The Republican Balancing Act

F our weeks out from the midterms, there’s a palpable political energy in South Texas. Every road, building, and car bumper is plastered with political posters, campaign stickers, and signs advertising various candidates — not just for national races but for local offices like justice of the peace, sheriff, county commissioner, and school-board member. The Rio Grande Valley (RGV) is a 91.5 percent Latino, traditionally Democratic region on the Texas-Mexico border that has shifted heavily toward Republicans in recent years, and it feels like a political battleground. The air hums with campaign energy. It’s “very, very competitive right now,” an older Latina woman at a local Republican phone-banking session tells me gravely. “I mean, the blue are very afraid of us doing the red tidal wave.”

Can Republicans keep — or even expand — their newfound voters in regions such as South Texas? As the 2020 election-night results began to pour in, and the GOP’s inroads with Latinos became evident, Republicans were quick to trumpet the emergence of a new, multiracial, working-class GOP. “The Republican coalition is bigger, more diverse, and more energetic than ever before—thanks to President @realDonald Trump. His efforts to reach every demographic has positively expanded the future of the GOP,” House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted. Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) tweeted that “the future of the GOP” was “a party built on a multi-ethnic multi-racial coalition of working AMERICANS.” Within the span of 24 hours, the conventional wisdom on the Latino vote’s loyalty to the Democratic Party appeared to have been completely inverted: “We are a working class party now,” Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) tweeted. “That’s the future.”

But the GOP has a ways to go in courting Hispanics, and it remains to be seen whether 2020 — when all four counties in the RGV swung toward Trump by double-digit margins — was a bellwether or a fluke. The GOP’s share of the national Latino vote has seesawed between 20 and 40 percent over the course of the past half-century, with the party appearing poised, at certain junctures, to become the “multi-ethnic multi-racial coalition” that Rubio foresaw, only to lose ground again in subsequent years. Ronald Reagan won 35 and 37 percent, respectively, in 1980 and 1984; George H. W. Bush won 30 percent in 1988 and 25 percent in 1992; Bob Dole shot down to just 21 percent in 1996. Bush Jr. won 35 percent in 2000 — losing the Hispanic vote in his home state of Texas to Al Gore, 42 to 54 percent — and anywhere between 33 and 44 percent, depending on the exit poll, in 2004. John McCain won 31 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008, Mitt Romney won 27 percent in 2012, and Donald Trump won 28 percent in 2016 and 38 percent in 2020.

In contrast, Republican presidential candidates have won the white vote in every election since the 1960s; Lyndon B. Johnson was the last Democrat to carry that demographic. In spite of Trump’s gains with nonwhite demographics, more than 80 percent of the former president’s 2020 voter base was still non-Hispanic white. (And notably, at the same time that he made inroads with some nonwhite voters from 2016 to 2020, Trump’s largest decline in support came from “white voters, particularly white men,” according to a December 2020 postmortem from Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio.) But whites rarely vote as a bloc. In only two presidential elections in the past half-century — 1972 and 1984 — have whites coalesced behind the Republican by more than 60 percent. The two times that they did, however, Republicans won in a landslide.

The bad news, then, is that Republicans are unlikely to carry the national Latino vote anytime soon. California, the state with the largest number of Latinos — 15.5 million, or almost 40 percent of the state’s population — makes that all but certain, at least for the foreseeable future: California Latinos are overwhelmingly Democratic. Just 16 percent of the state’s likely Latino voters in 2020 were registered Republicans, whereas 58 percent were registered Democrats. The GOP has long performed far worse with Latino voters in California than it does nationally, even as it performs far better with Latino voters in states such as Texas and Florida.

The good news, however, is that Republicans don’t actually have to win the national Latino vote to remain competitive in national elections. As I wrote last week, the GOP’s performance with this voter bloc in presidential elections has hovered at about a third, but this varies by region. The Rio Grande Valley’s 96.3 percent Hispanic Starr County, for instance, shifted toward Trump by 55 points in 2020.

If the GOP can make Latinos a swing vote in states such as Texas, Florida, and Arizona, there’s an easy path to national majorities. In Texas, the state with the second-largest number of Latinos (11.5 million), Ted Cruz won 40 percent of Latinos in 2012 — the same year that Mitt Romney carried just 27 percent nationwide. As Rich Lowry pointed out recently, Latino voters in other states are increasingly looking even more competitive for Republicans:

Republicans don’t have to win Hispanics outright to change the calculus of American politics, only eat into Democratic margins.

In specific places, they are doing even better. A Siena College poll shows Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio, both running for reelection in Florida, above 50 percent among Hispanics. A new poll for the Nevada Independent has Republican Adam Laxalt, who is challenging Democratic incumbent senator Catherine Cortez Masto, down by only two points among Hispanics.

The Latino vote in many of these states is not a given. For decades, Democrats have treated Latinos’ uniform support for their party as a foregone conclusion, and they are now suffering the consequences. But winning their loyalty also isn’t a sure bet for the GOP, either: Republicans will have to do the legwork to expand their inroads with more GOP-friendly Latino communities in states such as Texas. And they’ll also have to reckon with the potential tensions between those appeals and turning out their primarily white working-class base. As Ryan Girdusky noted in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the Trump campaign’s focus on appealing to the overwhelmingly Democratic black vote may have come at the expense of turning out the white working-class vote in the swing state of Wisconsin — voters who were essential to carrying Republicans to the White House in 2016:

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, analysts on both the left and right noticed that President Trump had the potential to grow his base of white working-class voters. Five Thirty-Eight’s David Wasserman noted that over 44 million non-college-educated white voters who were not even registered to vote before the 2016 election concentrated heavily in the Midwest, including 2.6 million in Pennsylvania, 2.2 million in Ohio, 900,000 in Wisconsin, and 500,000 in Iowa. All the Trump campaign needed to do was locate them and register a fraction of them, and it would be smooth sailing till Election Day.

Rather than employing a strategy that looked to find the missing white working-class voter, the Trump campaign [in 2020] devised a plan to drive support from minority voters. They released both the Platinum Plan for black Americans and the American Dream plan for Hispanic Americans, promising hundreds of billion dollars to revive their communities and a series of other identity-driven policies.

This was successful to a point. The Hispanic turnout in Florida and Texas were large enough to deliver Trump a much larger victory than most people expected and helped keep Arizona and Nevada competitive even as he shed voters in the suburbs and among Independents as well as college-educated whites. Among black voters, exit polls showed Trump received 19 percent of the black voters between 25 and 44 years old. However, he didn’t budge the number of older black Americas who make up a majority of voters in their racial group.

“The missing white vote,” on the other hand, “stayed missing,” Girdusky concluded. “In the 23 Obama-Trump counties, the number of registered voters declined by nearly 8,000 voters from January 2017 to November 2020 even though the population increased in these areas.”

There’s no reason that it can’t be rediscovered while the GOP maintains support with a larger share of Latinos — and if Republicans can manage that, they’ll have a formidable national coalition. But it will require being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.