Republicans should see the Latino community as an ally, not a threat.
Republicans should see the Latino community as an ally, not a threat.
T here has been a significant amount of garment-rending about the future of the GOP in recent years, as many conservatives worry that the party’s populist turn risks damaging its long-term brand. But the contemporary era in Republican politics has also yielded new and unpredictable electoral opportunities. If new polling is to be believed, for example, President Trump appears to be rapidly gaining ground on Joe Biden in Miami-Dade, the 2.7-million-person county that comprises the most populous voting district in the state of Florida. Biden is still decisively ahead of the president, but his most recent numbers mark a significant deterioration from the Democratic performance in the area four years ago. In 2016, the Trump campaign lost Miami-Dade to Hillary Clinton by a full 30 points; now, that gap has closed to about 17.
What’s most notable is that Trump is now leading Biden by a point or so with the area’s Hispanic voters, who make up 70 percent of Miami-Dade’s total population. Polling in a single county is insufficient evidence for sweeping political conclusions, of course. But Trump’s surprisingly good performance with Hispanic Floridians is mirrored by a number of different polls that suggest a national rightward movement among Latinos. In spite of his hardline rhetoric on immigration, Trump won nearly 30 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2016, and may well be on track to win a larger slice in 2020: As of June, only 59 percent of Hispanic voters said they plan to back Biden over Trump, a step down from the 66 percent that Hillary Clinton won four years ago. And by most metrics, Trump’s approval rating with Hispanics — currently hovering around 40 percent — has been steadily climbing since his inauguration.
These numbers challenge a core assumption shared by both major party establishments: the idea that nonwhite, immigrant voters are predestined to vote Democratic. For Democrats, this assumption manifests in revealingly eager rhetoric about the inevitability of progressivism’s political triumph in a diversifying country. Meanwhile, for Republicans, the fear that “demographics are destiny” — that a less-white America is necessarily a more left-wing one — often drives the increased propensity for immigration restrictionism.
But the president’s growing support from Latin-American immigrant populations is not, in fact, an especially new phenomenon. Trump won more of the Hispanic vote than Mitt Romney did in 2012, but substantially less than many of the recent pre-Romney Republican presidential candidates. Latinos have traditionally voted for the GOP in surprisingly large numbers: Ronald Reagan won 35 percent of the group’s vote in 1980 and 37 percent in 1984, and George W. Bush won 35 and 40 percent in 2000 and 2004, respectively. Romney’s unusually weak showing was partially due to his hardline stance on immigration; his infamous plans for “self-deportation” likely won him no favors with Hispanic voters. And it didn’t help that he was running against Barack Obama, the first nonwhite president and a politician of generational talent.
Latinos make up one of the fastest-growing electorates in the country — on track to double in size by 2030 — and are thus often presented as the face of the debate over America’s shifting demographics. But they possess far more ideological diversity than partisans in either party establishment seem to believe. “Hispanics are much more conservative than either conservatives or liberals give them credit for,” says Linda Chavez, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, who previously served as the highest-ranking woman in the Reagan administration, and the first Latina ever nominated to the United States Cabinet. “Particularly as they move up the ladder into the middle class, many of them become small business owners, and their attitudes begin to align more with the Republican Party.”
While Joe Biden is still likely to carry the Hispanic vote in November, these changing attitudes suggest an opportunity — not a setback — for future Republican efforts. One of the great ironies of contemporary American politics is that white Democrats now sit to the left of minorities on virtually every issue, including many aspects of political correctness, identity politics, and religion. Both Hispanics and blacks are devoutly Christian, report consistently high church attendance rates, and poll socially conservative on a variety of cultural concerns. It’s unlikely that African-American loyalty to the Democratic Party will waver significantly in the coming years, but the Hispanic vote remains an open question. In fact, the latter demographic “has been trending more favorably towards Republicans going back to the early 1970s, since at least Richard Nixon,” Chavez says.
But to fully capitalize on the political conservatism of the Latino community, the American Right first needs to abandon its increasingly prevalent conviction that a browner America portends a permanent Democratic majority. There is ample reason to believe otherwise. Polls show that immigrants are consistently more patriotic than native-born citizens, and tend to be entrepreneurial, hard-working, and deeply religious — values that lie at the heart of the American character conservatives say they want to protect.
“These are people with high aspirations,” says Chavez. “They have a real spirit, a willingness to be risk takers, and high motivation. And all of those things make a huge difference in your chances of succeeding in a country like the United States, which still does offer tremendous opportunities.” This, she argues, is likely the reason for the Republican Party’s growing Hispanic support. “It’s the economics,” she says. “But it’s also a sense of patriotism — you know, Hispanics do join the military in large numbers, and if you look at Pew Center statistics, they still pretty much believe that if you work hard you can get ahead, and that people achieve based on their own efforts. And all of those things are aligned with a more conservative political point of view.”
Recently arrived immigrants still tend to vote for Democrats in higher numbers than Republicans, despite the fact that their political views are often more closely aligned with the GOP platform. In California, for example, immigrants consistently poll as more conservative but less Republican than their native-born counterparts. This discrepancy tends to go away with time: As immigrant communities assimilate, their partisan affiliation becomes indistinct from the political distribution of the general American population. But insofar as recent arrivals do skew Democratic, Republicans should consider the possibility that their party’s anti-immigrant wing is alienating a large swathe of voters in an otherwise sympathetic demographic.
For many conservative Latinos, the Republican Party’s attitude on this issue can be frustrating. “Today, millions of immigrants who are otherwise conservative voters are staying home or voting for the Democrats for the single reason that if one party supports deporting their DACA sibling or cousin, they will never vote for them,” says Daniel Di Martino, a 21-year-old Venezuelan refugee who spoke at the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference about his experiences with socialism in his home country. “The same is true with legal immigration: Those who naturalized and came here legally are much less likely to support a candidate who is attacking the visa they used to become American citizens.”
Alternatively, Martino says: “A GOP that embraces immigration, like America has historically, will attract millions of new voters and win elections where now we can’t even imagine the party competing.”
In the meantime, in the increasingly likely event that Trump increases his share of the Hispanic vote this November, partisans in both camps will have to reassess their priors: Right-wing populists will have to rethink the motivations behind their hardline approach to immigration, and self-styled progressive anti-racists will have to reckon with the fact that they are not, in fact, the sole voice of the minority-American experience.
Even with the president’s aggressive stance on immigration issues, Hispanics appear to be increasingly comfortable with the Republican Party — a fact that, in and of itself, seems to contradict one of the White House’s primary justifications for its restrictionist policies. One can only imagine how this trend could be accelerated were the Right to return to its traditional roots on the issue. Republicans should see the Hispanic community as an ally, not a threat: “Latinos are Republicans,” Reagan famously liked to say. “They just don’t know it yet.”