permanent strategy to attract their votes.
The lingering effects of the pandemic, the highest inflation in 40 years, and two-thirds of Latinos agreeing with the overall US majority that the country is on the wrong track make for an unquestionably difficult midterm season, according to different polls.
Younger male Hispanic voters, especially those in the South, appear to be drifting away from the Democratic party, a shift that is propelled by deep economic concerns. Weaknesses in the South and among rural voters could stand in the way of crucial wins in Texas and Florida in this year’s midterms.
How Latinos will vote is a crucial question in the November elections and for the future of American politics. Hispanic voters are playing a pivotal role in the battle over control of Congress, making up a significant slice of voters — as high as 20 percent — in two of the states likeliest to determine control of the Senate, Arizona and Nevada. Latinos also make up more than 20 percent of registered voters in more than a dozen highly competitive House races in California, Colorado, Florida and Texas, among other states.
Democrats have long assumed that the growing Latino electorate would doom Republicans, and the prospect of an increasingly diverse electorate has fueled anxieties among conservatives. The 2020 election results — in which Mr. Trump gained an estimated eight percentage points among Hispanic voters compared to 2016 — began changing both parties’ outlooks. The Times/Siena poll shows that historic allegiances and beliefs on core issues remain entrenched, though some shifts are striking.
Hispanic voters in America have never been a unified voting bloc and have frequently puzzled political strategists who try to understand their behavior. The 32 million Latinos eligible to vote are recent immigrants and fourth-generation citizens, city dwellers and rural ranchers, Catholics and atheists.
Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of the online voter registration organization Voto Latino, said her data supports the idea that Latinos are less concerned about what Democrats have done for them lately and more concerned about how things have been going for the past few months. Voto Latino opinion researchers’ polling found strong support among Latinos for infrastructure spending, the child tax credit, and responding to climate change. After the mass killing in Uvalde and the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, Kumar said Voto Latino found 81 percent of Latinos in red states favor reforming gun ownership laws, and 68 percent want to keep abortion legal.
Republicans are performing best with Hispanic voters who live in the South, a region that includes Florida and Texas, where Republicans have notched significant wins with Latino voters in recent elections. In the South, 46 percent of Latino voters say they plan to vote for Democrats, while 45 percent say they plan to vote for Republicans. By contrast, Democrats lead 62 to 24 among Hispanic voters in other parts of the country.
A generation gap could also lead to more Republican gains. Democrats, the poll found, were benefiting from particularly high support among older Latino voters. But voters under 30 favor Republicans’ handling of the economy by 46 percent, compared with 43 percent who favor Democrats.
Republicans also have strength among Latino men, who favor Democrats in the midterm election but who say, by a five-point margin, that they would vote for Mr. Trump if he were to run again in 2024. Young men in particular appear to be shifting toward Republicans. They are a key vulnerability for Democrats, who maintain just a four-point edge in the midterms among men younger than 45.
The 2020 Latino vote nationwide was the largest ever, growing by about 30 percent compared to the 2016 elections. With a median age 10 years younger than that of the country overall, many of those 16 million Latino voters were young, including first-timers aging into the voting population.
There were undeniably some bad signs for Democrats. The Latino vote was stronger for Republicans than expected in South Florida, as the party and popular GOP politicians made a strong bid for Cuban American voters, and wooed a growing Venezuelan population by slamming Democrats as socialists unduly sympathetic with governments in Havana and Caracas.
Latinos as a population are younger, more urban, have fewer years of schooling, and earn lower wages than Americans as a whole, while posting very high rates of workplace participation.
Because of the higher percentage of new voters, young voters, first-time voters, and Spanish language-dominant voters, it costs parties and activists more per head to turn out a Latino voter on Election Day than a Black or white voter.
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