Is There A Political Realignment Among Latino Voters?
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I have to, sorry to break it to you, but you're the second most exciting guest at the ABC Studios today. I'm just excited to be like the top 1%. I walked into the office this morning with Janelle Monae. Okay, wait, that's actually like a really big deal. That's awesome. Yeah, she's on the view right now. Yeah. Yeah.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. If you regularly listen to this podcast, you're familiar with the statistic that Latino voters shifted the most of any demographic group between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. While the electorate shifted left overall, Latino voters shifted right by eight percentage points. So what happened in 2022, the most recent election?

Like with the bigger national picture, there isn't just one story. You've probably heard by now that Republicans cleaned Democrats' clock in Florida, which included winning the majority of Latino voters in the state for the first time since 2006.

but elsewhere, Democrats held their own. So today we're going to dig into that nuanced story. And there's no one better I could think of to help excavate the data than co-founder of Ekkies Research, Carlos Odio. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Galen. Thanks for having me back. Although, is it really back if it is for the first time in person? I know for folks watching along, this is very, very exciting. We're in studio together. It's been a couple of years that we've been chatting over the

the internet. So this is truly exciting. Welcome. Likewise. And I feel like in studio, I'm going to speak slower. People told me that the last ones that I appeared on your show, they had to do the like half speed

Oh, well, that means probably a lot of people just had to put it back to regular speed. By no one else in my life have I ever been told that I speak slowly, but apparently our podcast listeners think I speak slowly, so they speed me up, and then they have to slow down for you. Hopefully, well, I think we might match each other today. We'll see. So there's a lot to talk about here, and we don't even have all of the data that we need to get the full picture, but at least we have a bit more data than just the sort of results and the exit polls.

So after the 2020 election, as I mentioned, the progressive voter database Catalyst concluded that Latino voters swung that eight points towards Republicans. Democrats won 71% of the vote in 2016 and 63% of the vote in 2020. Do we have enough data at this point to say how Latino voters voted nationwide in 2022? Short answer, no. No.

Okay, fair enough. How close? Because I know if we look at the exit polls, they suggest that Democrats won 60% of the Latino vote in 2022, which would be a slight sort of reduction of support compared with 2020. But when you look at the national picture, the electorate shifted about four points right between 2020 and 2022 anyway. So that would be more or less in line with the nation. Okay.

Are there reasons to be suspect of those exit polls? Like, what are we waiting for in order to better understand the nationwide? That's a good question. Generally, yes, the exit polls. And I say, you know, we have the Edison poll now. We have the AP vote cast. Others do election eve polls like there's a midterm voter poll.

There are challenges of exit polling, which is especially in an age where you have so many people who are now voting by mail or voting early. You aren't getting them at a polling place. And so you are polling them. And so all of the bias that is present in any kind of survey is also present now in the exit polls. And so taking them to be the definitive ground truth without having then gone in and looking at the kind of individual level results that you will get once the voter files come back.

Once you have administrative records prepared by the states that you can then, for lack of a better term, like cross-reference with actual – with precinct-level results, with survey data to get a better read. But the other piece is, in general, if you just compare 2016 to 2020, two presidential elections, we know this is a midterm. We know that performance was –

weirdly distributed across states. And so if you are looking at, for example, the Hispanic vote nationally, Florida is going to play a very big role in that and can shift the numbers in a way that might not be representative of what happened overall and might not tell you the story that you're looking for. OK, so you're ahead of me, but

Believe you me, I know you can't compare a midterm to a presidential. So I have the data, right? Catalyst also looked at 2018 and found that Democrats won 68% of the Latino vote in 2018, which was a really big overperformance for Democrats.

I mean, the year in general was a big overperformance for Democrats. So I don't know if you can necessarily use that as a baseline for 2022. But if you look at 2014, which is the last time that Republicans had a better midterm than Democrats, it looks like even then, even in an environment where Republicans did better

quite well, Democrats did really poorly. Democrats won 63% of the Latino vote, which is still more than at least the exit polls would suggest happened this time around. So comparing midterm to midterm to midterm, is it fair to say like,

It's not the picture. Things aren't turning around for Democrats with Latino voters. Right. So here's what I'll give you. I won't give you a number. And I think I think the quest for a number, I think, leads us in, leads us astray, leads us down the wrong paths to some extent, because also it comes into how you define Latino voters and it gets complicated. But I think to the gut question of you had the shift from 16 to 20, there had previously been higher levels of Democratic support there.

the question coming into the cycle. Did Latino support for Democrats rebound to what it had been previously? Would it, would there be a retracement? Would it be stable or would there be further decline? And we took

rebound off the table pretty quickly. It was pretty, it was apparent. From the pre-election polling. From the pre-election polling. Throughout the cycle, especially once you get into kind of late summer of 2021, it becomes apparent. We were still very much stuck in the 2020 moment. A lot of the same conditions that had enabled the shift still existed. You weren't going to see a rebound for Democrats. So the question was, would there be stability or would there be further decline? The overall picture is a picture of stability to 2020,

With some declines in notable places. Well, one major notable place, which is Florida. But otherwise, very much a picture of stability to 2020. No rebound to 2018. No rebound to 2016 levels. Not a historic low for Democrats. But certainly, I'd say...

a draw relative to where we'd been in prior elections. To give us some sort of benchmark, because I think a trap that we can often fall into in this kind of analysis is just looking at the past, well, what I've just looked at as the past, you know, eight years or so.

When you say a historic low for Democrats, are we talking about the aughts under George W. Bush? Was that Democrats' lowest mark in terms of support amongst Latino voters? Well, you have to depend on somewhat sketchy data in order to do this. But if you go back to the 90s, you can even some go back to the 80s and you see peaks and valleys.

There is not a sense of stability. I think we were lulled into a sense of what Latino support should be by the period essentially from 2006 to 2016.

When in reality, that was likely something of a peak that then plateaued. Yes, 2004 had been a high for Republican support among Latinos, generally in the 90s as well. If you look at Clinton's first midterm, you had a peak of Latino support. Then again, it was an entirely different Latino electorate in it.

It's a fast-changing electorate. We're talking about different people. So today, the Latino electorate in midterms looks something like 11% of the electorate. In presidentials, looks something like 13%, maybe 14% of the electorate, which is very, I mean, part of the reason we wouldn't really have reliable data in like the 80s or early 90s is that the Latino electorate was just really not that big at all. I mean, it's been a remarkably quickly growing part of the American electorate.

But to your point about the peaks and valleys, can you determine certain trends in terms of what the parties are doing or what is happening in the country to give Republicans an advantage or Democrats an advantage amongst Latino voters? To me, a lot comes back to the immigration fights of 2006, 2007. So you're at the end of the Bush term to place ourselves. Already there is Bush discontent. And you have these very heated immigration debates.

And in those debates, Republicans get a reputation. There is a perception of the party that it's created as being

anti-immigrant, but that anti-immigrant rhetoric extends to just generally being hostile toward Latinos, towards minorities. And so all of a sudden, it becomes a sense that for many Latinos, including some who might be more conservative, it was unacceptable to vote for a Republican. I might not necessarily vote for the Democrat. Maybe I'm staying home, but I can't vote for Republicans. There's a group norm that's essentially created. And that group norm

Democrats ride that for a good decade. And sort of come to expect that the group norm that exists amongst African-American voters might be replicated amongst Latino voters. That's right. There was like an imperfect analogy made and then there were assumptions made about Latino voters that they would behave identically to black voters, ignoring some of the differences and ignoring in generally these astronomically high levels of support the Democrats came to expect from black Latino and by the way, AAPI voters that

which meant that they needed fewer votes from certain other kinds of white voters. So the Democratic coalition, Democrats rarely win a majority of, when was the last time Democrats reliably won a majority of white voters? Early 60s? And so like the only way the coalition works is because you're getting these incredibly high levels of support from non-white voters led by black voters. But then Latinos are very much like in that second pole position holding it down and made Democratic victories possible even as Democrats

non-college white voters were moving away. So in some ways, you would describe this as not a wholly new development, but maybe more of a reversion to the mean? Maybe. Maybe. Well, it depends. I mean, and I also caution, I would say, you know, two elections does not a trend make. I think we're still waiting to see which way it moves. We can talk about the extent to which this midterm

is anomalous. It's weird. It was a weird midterm. Let's talk about some of the ways in which it was weird. There are two more things I want to hit on before we dig into specific states, which is one, you mentioned that we knew from pre-election data that there was not going to be a rebound for Democrats amongst Latino voters. And the reason we knew that is because in 2021 and even the early part of 2022, there

approval of Biden's job as president amongst Latino voters was in the basement, right? I mean, you probably remember the headlines that were like, Biden loses support like fastest amongst Latino voters. And there was this sense that, okay, maybe the bottom has fallen out. Maybe what we saw in 2020, that trend has continued. And it's just going to be a disaster for Democrats amongst Latino votes in 2022.

So that didn't happen. It happened in Florida, but that didn't happen most elsewhere. And we can talk about New York and whether we saw any trends there, but that mostly didn't happen. But that data still exists. And I would assume that if you were to poll Latino voters today, you would probably still see not a lot of support for Biden. So what happened? Like, why did we see these just terrible numbers for Democrats, but then not see that result in the actual election?

Yeah, great question. So late 2021, we're stuck in the never-ending COVID curse, right? We're getting to the Delta period over the holidays of 2021. Inflation starts hitting in a serious way. And you get what feels like crisis upon crisis upon crisis throughout the rest of that period, right? Whether that's Ukraine's happening, whether that's Uvalde. It was one thing after another, and it felt like

Whether it was Biden's fault or not, people were saying, we are not dealing with these problems.

They are festering. And so there was discontent. It improved over the summer. Biden approvals did improve over the summer. There was the vibe shift, if you will, happened. Maybe some stabilization as you get closer to the election. But there had been an improvement in Biden's numbers. And I'd say today, if I were to, we have a poll in the field now. I'm so sorry it's not out yet. Well, you'll just have to come back on. You love when I say that. It's literally out as of like three days ago. But, you know, you can reveal the early data on this podcast. Right, partials.

But if you look at more recent numbers, they've gotten better. But to your point, they're not stellar. And so the question is, so why didn't that manifest in vote choice? And

I think, you know, we have now two states, Georgia and Nevada, where we have taken actual voter file data. We know who voted in those two states down to an individual level. So we were able to match it to the pre-election polling we'd done in those two places. And it shows an interesting picture, which is you have these voters who somewhat disapproved of Biden, not strongly, but somewhat.

And Catherine Cortez Masto, Senator Cortez Masto in Nevada, wins a healthy majority of those in Nevada. Senator Warnock wins a healthy majority of them in Georgia. And so there might have been some sense of discontent

but it didn't translate into voting for Republicans. And so we're actually arriving at a place that we often arrive at in the conversations that we've had over the years, which is that Latino voters are not aliens. They behaved much the same way that swing voters across all different kinds of demographics voted. Because we know from looking at the polls that

historically, with a 42% approval rating for Biden, Democrats should not have done well. But across the board, white, black, Asian, Latino, young, old, whatever, independent voters, voters who somewhat disapproved of Biden,

ended up casting votes for Democrats. And the conclusion I think that many people have come to is that it has to do with candidate choices for Republicans. It has to do with the Dobbs decision, some of the democracy debates, things like that. I mean, is that basically the conclusion you come to for Latino voters as well?

Absolutely. That local conditions ended up being very important. Candidate and campaigns mattered. That is the widest conclusion you could take in these situations and explains why you did have a mixed set of narratives to some extent. At the end of the day, you had some discontent that dislodged maybe some Latinos from any type of hard partisanship.

But Republicans couldn't close the deal. So I want to look at some of those states, of course, and get into what the campaigns look like. My last question of sort of the big picture before we do, though, is that it looks like the message is there was stability.

We've already said that there are caveats when it comes to comparing midterms to presidentials. And one of the big reasons is because of turnout. Right. Turnout is significantly lower in midterm elections than presidential for all voters, but especially for Latino voters. The electorate in a midterm is whiter than a presidential election.

And it looks like we saw that in certain key areas in this election, turnout was notably low understanding that. Another sort of thing that...

that we learned in 2020 is that for a long time, Democrats thought that if you could just get a higher turnout amongst Latino voters, that would be like golden for Democrats. But that actually a lot of low propensity Latino voters were the most likely to cast a vote for Trump or Republicans because those are voters who don't just have a strong party allegiance to the Democratic Party. So what we saw in this election is that there was stability more or less

in an environment with quite low turnout. Does that mean that we can't really learn much here from what a 2024 might look like with high Latino turnout? I think that's the bottom line. I have a hard time extrapolating from what we saw in this midterm to what's going to happen in 2024, because this is just a different swath of the electorate. You are looking at a cut, and you're not quite sure which cut of it you are looking at.

In 2024, we can expect much higher turnout, presidential level turnout. And like you said, you have what academics call the peripheral voter versus the core voter. Core voter, they know what party they belong to. They know who they're going to vote for. They're more likely to vote. Peripheral voters...

don't have a very clear sense of partisanship. And when they vote, they are closer to what we would call a swing voter, not the classic swing voter that people have in their minds. That's this person who always votes and is like studying both candidates and deciding which one, but rather somebody who's not paying a lot of attention to politics. Isn't following closely, doesn't have an ideologically consistent position all over the map. And at the end of the day are going to make determinations maybe kind of late in the game.

Based on the environment and the conditions in that moment. And maybe also based on the candidates whom we don't know who they will be in 2024. And vibes. And vibes. Vibes is a, you know, that's also a technical term. I know you're joking, but do you actually mean something specific or quantifiable when you say vibes?

Yeah, I actually do mean something. Yeah, it is half joking. And so like, you know, the theorists who actually write this stuff out, I'm sure would be very annoyed by me putting it this way. But there is, you know, a theory that those peripheral voters, when you do have a high turnout election and they're coming into the electorate, are kind of moving the ways that the winds are blowing. How they determine that, I think, comes back to how you define voters.

vibes in that moment. It doesn't truly explain how, for example, Latinos moved in a different direction than the rest of the electorate in 2020. So were they like localized vibes? Was it like micro climate of vibes? So it doesn't quite fit in that regard. But I think these are the considerations when you think of a peripheral voter and what is moving them and important to think of them through the lens of persuadability. All right. And with that, let's talk about Florida. Let's.

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As I mentioned at the top, for the first time since 2006, Republicans won a majority of the Latino vote in Florida. According to the exit polls, which again come with caveats, Latino voters made up 21% of the electorate in Florida and voted for DeSantis by an 18-point margin. Significant. So stop me if you think those exit polls are way off based on the data that you've seen so far.

But you don't. No, they're not. The precinct level results align. The precinct results show very clearly both DeSantis and Rubio won the Hispanic vote.

What happened? What happened? Florida. So Florida, I could go very long on Florida. I think Florida is important to understand as part of a longer term story. It doesn't start in 2020. It starts earlier. 2016, Clinton actually has a fairly good show with Hispanic voters in Florida. Then you start seeing a shift and the shift begins in 2018. And that's where you see it. And it's an advanced guard, right? It's almost like a canary in the coal mine.

to what then happens in 2020. What happens in 2022 is further decline. So it was a, you can see steps from election to election. And the first part of that really happened in Miami-Dade and among Cubans. Then as you get into further elections, it expands beyond Cubans. And then you get into this election, it expands beyond Miami in a more significant manner. I'd say

It is a story to me and a cautionary tale for Democrats of what happens when you neglect an electorate, that elections are a tug of war. And when you let go of the rope, you're going to lose. And there was essentially a decision made by Democrats not to contest for the Hispanic vote in Miami in particular. Like a conscious decision? Well, I think if you look at 2020 generally, we could talk about the presidential map.

There was a calculation, which by the way, was not an erroneous calculation by the Biden folks. They ended up being right, but they didn't need Florida. They gave Florida to Bloomberg. And so Bloomberg spent more money in Florida and the Biden folks didn't really. You were also in a COVID era. So you came out of the primary. Coming out of the primary, you know, Biden didn't do particularly well among Latinos in the primary. That went to Bernie. He comes out of the primary. Generally speaking, that's when he would go out and campaign and make up a lot of the difference. That's what Obama did in 08.

because he had lost the Hispanic vote to Hillary in that primary. COVID happens.

He's in the proverbial basement. Well, literal basement. Literal. Yes, that is true. But he ends up, you know, maybe he goes to Miami one and a half times toward the end of this period. At that point, Trump had been campaigning for four years aggressively in Miami. It was either Trump himself, Pence or his surrogates who are in Miami all of the time. They made a conscious decision to win over that vote.

And there was, again, it was a calculation. There are trade-offs in any election and it's about which, who is trying to outflank whom. And I think Republicans tried to outflank Democrats when it came to Hispanic voters. And it worked in the sense that you saw the shift.

It didn't work in the sense that it didn't actually then produce the wins that they were looking for. So that's a story about campaigns and Republicans making the conscious choice to campaign aggressively. Is there anything else that's going on here? I mean, there has to be right there. There are broader national trends. There are policy debates like give me more of the why.

Yeah, and I'll get more specific so we can actually ground this because it is a perfect storm. And I think what's an interesting case study is more recently arrived Cubans, Cuban-Americans. So you have waves of Cuban migration. My parents came in 50s and 60s. There were waves, big wave came in the 80s. There was a wave 1995 on. And that wave of Cuban-Americans had actually been more progressive.

It was a working class immigrant vote that behaved a lot like other working class immigrant voters. And so we talked about when you talked about Cubans, there was this idea that young Cubans were the most Obama supporting. Actually, if you looked at all the subgroups, it was more recently arrived Cubans who were the most Obama supporting during that era. And you look at Hialeah, which is where a lot of Cubans end up. It is the most Cuban place in the country.

It is 98% Hispanic, something along those lines. Incredibly dense, very immigrant community, very working class community. Hillary Clinton gets Obama and 12 gets 45% of the vote in Hialeah. Clinton gets 50% of the vote. Well, as you get down into 18, Democrats get 40% of the vote. You get into 2020, Democrats get 30% of the vote and you get into 2020.

this latest election and Democrats got 20% of the vote. So you went from Clinton at 50 to now Democrats at 20% in this city of Hialeah. And among Cubans, the story specifically was one of foreign policy. It is seen through the lens of Cuba, but not in the way I think some people imagine. It's the ways in which it then becomes a lens through which you are looking at domestic politics. That how you are standing up for certain values. And so they created this identity, which is if you are along class and cultural lines,

which is if you value the opportunities that you get in this country, if you value getting ahead through hard work, then Trump and DeSantis and Republicans are your guys. And there is an entire ecosystem that bolstered

That very idea. Of course, what is the opposite of getting ahead through hard work? Socialism. The right-wing narrative is socialism, right? And so you push out the other side and say the Democrats are socialists. And during that period of time, you do have the rise of – the re-rise of Bernie. You have the rise of AOC. So you have the rise of this democratic socialism within the Democratic Party that is giving proof points that Republicans can point to. OK. But this seems to be a story about –

Cuban Americans and maybe to some extent also Venezuelan Americans. But looking at the data from 2022, even looking at your data, it looks like a lot of the deterioration in Florida for Democrats was not actually amongst those groups. It was amongst other groups. So how does...

Where's that story? Because those Florida and Cuban-American voters is always going to be like a unique story. But when it comes to the states where the Latino electorate is going to be determining outcomes over the next decade to whatever into the future, it's like Arizona, Nevada. I mean, also New Jersey, New York, parts of Wisconsin, et cetera. So getting beyond the Cuban-American vote or even the Venezuelan-American vote, what is going on? So Cubans were phase one.

Phase two is you have in Miami an environment created of a very vocal and visible Trump supporter during the 2020 election. Again, bolstered by the fact that Trump and his people are there all the time and Democrats are not. Democrats are no-shows. And so you can make Biden and others to be out to be boogeyman and the boogeyman is not showing up to say no, no, to show otherwise, right? And so Republicans create this. There is a very developed ecosystem in Miami. And we talk a lot about social pressure in elections, generally when it comes to turnout.

join me on this journey, Galen. Yeah, I'm with you. When we talk about getting out the vote, there is the idea of social pressure, which is that you want to give people the sense that everybody's voting and that you must just vote too. And that if you don't vote, by the way, it's public record that you didn't vote and people are going to know and there's some shame associated with it. So there's like this benefit, a social benefit to voting and then also a social penalty for not voting. And that's how you get higher turnout in certain scenarios. Well, there's a certain thing, certain dynamic too that can be applied then in a partisan environment. And that's what happened with Trump.

that there was a MAGA identity that linked being a good immigrant with being a Trump supporter in Miami. And it was a norm created, enforced, and reinforced through a very vocal contingent of Trump supporters in Miami, where the impression was, we're all voting for Trump. Trump then made an effort to extend that beyond Cubans and Venezuelans. And to really get the kind of gains he did, he had to make inroads with Colombians. Colombian Americans are

the third largest Hispanic subgroup in Florida after Cubans and Puerto Ricans. Venezuelans are actually like fifth or sixth on the list. And the way he did that is

Not just through the he didn't have the same tools at his disposal that he did with Cubans, but there's an extension of it that is about leftism and it is about socialism. And that is about creating a connecting between economic and cultural concerns that the voters might have. That's a long answer. And yet it's still the shortest answer I could give you. But that is, again, sort of somewhat specific to one group that has a specific country of origin, et cetera, et cetera.

But when we've spoken in the past, it seemed like broader trends that were applicable to maybe all voters but had more of an impact on Latino voters also applied, like COVID shutdowns and things. I mean, especially because we're talking about Florida, Ron DeSantis built his identity and his popularity, really. I mean, you know, he was quite popular during the COVID shutdowns elsewhere when Florida was the free state of Florida. The economy was booming. People were moving to Florida specifically for that environment.

That was where he sort of created his national identity. And I would have to think that after looking at all of your slides and decks from 2020 and sort of pinpointing the COVID shutdowns as something that did not make Democrats popular with Latino voters contributed to DeSantis' sort of major success amongst Latino voters in 2022. That's right. And that's where you get to phase three, which is the 2022 election and where DeSantis, to your point,

DeSantis really bolsters his reputation among Florida voters in how he approached the lockdown. In some ways, he took a big gamble and he lucked out that it worked out in his favor because there did end up being, and we heard about it all the time in focus groups, a sort of pride in the idea that Florida didn't lock down

the way other places locked down. And so while other people were miserable and locked up in their apartments, people in Miami were out. I mean, I saw it on social media. It was real. Folks were out and about and enjoying the natural beauty of

of living in a place like Florida. And he really rode that reputation. He understood the value of it and he leaned into it very hard. And because he was doing so well and his numbers were pretty strong, it scared away a lot of national Democratic money who saw the results in 2020 and said, "Florida is very expensive. Do we want to go in there and play that?" And so at the end of the day, the national Democratic spending in Florida in 2022 was 2.3% of what it had been in 2018.

So National Democrats... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Say that again. National Democratic money, outside money coming into Florida, was 2.3% of what it had been in 2018, in 2022.

Do you know what it was? Do you know what the benchmark is like? Like you come to 538. We got to ask these questions. But no, we got it. We got a sense. It's like it's a large. It's hundreds of millions. You're talking. Exactly. You're talking in the 100 million plus range of spending. And again, that's a calculation in the same way the Democrats made a calculation not to play in North Carolina because.

the fundamentals and your forecasts indicated that it probably was a long shot. And so go spend the money where it's going to make more sense. Now, that didn't mean the Democrats didn't spend in Florida. Val Demings raised a lot of money. She actually outspent Marco Rubio. So it doesn't explain the entirety of it. But I think it's part of a larger story about the extent to which Democrats, the administration basically said, we're going to spend our energy, including our money,

Elsewhere. While we're on the topic of Florida, I'm curious. It swung so much. You've talked about Cuban-American voters, Colombian-American voters. Who is, like if you look at the data, the swingiest type of Hispanic voter? In Florida or generally? Both.

That's hard because I think you have wide sections of the electorate. I mean, if you looked at it in battleground states in this election, we had it that essentially 45 percent of registered Latino voters were straight line Democrats. They were going to vote for Democrat in every single race. You had about north of 30 percent who in this election in battleground polls, which includes Florida, were hardline Republican. We're going to vote Republican in every race. And then you had the other

20-something percent who were persuadable in some extent. They were either undecided in one of the ballots, at some level of the ballot, or they were ticket splitting, voting Democrat in one, Republican in the other. That persuadable chunk encompasses multitudes, is what I would say. You do have what I think sticks out is less a demographic profile and more an ideological one, that there is a Latino voter who is more moderate or even conservative who has held out

voting for Republicans in the past. There are people who, if you took out the Latino piece, you didn't know Latino as an input and you assume they were white, for example, you'd say, oh, this looks a lot like a Republican. But because they are Latino, even if they're living in a place that's not particularly Latino, it has kept them away from Republicans in the past. And so there's this kind of ideological holdout that is what I'd say is the most notable segment of the swing Latino electorate.

And so the bet for Republicans is that if you can break down that barrier between identifying as Latino and saying, and therefore, you know, the Republican Party maybe isn't just for me, but everything else sort of culturally, socially, whatever, would work.

that I might vote for Republicans, then that's gold for Republicans. Like that's where they start getting maybe even closer to 50% of the Latino vote nationwide or something like that if they can break down that barrier. Theoretically, knowing that it's a dynamic and fast-changing electorate, so they're also having to deal with an influx of young Latinos, just a huge...

numbers of young Latinos who are coming into the electorate who are not particularly partial to Republicans either, at the same time that Republicans are making some gains with, for example, some kinds of Latino men.

And so you have all of these movements in all these directions. It's not unidimensional. I think that's what I think might be lost. And misses that in any one of these elections, you're not talking about two candidates or just two options. You're talking about the two options of the two parties and then a third option, which is not voting, which is a big factor in a midterm election and will be a big factor in terms of, you know, what kind of electorate shows up in 2024. It would be a mistake to think when we talk about

four in 10 Latinos in 2020 voted for Trump, that it's the same 10 who are showing up for the next presidential. I want to move on from Florida, but- Oh, I thought we did. Oh, well, yeah. We didn't even talk about Puerto Ricans, but I'm like- Well, I was actually going to ask about New York too, and then maybe we can talk about Puerto Ricans there. But it seemed like there was something of a red wave in both Florida and New York. Is the story in Florida a story about Latino voters, or is it much bigger than that? It's certainly much bigger than that.

It's certainly much bigger than that. You could see the shifts kind of across the electorate. You can see it in DeSantis winning Palm Beach County. Right. I was just going to say Palm Beach. Yeah. That's not a Latino story. And by the way, that's true of Trump's 2020 win. That's true of Rick Scott and DeSantis' 2018 wins.

in Florida, which it wasn't just about the Latino vote. It's just the Latino vote is an eye-catching dimension of this. We talk so much about demographics changing Florida, and here you see those support levels sliding back to what they'd been in the pre-Obama era, essentially seeming to wipe out what had been the Democratic gains during that Obama period. What did we see in New York amongst Latino voters? We haven't looked in detail.

We've had enough other stories to kind of chase down. So I have less on New York. I will say I think New York fits into the pattern with Florida. There are commonalities there in terms of decisions Democrats made and where they would play and where they would contest. And New York wasn't one of those.

But you mentioned that we hadn't talked about Puerto Rican voters. I mean, do we see a sort of trend amongst Puerto Rican voters as well? Or I know that Puerto Rican voters are historically some of the most Democratic supporting Latino voters in the country. And still are. And I think actually there's an interesting...

research, somebody should do it, we're going to do it, of comparing similar Puerto Ricans who end up in different geographies. What is the geographic impact of landing in Orlando versus landing in Philadelphia versus landing in New York versus landing in New Jersey? Which would be evidence of the sort of social pressure thing. Evidence of the social pressure and other kind of contextual dynamics that are tied to being in a certain region in a certain media market. Mm-hmm.

That would be notable. And yeah, you're in an environment. Who are you with? Yeah. If you are surrounded by rabid Republican Cubans, then you might have a different perception of Iran DeSantis than if you're in Philadelphia and you're talking about John Fetterman versus Dr. Oz. Yeah, sometimes we don't actually. I mean...

We talk about states a lot, but sometimes we don't talk enough about geography. Because if you are talking about college-educated white voters, for example, college-educated white voters have for a long time voted differently in the North and South in the United States. And there has been some nationalization of the trends in recent years. But maybe this election was a piece of evidence in support of

taking more regional considerations seriously going forward. But who knows? Again, it was just one election. What I'd say is what is worth looking at going forward is that there is a story specifically about Puerto Rican and Dominican voters. We forget about Dominican voters. That's what we're talking about when we talk about the Bronx is Puerto Rican and Dominican. That is the Northeast Corridor. So you're talking from you're looking at Pennsylvania. You're looking at New Jersey.

You're looking at parts of Massachusetts and you're looking at New York. And I think there's more that we have to study there. There were clearly shifts, even though support for Democrats remains sky high. You said that the picture outside of Florida and maybe to some extent New York looks like stability in terms of vote preference. Again, there are all of those caveats about stability for now doesn't mean stability forever. Why? Again, my favorite question. Yeah.

You're jumping most of the thing that we know the least about. But here's what I'd say. I think it's important to ground ourselves in what the Republican case for a realignment, right? Because we're talking about this at all because the headlines were Latino support for Democrats is declining and we're seeing some shift in partisanship. There's the Latino red wave that is coming. And that narrative hinged on three things. Florida,

the Texas Congressionals in particular, and just South Texas, Rio Grande Valley realignment, and the Southwest, Arizona, Nevada, which were the hottest battleground Senate states. Republicans' theory tests out in Florida. It doesn't test out in either Texas, where Mayra Flores, who is the most visible representative of this kind of Latino Republican vanguard, loses her seat. And most notably in Nevada and Arizona, where you had

what we said, portrait of perfect stability. It is not that there was a rebound to 2018 or 2016 levels, but rather that in the Senate races in particular, Democrats perform evenly to what Biden had gotten in 2020. Put differently, Republicans, masters and laxalt make no gains over what Trump had gotten in 2020.

I actually thought we would see more of a shift in RGV, the Rio Grande Valley, than we did. And the reason was because what we saw in 2020 was similarities actually between South Texas and South Florida. For sure. And in South Texas in particular, look, it was socially unacceptable to vote for Republicans. There was actually no reason to vote for Republicans. The only people running were Democrats. The only way to get elected was as a Democrat.

You would actually almost call it artificially high levels of Democratic support. And what happens in 2020 is that all of a sudden the permission structure, there is a permission structure that allows you to vote for Republican and not feel like an outcast. And I thought that that might lead to more normalization of the vote. It didn't.

And the permission structure that you're talking about, it comes from real policy issues, too, right? It comes from COVID. It comes from debates about the border. It's not just social pressure. There are issues that people care about that they may disagree with Democrats on and agree with Republicans on. Yeah, it's a stew. I'd say where the border wasn't a major dynamic in the Latino vote nationally in 2020, it was dynamic.

along the border. And not in the way that the rest of the country absorbed it, but as a local public safety concern. You know, it expressed in how people talk about homelessness in Brownsville. And so the border was highly salient. Republicans made it so, not by the way, because they were trying to win the border. They were trying to win everywhere else, but they were going down and making the border the stage for their political theater. And so you have this highly salient issue on which there's more alignment with the Republican position in that moment. And you have a

along with this idea of social pressure, a more vocal and visible Republican presence, which then gets manifest in Latino Republicans getting elected. That was the significance of your Myra Flores as coming into the picture is to say, well, she's a Republican. Yeah. I can...

maybe now flirt at least with this idea in a way that I hadn't before. Well, speaking of how identity of candidates affects these things, you said there was stability in Nevada and Arizona. Did Senator Catherine Cortez Mastro's identity as the first Latina senator help her in any way with Latino voters? Because it kind of didn't look like it from the data that I've looked at.

So what's interesting is, you know, so Cortez Masto, her last election had been in 2016. It had not been recent. And in Nevada, which is a fast-changing state, that's like lifetimes ago. She'd been on the ballot eons ago. So she came into this election cycle with fairly low name ID among Hispanic voters in Nevada. She made up the difference through very aggressive campaigning, very aggressive campaigning. By the end, in focus groups, people were like, can she please leave us alone?

And so I think what we saw actually in our surveys were, you know, immigration was not a great issue for Democrats in this election among Latinos, which is surprising historically. And it's just Democrats didn't have credibility they had in the past. In polling, immigration was one of CCM's greatest points. And it's because she had personal skin in the game on it. She talked about her immigrant background and she talked about her experience fighting for Dreamers.

And so that's where like identity and bio then meets the issue moment meets campaigning. She outperformed what were fairly bad Democratic fundamentals in the state. She probably should have lost. But let me put it that way. What do you mean? Nevada was of the states that we're looking at truly rocked by economic crisis, starting with COVID. The lockdown dynamic that you talked about was devastating.

we saw most prevalent in Nevada because at one point, I think in Clark County, like unemployment became like 40% in the middle of the pandemic. And so there was more of a sense of precarity, job precarity there than there had been elsewhere.

you know, amplified by a variety of other issues that you have because of people moving in. You have housing pressures. You have a homelessness problem. You have like literally like broken streets, like the like local conditions in Vegas were actually very difficult. And you have Democratic incumbency across the board. And you would have thought looking at other fundamentals like the generic ballot that Democrats would have a very hard time holding on to the state. And in fact, it took

a great deal of effort and spending and campaigning and a weak Republican candidate on the Senate race for Catherine Cortez Masto to eke it out. So looking at the data that you put out, it looks like one turnout was quite low in Clark County amongst Latino voters, notably low, which is the Las Vegas area.

And also that Democrats didn't necessarily hit their numbers. So I think your theory was that Democrats have to get 65% of the Latino vote in Nevada and Arizona in order to win the election. And they didn't, it looks like they didn't hit that mark, but did better with white voters. And so still won those elections. So is it like stability with like, but not like exactly stability kind of situation? What's Latino stability? Yeah.

It was holding the line among Latino voters, didn't slip with Latino voters, couldn't afford to slip with Latino voters, and then going and finding votes somewhere, anywhere else, which they were able to do. So, yes, I thought we thought our team, we ran scenarios that we did that Democrats need to get at least 65 percent of the vote. That didn't seem necessary. What did they get in the end? It was probably closer to what Biden had gotten. So you're talking low 60s, if not 60 percent flat.

Does this mean, I guess it's what it has to mean, does it mean the Democratic electorate is getting whiter? I wouldn't go that far. What I'd say is if you, and we've done this, it's kind of a fun exercise if you try to apply, you know, like basketball logic to the electorate, in which case for Democrats, like the black vote is like the Michael Jordan of the team, right? Like if not for sky high support and high turnout and high just numbers, right?

The Democrats just wouldn't win any elections anywhere. Wait, let me guess. You're going to say Latinos are the Scottie Pippen? Correct. And by the way, I've now used this analogy and found that it ages me in that there are people on my team who don't get it. So I've tried more modern analogies and they don't seem to land either like a Steph Curry, Klay Thompson perhaps.

There's non-sports analogies I'm sure that would work as well. Let's just say there's most important contributor, second most important contributor. And people tell me that's misleading because, well, there's more white voters. But in reality, if you were to clear out all 9-1 voters and just look at white voters, Democrats would lose fairly badly, right? Like the plus minus on the white vote. Now, even marginal increases of support among white voters.

inch Democrats closer to where they need to be. And so because they make up like 72 percent because they're the overwhelming majority of the electorate generally, most elections still are. Most Democratic voters are white. It seems like the message about the role that black voters play in the party has been very much amplified and embraced. And conversations about South Carolina becoming the first in the primary calendar in the

the upcoming presidential primary. The conversations around the VP pick in 2020 is almost certainly going to be a black candidate. There's very little talk about it being a Latino candidate. It seems to me like Latinos do not play nearly the same role that the black electorate does in the Democratic Party. You look at the numbers, they are a similar part of the electorate. So

Black Americans make up about 12% of the population and they make up about 12% of the electorate as well. Latinos make up about 20% of the population. They only make up about 12% of the electorate. What that tells us is it's going to grow dramatically. We're going to see Latino voters become a much larger part of the electorate in the coming decade and beyond.

So that's what the stakes are. Do you see at this point things changing in the Democratic Party in terms of understanding the role that Latinos play in the electorate and in the party? Especially the example you gave of Florida. You look at the way that Republicans actually talk about the role Latinos are playing in their party, and it's almost sort of like this more out loud and proud,

message that you get than sometimes even on the Democratic side. That's right. I think it's important to say, first of all, there is a intentional right-wing strategy at times to divide black from Latino voters and pit them against each other. And so even when you talk about the vice president pick, there were ads from some fringe right-wing targeted Latino voters saying, well, you weren't considered.

And I think, you know, that's an intentional... Well, and also it's fair to say that amongst all groups in America, there is racism and xenophobia and whatever. You know, it's not... It doesn't belong to one group of people. 100%. And at the same time, you know, it is an intentional strategy to divide because it actually comes from an understanding of what the Democratic coalition looks like. And it's trying to split the Democratic coalition. Where Democrats and Latinos and AAPI voters tend to be Democrats for similar reasons. You know, there are differences, of course, very important differences. And then even within the groups...

However, those are generally voters who don't feel welcome on the Republican side and generally feel Democrats care more. There is clearly still more to be done for Latinos to fully feel like they're at the table. Part of what has created this opening for Republicans is a sense that we've seen in our research that Democrats take Latinos for granted. And that is what creates opportunity. You have, you know, Republican hostility on one side, Democratic neglect on the other.

And you kind of measure the levels of each. And it actually gives you a lot of predictive power in terms of certain elections. When Republican hostility is low and dem-neglect is high, Republicans do a lot better. That's actually a big part of the Florida story. And so there is actually much more Democrats to do to reflect that, to reflect it in leadership, to reflect it even in redistricting fights, to reflect it in policymaking. In the absence of that, it is creating an ongoing opportunity to Republicans that actually parallels Democrats

What happened with Cubans? You know, Cuban-Americans at one point were actually Democrats. Some of the leading Republican elected officials at some points, like Lincoln Diaz-Balart, was a college Democrat. But there was no opportunity to be elected as Hispanic in the Democratic Party of Florida of the 70s and early 80s.

And there was an opportunity on the Republican side. So it's a story of not to go down this hole, but of elite oversupply. It's actually part of the story of Mayra Flores. And Democrats, though, do have some agency in trying to head that off. So we've talked a lot about where we are right now, what's happened up until this point. All of the different caveats. We're still waiting for more data. What do you think happens next? Not maybe necessarily what you hope happens next, but if you had to guess, where do we go from here? Hmm. Not a game I enjoy, Galen.

Right. Like, I know that you can't answer that in an empirical way and be like, OK, this is where we're going to go. And then I'm going to, like, call you up in 2024 and be like, wait, but why didn't this happen? But looking, I mean, you spend more time with data on Latino voters than probably anybody else. And so having done that, you're better positioned than anyone else to kind of say what you see happening next. Great visibility into the past does not

automatically offer visibility into the future. This is true. Although your entire business model is premised on this idea. Slay us. Look, what I'd say is... But it helps. I mean, what else? Like, why do we learn history? Right? Of course. Look, you come out of a 2020 where all of a sudden, I think Republicans were to some extent surprised to find themselves having made these games with Latino voters and saying, whoa, can we build, you know, in the language of Marco Rubio, a multiracial working class party? Mm-hmm. And...

you come into the 2022 midterms, both sides kind of fight it out and essentially fight it out to a draw that benefits Democrats in that situation. Now they have gone back to their corners and they're looking at 2024. And the question is, is that just a skirmish in some larger war or is it the battle itself? And I would say it's probably a skirmish. And I don't know that it carries a lot of meaning. And so I think what you're going to see going forward is

I think you will see some people are trying to fight the last war, which would be dangerous. It would be very dangerous for, for example, Republicans to say these gains are never going to happen. Let's walk away for them. And for Democrats, it would be dangerous to say, hey, we don't have a problem. Everything was stable. Let's carry on as we always have. I think if they instead decide to fight the 2020 war,

and say, okay, you got a lot of votes here that are up for grabs. You got a lot of people who are moving into the electorate. This is a swing vote in the way that the classic trope of the soccer mom was dominant at one point. And we're going to go treat a certain kind of Latino voter, the original soccer mom, as a swing voter. We've talked a lot about Florida, Texas, Arizona, Nevada,

Some of those are swing states, Arizona and Nevada for sure. At this point, we can debate how much Florida is still a swing state. I think it's still a swing state. You think it's still a swing state? That's kind of a hot take. It is a hot take. It is a hot take. I think the underlying fundamentals are still swing. I think Democrats have a choice as to what extent they want to keep it swing or not because it's expensive to keep it swing. Makes sense.

Where do you see the other places being where the Latino vote becomes increasingly important over the next decade? Keeping in mind, like, I think that those statistics are so important. Latinos make up 20% of the American public. They make up about 12% of the electorate. That sort of first number is going to keep growing and increasing.

that second number is going to grow by a whole lot. It's going to get closer and closer to that 20%. Yeah, that's right. And you don't, you've had the Latino firewall in the West at this point, you know, Colorado,

used to be a red state. We talked about it as also a perennial purple state at one point. You know, Obama does the convention in Denver in 2008. And now we don't even talk about Colorado, right? It barely gets any attention. And a big part of that is the Hispanic vote in that state teaming up with other parts of the electorate. Nevada and Arizona stay swing. New Mexico, I think,

though we treat it now as a safe democratic seat, will always be lurking on the margins and people will watch it. What are interesting to me are the places where you have, let's say like two to 3% of the electorate that is Latino. Wisconsin. Wisconsin. I would have said Michigan.

Michigan was obviously a different story in 2022 and Democrats are less worried, but it wasn't that far long ago. Oh, yeah. I don't think there's any reason to believe that it's – So Michigan is one of those states. Pennsylvania is one of those states. North Carolina is one of those states. Georgia is one of those states. So all of the swing states. Essentially. I mean – but it's not a coincidence, right? I mean battlegrounds are battlegrounds because you have a changing electorate. Again, if these were just white states, we wouldn't be talking about them at all.

it would be Oklahoma. So that is the dynamic that makes it competitive. Now, Latino voters aren't, in most scenarios, going to be the critical decider in Georgia, but they play a important supporting role. Wisconsin, especially so. Wisconsin, given with the kind of margins you get in a place like Wisconsin, it's going to matter going forward whether Republicans get 30% of the Latino vote or 40% Latino vote. Is that a good place to leave things?

Any final words here? I've asked you to say a lot. We have covered so much territory. No, I'd say, look, and I appreciate being on now. And, you know, it is early. So for few people do I do, do we talk this early? I think there's a lot more to learn. I think what we'd urge is some patience and embracing some of the uncertainty that comes to this. And I think it's the only wise posture when it comes to Latino voters is saying, we don't actually know as much as we need to know here.

and proceed on that assumption rather than taking any of the preconceived ideas about Latino voters. The mistake either party would have made was going back in time and assuming that the Latino vote circa 2012 was going to be locked that way forever.

All right, well, we can work with that because uncertainty is our industry here at FiveThirtyEight. So thank you so much for joining me today, Carlos. Thank you for having me on. My name is Galen Druk. Kevin Ryder and Audrey Mostak are in the control room. Tony Chow is on video editing and Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at FiveThirtyEight.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us

Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.