The United States midterm elections are around the corner. One of the blocs that determine the winners is the Latino voters. United States Bureau Chief OLUKOREDE YISHAU reports that over the years, as the population of Latino voters expands, so do their influences soar. In 2020, the Latino voters surprised the major parties. Mark Hugo Lopez, Director of Race and Ethnicity, Pew Research Centre, spoke with members of the Foreign Press Centres on this important voting bloc. Excerpts:
You’ll notice that I’m going to say something that’s really, I think, an important distinction to make, which is I’m going to say Latino voters, not the Latino vote. And that’s partly because when we talk about this group, this group is a heterogeneous group; it’s not a monolithic group, and I think this is one of the key points that has now become standard when people talk about this group is that it’s a diverse population of many different types of voters; as opposed to a single monolithic group that is only interested in one or two issues. And in the past, folks would oftentimes talk about the Latino vote and just immigration, as an example.
So you’ll hear me say Latino voters, Latino population, as opposed to the Latino vote and the Latino community, and that’s on purpose. But I’m certainly happy to talk about that more if you like. So first, let’s talk about demographics in the country. How many Latinos live in the United States today? Well, the 2020 Census in the United States revealed that there were 62.1 million people who said that they’re Latino and are currently living in the country. And as you can see, that population number has grown rapidly.
So we talk about Latino population growth. Latinos are one of the fastest growing groups, racial and ethnic groups, in the United States today. And what I think is important to note is that they have accounted for about half of the nation’s population growth since 2010, and even before that, into the 1990s, about half of U.S. population growth since then has come from growth in the U.S. Hispanic population. So you can just see here how big the Hispanic population is compared to other groups of Americans. Particularly, Hispanics make up almost one in five Americans today, and that’s up from less than 5 per cent back in 1970. And when you take a look at it compared to black Americans and Asian Americans, you’ll see that the nation’s Latino population is larger, and it’s larger sometimes by multiple factors compared to some of those other groups. Now, Asian Americans are a faster growing group in terms of percentages, but when we talk about the Latino population, a large part of U.S. population growth has come just from Latinos.
So, with all of that population growth, what does that mean for politics? The Latino population has been dispersing across the country. And if you look here, this chart shows you a map of the United States, and it shows you – the darker-coloured squares here show you the states that have had the quickest Hispanic population growth over the course of the last 10 years, or at least 2010 to 2020. And you can see that some of those states are not states that you usually associate with the Hispanic population. These are places like Tennessee, Vermont, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Louisiana.
Recent elections
So what happened in 2016? Well, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the support of Hispanic voters at 66 per cent compared to Donald Trump’s 28 per cent in that same year. And just to be clear, Hillary Clinton was the candidate for the Democratic Party and Donald Trump was the candidate for the Republican Party. You could see there was a gap of about 38 percentage points. In other words, Clinton led Trump by 38 percentage points among Latino voters. If you were to go back to 2012, and we didn’t have a voter validated study for 2012 because we were doing telephone surveys back then, but in 2012, Barack Obama appeared to have won about 80 per cent of Latino voter support; so a much higher level than Hillary Clinton. And at the time, there was some discussion about, well, why is Hillary Clinton losing support among Latino voters? We’ll come back to that in just a little bit.
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What happened in 2020? Well, in 2020, Joe Biden won 59 per cent of Latino voter support compared to 38 per cent for Trump. That means that Trump narrowed the margin of victory among Latino voters for Joe Biden compared with, say 2016 and Hillary Clinton. The difference here was a margin of 21 percentage points. So we talk again about Latino voters. This is the story that just about everybody since 2020 has been focusing on: How did Donald Trump win so much support among Latino voters in 2020, especially after Donald Trump made a number of comments about Mexicans being criminals, Mexican immigrants particularly crossing the border illegally and being criminals and many other comments about Hispanics that over the course of the – since 2016 many Latino leaders nationally have pointed to as the reason why Latino voters would not support Donald Trump; and yet Donald Trump improved his support among Latino voters from 2016 to 2020 despite those comments.
Latino voters
You’ll also see here, though, for 2020 we have some other information. You can see that the – Donald Trump’s closing this margin, or at least the margin by which he won Latino support compared to, say, Joe Biden was kind of universal when it comes to gender. There was a gap among men and there was actually even a wider gap among Hispanic women voters in 2020 in terms of how many supported Biden versus how many supported Trump. So there are some interesting patterns here, but again, men and women both had this gap. Democrats won. Biden won the support of Hispanic voters by gender. However, you can see that there was no real story here of men necessarily being more likely to support Trump than women, which is one of the explanations that many analysts provided.
What about in terms of college versus non-college Latino voters? Here too you can see that there – that Biden won both groups; however, his margin of victory was much greater among college-educated Hispanics than it is among Hispanics who had some college or less. This is again another story that’s emerged not only for Hispanic voters but has emerged for U.S. voters overall from 2020, that there’s a growing gap between those who are college-educated and those who are not college-educated in terms of support for Republican versus Democratic candidates. And Latino voters seem to be very similar here compared to other Americans.
That’s the Presidential election story. But what about the midterm election story? Well, we don’t have data going farther back than 2018, but let me show you what we saw in 2018. So if we took a look at our validated voter study in 2018, Democratic congressional candidates – so this is U.S. congressional candidates – won 75 per cent of Latino vote – I’m sorry, 72 per cent of Latino voter support compared to 25 per cent of Republican congressional candidates, for a margin – a Democratic margin of 47 percentage points. And you can see that it’s pretty similar across the different demographic groups.
In any given year, about 1 million U.S.-born young Latinos enter adulthood and become potential voters. And so over the course of four years – between, say, presidential cycles – you might have about 4 million or more Latinos who become eligible to vote. Also, many Latinos become U.S. citizens, they naturalise to become citizens, and about a quarter of the gain in the number of Latino eligible voters in any given year is due to people who choose to naturalise. Now, naturalisation rates are a little bit slower recently because of the pandemic and so forth, but a lot of this growth is really coming from U.S.-born young Latinos who have now entered adulthood and now can vote. And I think it’s an important point to keep in mind. These are oftentimes young people who are going to be voting for the first time, and that’s part of the reason why we see a somewhat lower voter turnout rate.
Now, where are Latino voters? Well, this pattern should look very similar to the pattern that you saw earlier about the distribution of where the U.S. Latino population is. What this shows you is a heat map, the share of all potential voters in the state who are Hispanic. And so you can see that in a place like New Mexico, almost half of all eligible voters in that state are Hispanic. In California and Texas, those numbers are about 35 per cent or so. And when you start to talk about some other states like Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Florida, you start to see – you see some significant shares of Hispanic voters, but you’ll note that there is no state in the nation where Hispanics make up the majority of voters in that state – no state for which that’s true.
But we have seen growth in the Hispanic share among eligible voters in many places. Oftentimes, like in a state like Georgia, you might see the Hispanic share in the last 10, 15 years rise from maybe 2 percent to 5 per cent of potential voters. So these numbers are rising, but in close elections that can be very important in determining the outcome of an election in either a congressional race, a state-wide race, or even in a national race where battleground states end up becoming very important. Okay.
What about voter turnout rates? Well, for midterm years, here is, according to the Census Bureau, the pattern in voter participation rates among those who are at least an adult U.S. citizen. And you could see what the pattern generally has been. I mentioned earlier that Hispanics oftentimes trail other groups of Americans, and you can certainly see that here. In 2014, for example, the voter turnout rate for Hispanic eligible voters was 27 per cent. For whites, by comparison, it was 46 per cent – 45.8, and for black Americans it was 40.6.
Recent developments
63 per cent of Latinos approve, in a recent survey that we did, of the new law that was passed by Congress and signed into law by Joe Biden to address gun violence. If you’ve been following the news on this, you know that the U.S. Congress passed a law requiring more checks, et cetera. Sixty-three per cent of Latinos approve of that law, which is very similar to what we see for the U.S. public.
We also find that 56 percent disapprove, but 42 per cent approve of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which of course addresses abortion rights here in the United States. This is something that’s interesting, because when we’ve tracked the issue of abortion among Latinos, we found over the years that Latinos have somewhat trailed the U.S. public in their view that abortion should be legal. So 61 per cent of Hispanics today say that abortion should be legal, and this is up from maybe about 55 per cent 10 years ago, but Latinos have oftentimes been a little bit slower in changing their views here compared to other groups when it comes to abortion rights in the United States. However, they’re now much more like the general public in this view than they used to be. Thirty-seven per cent, by the way, say it should be illegal.
These are from surveys that have been conducted this summer, just to give you some sense for different surveys, but I can certainly point you to them if you would like to see where this data comes from. What about approval of Joe Biden and favourability of Donald Trump? Well, first let’s talk about Joe Biden. In our most recent read from just about a few weeks ago, we found that 52 per cent of Latinos disapprove of the way Joe Biden is handling his job as president, while 46 per cent approve of the President’s handling of his job. This is interesting because when Joe Biden became President, Latinos were generally overwhelmingly approving of the way he was handling his job as President, and there was a real high favourability rating for the President. But since then, his ratings have dropped among Hispanics just like it has, by the way, for the general U.S. public. There’s nothing unusual here that’s unique to the Latino story.
Meanwhile, we also found in the same survey that 68 per cent say that they have an unfavourable opinion of Donald Trump, and 28 percent say they have a favourable one. As you might guess, there are some distinctions here between Republicans and Democrats among Latinos, but nonetheless, this is a general – as a general rule, this is a pattern that we’ve seen over the last few years in terms of the generally high unfavourability rating or opinion of Donald Trump among Latinos.
What about economics? As you might guess, Hispanics, just like the U.S. public, are concerned about the economy, particularly rising prices. And here, there’s actually no distinction. Three quarters say they’re very concerned about rising food and consumer goods prices, and another three quarters say that they’re concerned about rising gas and energy prices.
Climate change
Finally, climate change, and this is one where Latinos stand out as perhaps more concerned than the general U.S. public – though, again, it is a concern of the general public overall, and you can see particularly that Latinos are worried about the impact it is having in their local communities. They’re worried about trash in their local communities. They’re worried about water pollution. They’re worried particularly about air pollution. And so a recent survey that we did has some of these findings from this past summer if you’re interested in taking a look at some of those views. But climate change is something that is also on the minds of Latinos, perhaps even more so than others.