It turns out that Republicans could persuade Hispanic voters with the Republican message.
It turns out that Republicans could persuade Hispanic voters with the Republican message.
A s Rich Lowry noted earlier this week, the latest Wall Street Journal poll showing nearly an even split in party preference among Hispanic voters is yet more evidence that Republicans are in a period of breaking through to something much closer to parity with Democrats among Hispanic Americans and are now capable of winning those voters outright in some elections. Rich observes that this is a rebuttal to the charge that “Republicans couldn’t be tough-minded on immigration and win Hispanics.” That is true, but it is also only half of the story.
For a long time, the demographic triumphalism of Democrats — premised as so much of it was on the growth of the Hispanic vote — was matched by a two-sided counsel of pessimism bordering on despair on the right. Like the Democrats, both factions on the right looked at California’s dramatic decline from a Nixon/Reagan stronghold to a blue state after 1992 and a deep-blue state after 2008. Republicans last won a Senate race in California in 1988, when Pete Wilson won 53 percent to 44 percent, and last fielded a competitive candidate in 1994, when Michael Huffington lost to Dianne Feinstein 47 percent to 45 percent. Since 2000, Carly Fiorina’s ten-point loss in 2010 is the only Senate race in which a California Republican has come within 19 points, and Republicans have not even had a candidate on the ballot since 2012.
There were two competing theories of what happened, both of which emphasized Hispanic voters and immigration. One theory was that California was flipped mainly by demographic change: Lots of Hispanic — especially Mexican — immigrants entered the state, they voted Democratic in large numbers, and that did most of the work in tilting the partisan balance. An entire culture of California conservatives grew up around the apocalyptic theme of invasion: “It could happen to you!” Fear of being demographically swamped by new Democratic voters who would be permanently unreachable drove a culture of demands for abolishing the birthright citizenship mandated by the 14th Amendment and infused a hysterical “Flight 93 election” tone into the Right’s political discourse.
The other theory — advocated most prominently by the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh — was that California turned left because of the backlash against Proposition 187, the Republican-backed initiative to deny public services to illegal immigrants. After the 2012 election, the Republican “autopsy” embraced this view, endorsing comprehensive immigration reform as a way to stop alienating Hispanics. Marco Rubio destroyed his presidential aspirations by buying into this theory. Even Sean Hannity embraced it at the time:
We’ve got to get rid of the immigration issue altogether. . . . It’s simple to me to fix it. I think you control the border first. You create a pathway for those people that are here. You don’t say you’ve got to go home. And that is a position that I’ve evolved on. Because, you know what, it’s got to be resolved. The majority of people here, if some people have criminal records you can send them home, but if people are here, law-abiding, participating for years, their kids are born here, you know, it’s first secure the border, pathway to citizenship, done, whatever little penalties you want to put in there, if you want, and it’s done.
As Sean Trende explained back in 2010, both theories had some problems: If you actually looked at California voters, you saw that the state was never as solidly Republican as it seemed. Hispanics’ perceptions of the Republican Party did not change much following Proposition 187. The decline of the Republican Party was a combination of a rise in the size of the Hispanic vote with a decline in the Republican share of the white vote — a decline that might have been partly due to distaste at Prop 187 but was likely due as well to a whole battery of other issues, including the end of the Cold War and the declining salience of the crime issue by the end of the 1990s.
What both crowds of pessimists missed was the possibility that Republicans could, in time, break the Democratic stranglehold on the Hispanic vote, and do so without significantly moderating the party’s stance on immigration. That could be done, not only because some Hispanic voters would agree with that stance but also because others would not place a high priority on the issue. Indeed, the optimists argued that immigration policy was never really why Hispanics voted Democratic in such large numbers in the first place.
Hispanic voters were never a monolith: Republicans in Texas and Florida always had more success than in California. The optimistic case argued that Hispanic voters tended to vote Democratic for many of the same reasons that previous groups of immigrants (the Germans, the Irish, the Italians) voted Democratic when they were composed heavily of first-generation immigrants living in poor and working-class urban enclaves and relying on a lot of public services and benefits. Individual voters in those groups, as they moved up the economic ladder and assimilated more into American culture, began to see themselves more as part of the American mainstream, with a stake in the system. With that came voting more often for Republicans.
That is where we are today. In July, Noah Smith argued the case:
The boom of 2014-2019 — and it was a boom, even though we kind of ignored it — was good for everyone, but in percentage terms it was especially good for Hispanics. . . . Part of this is from the end of mass net Hispanic immigration, which happened in 2007. With fewer poor immigrant families coming in, the natural tendency of incomes to rise from the first to the second generation is no longer being obscured by a composition effect. In fact, despite some claims to the contrary, Hispanic upward mobility has been a fact of American life for a long time now. . . . And perhaps most importantly, Hispanics themselves feel the upward mobility too. [Citing poll data]. . . . In other words, despite starting from a very humble base, Hispanics are treading the same upward path that American immigrant groups always tread. The history of the Irish, Italians, Poles, and so on is repeating itself.
When Mexican immigrants waved American flags at pro-immigration rallies in the 2000s, they weren’t just courting public opinion — they really believed in this country, and in the American Dream they were promised. The dream of working hard, bettering yourself, and moving up. They were immigrants, damn it. And their children and their grandchildren remembered that dream as well — and now they’re achieving it. America has kept the promise it made. So why would this make Hispanics shift toward the GOP? Maybe it’s because Trump presided over the most recent boom, in which Hispanic incomes did so well. Maybe it’s because when you start moving up the economic ladder, you get the urge to protect your gains with low taxes. . . . They, or their parents or grandparents, worked damn hard to get to this country and succeed here; my bet is that they do not want to see the America they believed in and fought so hard for be yanked away by pious White liberals and replaced with a stifling spoils system.
Improving one’s economic status doesn’t automatically turn people into Republicans, but it does make them much more receptive to persuasion by Republicans, who traditionally emphasize opportunity, economic optimism, and letting people keep more of what they earn. That is even a good part of the story of how Republicans broke through with white Southerners; Trende, in his book The Lost Majority, details at some length not just the shift among Irish and Italian immigrants as they became more economically established but also how the breaks in the Democratic Solid South tracked the growth of suburbs and the middle class in the “New South,” especially after the Second World War, while poorer and more rural Southerners were slower to change their voting behavior (at least until much more recently).
Reading that Wall Street Journal poll and other signs in his latest newsletter, Ruy Teixeira also continued to warn Democrats about the trend with Hispanic voters:
Turning to the nature and size of recent Hispanic shifts against the Democrats—it’s not as bad as you think, it’s worse. . . . In the hotly-contested 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, according to the AP-NORC VoteCast survey . . . Democrat Terry McAuliffe actually lost the Latino vote and also lost ground among black and “other race’ (chiefly Asian) voters. This deterioration of nonwhite support also can be seen in analysis of precinct-level results. . . . It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrats have seriously erred by lumping Hispanics in with “people of color” and assuming they embraced the activism around racial issues that dominated so much of the political scene in 2020. . . . Latino voters evinced little sympathy with the more radical demands that came to be associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. . . . [In a post-election survey,] despite showing support for some specific policing reforms, Hispanics opposed defunding the police, decreasing the size of police forces and the scope of their work and reparations for the descendants of slaves by 2:1 or more. . . . They are also patriotic. By well over 3:1, Hispanics in the . . . survey said they would rather be a citizen of the United States than any other country in the world and by 35 points said they were proud of the way American democracy works.
If you listened to the pessimists for the past decade and a half warning about an “invasion” of people who did not share our values and could not be assimilated into America, you would never have expected these survey results. We turn out, as a nation, to be better at passing on our principles and culture than conservative pessimists think. That even includes selling new arrivals on the value of enforcing our immigration laws.
On the other hand, paranoia about immigrants and non-white ethnic groups can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Republicans who give up trying to reach voters will find that they do not reach them. Even Donald Trump’s campaign in 2020 spent less time bashing immigrants and more time highlighting immigrant stories and appeals to Hispanics and South Asians. One of Trump’s assets as a politician was his salesman’s shamelessness: He was never afraid to ask for votes even from people whom one might expect to be skeptical. That helped.
What does all this say for the party’s immigration policy going forward? Will the same process continue for other immigrant groups in the future? One thing Smith notes is that the shift among Hispanics has taken place after the end of the big waves of Hispanic immigration. That, in effect, suggests that Republicans who are worried (if we are analyzing immigration in strictly partisan terms) about waves of new voters should think less in terms of restricting immigration generally than in terms of having a more even and diverse flow that is not composed disproportionately of new arrivals from a single country or region. After all, the electoral problem for Republicans is not that Hispanics were undergoing the classic American immigrant experience, but that so many of them were doing so at the same time, often in communities with one another. A balanced mix of skilled and unskilled immigrants, varied in their origins, present less of a demographic bulge that can be politically exploited in the short term.
The future of immigration to the United States will likely be dominated by the groups that have been overtaking Hispanics since 2010: newcomers from Asia, South Asia, and the heartland of the Muslim world. Hispanic Americans are, like the Irish, Italians, and other European groups, still fundamentally Western. They are mostly Christians, speak a Western language, and came from countries established by Europeans. While there are other optimistic stories that can be told about immigrant groups from non-Western societies and non-Judeo-Christian religious backgrounds, it is unwise to simply assume the same trajectory. But we would be well-advised to be less consumed by fear that new immigrants and their descendants will permanently tilt the partisan balance of the country, and less worried about compromising our principles rather than simply doing outreach and treating people with respect.