Hispanics are rejecting Democrat identity politics
To no one’s surprise, a majority—63 percent—of Hispanics voted for Joe Biden for president on November 3. Yet the Hispanic vote still has the pundit world in a tizzy. About a third of them decided that the man who spent four years insulting their Spanish-speaking homelands and landsmen was preferable to a diversity-embracing opponent with a fondness for the Latin pop hit “Despacito” and a textbook-perfect intersectional running mate.
In truth, Donald Trump improved his percentage of the Hispanic vote by only four points over his showing against Hillary Clinton 2016, but even that modest gain befuddled most everyone embracing—or resigned to—the “emerging Democratic majority.” Hispanics were supposed to be redrawing the electoral map by turning Florida and Texas blue; instead, Biden carried Miami Dade county by only seven points compared with Clinton’s 30-point win, thereby killing the Dems’ Florida dream. Hispanics in the poor, immigrant border counties of Texas were even more of a surprise. Hillary Clinton’s 60-point margin in Starr County in 2016 vaporized into a mere five-point win for Joe Biden. It was the largest swing to Trump of any county in the United States. Hillary took nearby Zapata County by 33 points in 2016; this year Trump won it by six. Hispanic support for the anti-immigration, border-wall-obsessed president increased in New Mexico, Colorado, and Georgia. Even in true-blue Massachusetts, a surprising number of Latinos gave Trump a thumbs up. As Tim Carney observed in the Washington Examiner, Trump improved his performance by 21 points in Lawrence, a once white, working-class factory and mill town now 80 percent Hispanic and 40 percent foreign-born.
Hispanic consultants and politicos blamed strategic and tactical flaws for the Democrats’ disappointment. The most talked-about Hispanic politician in the country, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, slammed the party in the New York Times for not investing more in digital advertising or doing more “anti-racist, deep canvassing”—intense, personal conversations with putatively racist voters. That is exactly wrong. The Hispanic desertion, modest as it might be, is a warning sign for Democrats not about tactics but about the weakness of their “Latinx” creed.
Hispanic support for the crude logic of identity politics has always been tepid. Julian Castro, a former San Antonio mayor and U.S. housing secretary, was the only Hispanic to enter the Democratic primary in 2019. He expected that he would have a solid Hispanic base, but polls never showed him getting more than 7 percent of the Hispanic vote. A significant number of Hispanics have balked at the idea of being shunted into a box marked “people of color.” In the 2010 census, 2.5 million of them described themselves as Hispanic and white. While “Latino,” an attempt to overthrow the colonialist implications of the label “Hispanic,” has become a part of the American vernacular, the more recent enlightened neologism, “Latinx,” has been about as tempting as a soggy tostada. An August Pew Research survey found a paltry 3 percent of “Latinx” actually use the word, and three out of four had never even heard of it. A few days before the election, a follower tweeted to Ruben Gallego, a liberal Democrat congressman in a heavily Hispanic working-class district around Phoenix, “Ruben, honest question, how do we as a party improve our work with the LatinX community across the country as well as we’ve done in AZ?” Gallego’s acid response? “First, start by not using the term Latinx.”
Though bureaucrats, politicians, college admissions officers, and executives at Univision have had good reason to pretend otherwise, Hispanics are not a “monolith,” nor are they neatly packaged as “people of color.” Up until the 1970s, the largest groups from Spanish-speaking countries—Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans—lived in different regions of the U.S. They didn’t have much to do with one another and, not knowing what else to do, the Census Bureau simply classified them as white. Seeing the success of the Civil Rights movement, in the late 1960s Mexican-American activists began lobbying for more data on their fellows and proposed a Census category of “Brown.” Since the race of these groups varied, eventually, the government settled on Hispanic.
Mexicans remain by far the largest Hispanic group in the U.S., but today they have been joined by people from a wide range of countries. Pew lists 15 different Spanish-speaking nations with significant-sized populations in the United States. Those countries often have a big enough claim on the expatriate imagination to make a convenient mega-identity an awkward fit. “I only learned I was a Latina in the last few years,” editor Isvett Verde wrote in the New York Times. “I still don’t know what that means. Growing up, I thought of myself as Cuban, or maybe Caribbean.”
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Democrats have tried to put Hispanics in a box that they do not naturally fit into. As the piece points out they come from varying countries and in the case of Texas many of their ancestors were Texans before it became a country and then joined the union. Some died in the Alamo defending Texas and others became heroes of the revolution against a Mexican dictator, Santa Anna.
While they were traditional Democrat voters, immigration was not their issue. Where the Democrats made a mistake is assuming that Trump's opposition to illegal immigration was racist. To the Hispanics that voted for him, they saw him as someone who was protecting their jobs and who was helping their businesses prosper.
The Hispanics who came here from places like Cuba and Venezuela as victims of socialism rejected Democrats who pushed that agenda. Again, they voted in their own self-interest and not on the basis of Democrat identity politics. This is a healthy response and is a good example of assimulation.
See, also:
How Hispanic Voters Swung Miami Right
Many expected that liberal young Hispanic voters would propel a Democratic wave. But Miami, a city where Hispanics hold the levers of power, confounded expectations.
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