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Explaining Trump’s Hispanic Support

Explaining Trump’s Hispanic Support

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- At a rally in New Mexico last September, President Donald Trump pointed to Steve Cortes, one of his most prominent Hispanic supporters, and asked him: “Who do you like more, the country or the Hispanics?”

The binary choice is telling. Trump was positing that “the country” is distinct from “the Hispanics,” some 59 million of whom happen to live in the country. That Trump made this statement in New Mexico, where Hispanics have been residing since before the U.S. existed, and while Trump was ostensibly appealing for Hispanic votes, only underscores how committed he is to keeping these two concepts in opposition.

Trump’s public animus toward Hispanics has been a defining feature of his presidency and, before that, his campaign.  Yet Hispanic turnout, never high, declined in 2016. “While many expected a strong Hispanic turnout surge in a Trump-Clinton match-up,’ wrote Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, “Hispanics registered a modest 0.4 percent decline.” Moreover, Trump received 28% of the Hispanic vote in 2016 — one percentage point higher than Mitt Romney’s share in 2012. Hispanic women and men voted for Trump in equal measure, with only a slightly greater percentage of Hispanic women (67) than men (65) casting votes for Hillary Clinton.

In politics and policy, Trump repeatedly directs his racial aggression at Mexicans, Central American families and the largely Hispanic Dreamers living in the U.S. So his approval rating among Hispanics — 31% according to a poll last fall, not high but not calamitously low — is perplexing.

It’s even more confounding in light of a new research paper by political scientists Alexander Agadjanian and Dean Lacy. They raise the possibility that some Americans with more fluid racial identities — including many Hispanics and people of mixed race — may be aligning their racial identities with their partisan identities:

Group pressures related to race and identity led Americans to alter their racial identity to match their changing vote allegiances. Specifically, people who switched their votes from non-Republican in 2012 to Republican in 2016 (into a Trump vote) were more likely to change their racial identification from nonwhite to white. Similarly, those who switched their votes from non-Democratic in 2012 to Democratic in 2016 (into a Clinton vote) were more likely to change their racial identification from white to nonwhite.

If this kind of self-sorting is at work even at the margins of the electorate, self-identified Hispanics should be even more hostile to Trump, since, at least among some, their identity is in part a function of their opposition to his presidency.

It’s far from clear that Trump will fare worse among Hispanics in 2020 than he did in 2016.  Democratic activists are hoping, not for the first time, that they can overwhelm the Republican ticket with turnout even if they don’t increase their vote share.

Should Trump maintain his Hispanic vote share from 2016, an activated Hispanic base could still jettison him from office. In 2016, Trump defeated Clinton in Texas by 807,000 votes, winning the state’s 38 electoral votes, equal to those of Pennsylvania and Ohio combined. Republican Ted Cruz defeated Democrat Beto O’Rourke in the 2018 Senate race in Texas by 215,000 votes.

“Any political observer who follows electoral trends will look at Texas and wonder why there are roughly 4 million Latinos standing on the sidelines during each election” writes Albert Morales, senior political director of Latino Decisions and a longtime Democratic political operative. “If not obvious already, my point is that in a Texas where even half of the 4 million under-mobilized Latinos turn out for state and national races, the composition of the legislature and statehouse would be very, very different.”

Democrats have been waiting years for this Hispanic wave to hit shore. They are struggling to regain their hold on the upper Midwest, where the median voter is whiter and older. Meanwhile, the heavily Hispanic states of Arizona, Florida and Texas beckon. Hispanic turnout surged nationally in 2018, compared with the low baseline of the 2014 midterm election. And Hispanic voters were heavily Democratic.

Still, it may be difficult for any Democratic candidate to straddle the white states of the old “blue wall” and the more Hispanic states of the “emerging Democratic majority.” (Judging by the stern reaction of South Florida Democrats to mildly approving comments Senator Bernie Sanders made about Cuba, Sanders may already be in trouble with some Cuban and Venezuelan voters.)

A Mason-Dixon poll last fall of 1,000 registered Hispanic voters suggested trouble ahead for Trump, with only 25% saying they would vote to re-elect the president. But the poll also included this warning to Sanders, who won strong Hispanic support in last weekend’s Nevada caucuses: 62% of Hispanic voters said they would not vote for a candidate who described himself as “socialist.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.

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