Voters migrating to the GOP

 Spectator:

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For white Catholics, and Hispanics fifty years later, it was downhill for Democrats in the elections that followed. A major warning sign came in 2016, when Democrats lost ground with Hispanics, even campaigning against Donald Trump, whose entire campaign seemed premised on offending as many Hispanics as possible. In 2020, having mostly dropped his hard-edged immigration rhetoric, Trump made double-digit gains with Hispanics. So it was in the 1960s, when the white Catholic children of immigrants began their migration to the political center. By 2000, they were voting the same way as the country as a whole. They didn’t stop there: by 2020, Trump was winning the white Catholic vote by double digits.

Both Hispanics and white Catholics also joined the march from the city to the suburbs. Once they arrived, they joined a multiethnic majority no longer defined by sharp neighborhood borders along ethnic lines. In the 1960s, this suburban migration made places like Westchester County and Long Island a Republican counterweight to heavily Democratic New York City. In Texas today, the Hispanic population is growing fastest in higher-income suburbs and exurbs — like Conroe and The Woodlands outside Houston — and dropping fastest in the Hispanic-majority neighborhoods of central cities: In the suburbs, the rate of Hispanic participation in Republican primaries is almost three times higher than in the inner-city neighborhoods they left behind.

Suburbanization has also meant greater economic opportunity. While higher incomes today signal a leftward shift for whites, the opposite is true among Hispanics, where higher income equated to stronger support for Trump in 2020. And overall Hispanic income levels are rising quickly, jumping 22 percent between 2014 and 2019, more than in any other racial or ethnic group.

For Democrats, this was not how things were meant to go. Hispanics were supposed to be part of an “emerging Democratic majority” consisting of educated and non-white voters, whose growing numbers and Democratic lean were supposed to sound the death knell for conservative politics. The theory began to show cracks with the election of Donald Trump. A further blow was dealt in 2020, when Trump nearly won the Electoral College with a coalition that fused increases among minority voters with continued strength among working-class whites. Both of the “emerging majority” theory’s originators, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, have recanted it, with Teixeira becoming a fierce critic of his party’s fixation on identity politics.

One of the myths that came under scrutiny was that Hispanics could be treated as “voters of color,” a naturally Democratic group like African Americans, who would vote based on group solidarity. The left’s ill-conceived focus on skin color ignored the fact that Hispanics always had more in common with nineteenth-century European immigrants than with Blacks. Like white Catholics, Hispanics chose to come to America, thinking they might build a better life here. Blacks came here enslaved and lived under a regime of legalized oppression, bonding them together. Hispanics have also come to the United States from a panoply of different countries with about as much in common as Portugal and Poland.

In fact, the most common way that Hispanics in America identify themselves is not as Hispanic or Latino, or as members of a specific nationality, but as Americans. Polling my firm helped conduct among Texas Hispanics for Texas Latino Conservatives found them predominantly identifying as “American,” with nearly twice as many responses as the second most popular answer, “Texan.” “Hispanic” or “Latino” ran a distant third. Teixeira has also highlighted polling from the Voter Study Group that reveals that Hispanics would rather be citizens of the United States than any other country by a three-to-one margin.
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One of the things these groups have in common is that they are hard workers and upward mobile.  They see America as an opportunity for advancement and not a place to go on welfare.  They are both migrating toward the GOP.