Are Hispanic voters abandoning the Democratic Party? Fox News and the Wall Street Journal want you to think so, but Gallup disagrees:
Gallup's best mechanism for tracking political inclinations over time is political party identification, a measure included in all Gallup surveys for decades....The results show that Americans' party identification swung dramatically toward the Republican Party in the last six months of 2021....With these national numbers as a context, what about party identification among Hispanic Americans?
Gallup says that between the first and second halves of 2021, overall party ID shifted 9 points away from Democrats while Hispanic party ID shifted only 4 points. Here are the annual party ID averages for the past decade:
This is net advantage. For example, in 2021 Hispanic voters were 56% Democratic and 26% Republican.
Overall, there's no indication that Democrats are shedding Hispanic voters. The annual trend is positive and in the last half of 2021 they bucked the national trend significantly.
Of course, what we're really interested in is seeing party ID among Hispanic voters right now. Gallup has this number but hasn't published it. Perhaps someone who's a subscriber can persuade them to do so.
POSTSCRIPT: When you're looking at something like this, you really need to look at the same statistic over time. You can't look at party ID for one year and the generic congressional ballot another. You can't compare a Washington Post poll in 2018 with a Gallup poll in 2022 that might have different question wording and different demographic weighting. Nor can you compare, say, presidential support in one year with party ID in another.
This is all cherry picking and it can provide you with pretty much any trend that appeals to whatever point you'd like to make. If, on the other hand, you really want to know what's going on, you need to compare the same thing year over year. This is what makes the Gallup results so valuable.
Valid data observations. The additional observation is National level statistic for a heterogenous category - hispanic - may obscure materially significant regional or state level variation as it has been evoked in various studies that the Anglo driven category hispanic really includes wildly different ethnic groupings. As such there is certainly a potential national disguises or obscures differeing trends.
Excellent points! In Florida, you have the Cubans. Totally different from the Chicanos of California, who are probably unlike the Chicanos of Tejas. In northern New Mexico, they're "Spanish" and take pride in their families living here since the 1500s. (Match THAT, DAR!) In some areas, these folks prefer the term "Latino" (or "Latina", if you're trying to appeal to the men and women equipped with wombs).
Notably, there's not a "Latin Ex" among them, except maybe the view from the proverbial ivory towers.
Supposedly, we lefties embrace "diversity." So recognizing this in people who's ancestors spoke Spanish should not be such a stretch.
Kevin - good point, but your graph shows the advantage dropping from 35% (roughly) to around 25% from 2016 to 2020, which is a pretty worrying drop (30%!). I think the data shows that there is considerable variability on a year-to-year basis, and democrats can’t take their inherent advantage for granted.
I think Larry has noted something important without identifying an underlying cause. What's clear from the chart as shown is that there seems to be a strong influence by which party has the President. On the left side of the chart, which represents Obama years, the curve tended noticeably up. Then, during the Trump years the trend was noticeably down. Finally, in the first year of Biden, then curve turned slightly upward again.
What to make of that??? I dunno.
How about the shift rom 2014 to 2021, to pick a set of numbers which give the results I want?
I'd really like to read what David Shor thinks of this.
¿Este pinche gringo?
Probablemente sugiere que el partido democrata lanze una politica franquista.
No mames, just say "Jew." We all know what you meant.
David Shor's politics are as much influenced by his Hebraica as Bernie Sanders's are.
He's a white populist Lestermaddox Democrat no different than "Vigilante Shrek" John Fetterman, Afroladinoatea "Sandy" Cortez, Vegan Antiabortionist Dennis Kucinich, & Mohammedans Rachida Tlaib & Ihlan Omer. He may not abide all their collectivist impulses, but as far as looking out for the collective blanched mass of Real America, he's right there with them.
Monty: If Shor's political preferences were as you describe, it seems unlikely he'd be sounding the alarm about the nontrivial degree of Latino drift toward the GOP. Rather, he'd be shutting his mouth about it, or perhaps downplaying it. But he seems genuinely concerned it may be a thing (as are modest but quite possibly real signs of increased GOP support among Black voters, especially non-college Black males).
Maybe the trend will prove ephemeral, but it does appear in America we're seeing evidence of racial depolarization of our politics, in favor of class. In a word, non-college voters of all racial backgrounds have demonstrated an increased affinity for the Republican Party.
Here's well-known MAGA radical Harry Enten on the phenomenon:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/17/politics/republicans-voters-color-women-midterm-elections/index.html
In Josh Hawley & Tulsi Gabbard's American Orbanist Restoration government, every individual, regardless their color or creed, can grow up to be an FBI special agent, just like Herschel Walker.
Just because O'Shea Jackson, Sr., went full MAGA while Killer Mike is shucking n' jiving for Brian Kemp (what turnabout, after he did the same for Bernie), doesn't mean the GQP is becoming a racial bouillabaise of colorblind workers. It just means wealth is finding its level.
The GQP was & remains a party predicated on class. But it ain't working class.
Also, as a 538 alumnus, Harry Enten absolutely is MAGA curious, at the least.
No, he just wants us to admit that Hispanics in good standing are white, or soon will be. Like 1920s Pollacks, Honkies, & Wops.
Vacillating Republiqan Kevin Drum says Hispanic voters are not scurrying from the Democrat Party, but at this taqueria in the Rio Grande Valley where Uvalde parents are decompressing after blistering the response to the elementary school massacre & demanding wholesale change, they are still standing with Greg Abbott against Neoliberal gungrabber "Beto" O'Rourke.
It has to be useful to separate what's happening in real life from what's being said among the consultant and media cohorts. There's some dramatic reshuffling among the cohorts after "discoveries" that local and subgroup voting patterns among Hispanics are not monolithic, eg that Cuban-descended Americans in FL and Puerto Ricans in the northeast don't seem to vote the same way after all, and that political attitudes in the Southwest are at least as complex as the ethnic patterns there. In fact I seem to remember that Hillary's campaign had a single set of materials for all Hispanic areas throughout the country.
You have to suspect that people on the ground had been trying to get that point across since, oh, the late 1960s and maybe it finally started breaking through after the 2020 results got dissected. So they have their hair on fire and haven't figured out how to enlighten the rest of the party.
Tip used to say that all politics is local, and especially so with the electoral college and gerrymandering. So while it's important to know the overall picture and long-term trend among plausibly "Hispanic" voters, I'm not sure the aggregate numbers and trends tell us that much in electoral terms. I wish they did. At least they underline that effective planning and messaging are going to be a lot more useful than panic.
Invoking Thomas P. "Tipp" O'Neill in the comments?
Are you trying to get Chris Matthews to show up?
Since 2000, the Hispanic vote for Republican presidential candidates has been (%) 35; 40; 31; 27; 28; 37 for an average of 33%. An interesting phenomenon is that with an increase of Hispanic votes, the % difference narrows but the absolute vote differential increases and this number has greater effect in electoral outcomes. Another factoid is that while Hispanics are perceived and may well be more religious, the support for abortion rights is the same as whites. Hispanic vote is overall Democratic and it is not changing except in South Florida and Texas. The Florida situation involves a combination of an influx of South Americans and straight propaganda, these are factors that are reversible especially with the growth of Puertorrican voters who so far are not voting in the expected numbers. The Texas situation is more complicated which regional variations marked by historical circumstances as well as current migratory movements. For example, Hispanics in Dallas have a great disdain towards the GOP due to pervasive racism but this racism does project in middle towns that are Hispanic and this gives you greater Republican tolerance. The border situation and drugs are also factors. Texas is simply a state in flux with an indeterminate future.
It's a bit of a surprise that the idea of all Hispanics as a marauding, raping horde, as articulated by El Jefe, didn't dampen Latin enthusiasm for Trump the way that the Global War on Terror stymied Arab & Muslim participation in GQP politics (pre-9/11/01, the two parties were about at parity with Middle Easterners & Muslamiacs, if not the GQP slightly ahead), but it might just be that Hispanics enjoy being led by a putative strongman.