October 14, 2024 - 6:00pm
Heading into next month’s presidential contest, there are fresh signs that the Democrats’ 2024 nominee, Kamala Harris, is facing an uphill battle to regain her party’s lost ground with Hispanic Americans. The latest presidential election polling from The New York Times shows Harris only winning Hispanic voters over Donald Trump by 19 points (56–37%). This comes on the heels of an NBC News poll from late last month showing her lead with them down to just 14 points (54–40%). Both polls found that her declining support was driven by younger, male, non-college-educated Hispanics.
If these margins materialised on election day, they would represent the second-smallest advantage for a Democratic nominee in the last 40 years. Only John Kerry in 2004 did worse — at a nine-point margin — and he of course went on to lose. Trump’s roughly 39% of the vote would also be the second-highest level of support for a Republican nominee since at least 1972, behind only George Bush’s 44% in 2004.
This shift has perplexed many observers. After all, it wasn’t long ago that Trump decried many Mexican immigrants as “rapists”, and his anti-immigration rhetoric and deportation threats have grown increasingly menacing in the final months of the campaign. So why could it be that so many Hispanics not only aren’t turned off by Trump but are considering voting for him?
First, the New York Times poll indicated that a majority of Hispanic Americans — especially those born in the United States — do not believe Trump is referring to them when he talks about the country’s immigration problems. What’s more, many agreed with Trump’s proposals, including 43% who say they support building a wall along America’s southern border and 45% who back deporting anyone living in the country illegally. This scepticism of migrants mirrors findings from a spring 2024 survey showing many American Hispanics believe the arrival of new immigrants from Latin American countries hurts the former group’s social status in the US.
This finding is particularly interesting because one issue that has long tied many Hispanics to the Democratic Party has been immigration. Barack Obama made explicit appeals during his campaigns — and, later, a strong legislative push as well — to pass comprehensive immigration reform, which was likely a major reason why he received historic backing from Hispanic Americans. In 2012, he led among the group by 71% to 27%. In 2016, Hillary Clinton picked up that mantle while Trump drove a hard anti-immigrant message that alienated many Hispanics, allowing her to basically retain Obama’s levels of support, this time with 66% to Trump’s 28%.
But in 2020, Joe Biden’s margins with Hispanics were noticeably lower. As a post-election report on the 2020 vote found, this may have been at least in part because Trump turned down the “identity knob” and instead focused on the economy, where he had an advantage. This is confirmed by the recent NYT poll, which found that Hispanics care deeply about the economy, and that they are very pessimistic about the current state of it — a troubling sign for the party in power.
Another overlooked factor is that Hispanics are more moderate than some Democrats might expect them to be. An analysis of Cooperative Election Study data from Echelon Insights’ Patrick Ruffini showed that the overwhelming majority of Hispanic voters are not ideologically extreme one way or the other, meaning more progressive immigration-related proposals such as an open borders policy or abolishing ICE are unlikely to resonate with many of them — and may even turn them off.
We also know that very few Hispanics use identifiers adopted by social justice groups such as “Latinx”, and some consider the term offensive. This cohort’s moderation is evident even among self-identified Democrats: multiple polls have found Hispanic Democrats are far less likely than white ones to call themselves “liberal”.
It remains to be seen whether the actual election results this year reflect these shifts in the polls. If they do, it could jeopardise Harris’s chance of winning crucial swing states such as Arizona and Nevada. But even if Harris matches Biden’s 2020 margins, it would still represent a decline from the Democrats’ higher levels of support under Obama and Clinton. Given Hispanic Americans’ continued growth as a share of the electorate, their importance will continue to grow in future elections too. If Democrats hope to rebound with the group, it may behove them to no longer think of Hispanics as a core part of their coalition but increasingly as a swing group — one that must be persuaded to vote for them and not taken for granted.
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SubscribeWhy would a Hispanic voter, who came here legally, think any different about open borders than any other American? Sounds kinda racist to me.
Of course legal immigrants from Latin America don’t look kindly on illegals. Hardly rocket science. Legal immigration is a long, difficult and costly process. No one likes queue cutting.
I’m sure there are similar trends in the UK.
Still, I’m sure political analysts and commentators will keep pretending these groups vote as a single bloc as if all their interests and instincts were the same (just like they don’t in the countries they came from !).
This ongoing assumption that immigrants are always going to be on the side of other immigrants, always for more immigration and OK with illegal immigration needs to be binned forever. Along with thinking that voting behaviour within any given minority is going to be homogenous. Laughable, inaccurate, possibly racist.
I spent the last evening or two immersing myself in online criticism of Obama by black Americans due to his comments last week about black men not getting on board with Harris. The reasons for their discontent with BO/Harris/the Democrats were so diverse as to make trying to lump them together according to race rather misleading, possibly counterproductive.
When the Democrats make the case that America is a “Nation of Immigrants” they are implying a Strawman that Republicans are “Anti-Immigrant.”
No they’re not. As Milton Friedman once said you can have Open Immigration or a Welfare State. You can’t have both. It is statistically impossible to budget for people not yet in the country who may require social services.
Here’s the actual quote for people interested in the truth vs. the complete BS in this article:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
You forgot an important element that Hispanic people are generally more religious and the Democratic Party has turned into the Godless party.