Democrats Shouldn't Repeat the Errors of the 90s

For the last few days I've been reading a lot of analysis in an attempt to understand what happened with Hispanic voters in the 2020 election. At first I wasn't sure why this question piqued my curiosity. But a piece by Ron Brownstein helped explain it. He notes that there is a small group of data analysts - primarily David Shor, Ruy Teixeira, and Stanley Greenberg - who are reigniting the idea that Democrats should harken back to the strategies proposed by the Democratic Leadership Council and largely adopted by Bill Clinton in the 1990s. As such, Brownstein refers to these analysts as "neo-New Democrats."

Just like the centrists who clustered around Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council that he led decades ago, today’s dissenters argue that Democrats risk a sustained exodus from power unless they can recapture more of the culturally conservative voters without a college education who are drifting away from the party. (That group, these dissenters argue, now includes not only white Americans but also working-class Hispanics and even some Black Americans.) 

These neo-New Democrats had already been focused on the need for Democrats to win back white working class voters. But when it became clear that Trump had actually increased his support from Hispanics in 2020, they took it as further confirmation that the party had been taken over by "liberal elites" who were too extreme on so-called "cultural issues," perhaps requiring another Sister Souljah moment. All of that comes regardless of this:

After [Clinton] left office, more Democrats came to view his approach as an unprincipled concession to white conservatives, particularly on issues such as crime and welfare....Hillary Clinton, in her 2016 primary campaign, felt compelled to renounce decisions from her husband’s presidency on trade, LGBTQ rights, and crime...Even Bill Clinton, in a 2015 appearance before the NAACP, apologized for elements of the crime bill, which he acknowledged had contributed to the era of mass incarceration.

If, as these neo-New Democrats suggested, Hispanic voters are drifting Republican (even in the era of Donald Trump) along with their white working class counterparts, that would be a serious problem for the future of the party. So I kept looking for answers about what happened. 

What have I learned? Perhaps the most important thing was a reminder that there is no such thing as the "Hispanic vote." While pundits tend to slice and dice white voters by every criteria imaginable, we think of voters of color as blocs, ie, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American. But each of those groups is complex - and none more so that Hispanics. 

As a result, we need to go back to the basics and ask "Who is Hispanic." According to the census bureau, it's anyone who says they are and nobody who says they aren’t. Using that definition, Pew Research says that there are roughly 62 million self-identified Hispanics in the U.S. Further, they found that, when it comes to identity, "47% of Hispanics most often describe themselves by their family’s country of origin; 39% use the terms Latino or Hispanic, and 14% most often describe themselves as American."

To drill down on what this means politically, a Mexican-American in Phoenix doesn't have all that much in common with a Cuban-American in Miami. So trying to figure out what happened to the Hispanic vote in 2020 is going to get very complicated very fast. Anyone who answers that simplistically is most likely skewing the data to confirm their existing biases.

With that in mind, one of the trends that usually gets overlooked is that, according to the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, "nationwide, Latinos cast 16.6 million votes in 2020, an increase of 30.9% over the 2016 presidential election. By comparison, turnout was 15.9% greater among voters of all races." Some of that was driven by the fact that every year about 900,000 Hispanics turn 18 and become eligible to vote. But that's not the whole story. 

As just one example, here's what happened in the Rio Grande Valley, where Trump made some of his biggest gains.

In terms of raw vote totals, Biden actually saw an increase compared to Clinton - but new Hispanic voters surged to Trump. According to Equis Labs (which analyzes data about the Hispanic Community), the same thing happened in heavily Hispanic areas across the country.

That is important to keep in mind because, while some Hispanics did switch from Clinton to Trump, the swing towards the former guy mostly came from people who hadn't voted in 2016. Equis suggests that these are the true "swing voters" because they are less ideologically driven than hardcore conservatives or liberals.

So the question becomes: what motivated new Hispanic voters to turn out for Trump? That is where the complexities come into play. Claims that Biden was a socialist seem to have gained salience primarily in South Florida (due to disinformation spread in Spanish media by both the Trump campaign and right wing media), while border security was especially important in the Rio Grande Valley where Tejanos ("we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us") don't consider themselves immigrants and tend to work for either Border Patrol or the oil and gas industry. 

But Equis Labs was able to rule out one contributor that has been pushed by the neo-New Democrats.

Do attitudes toward the police and BLM help us to predict which Hispanic voters supported Trump? Our analysis says no: feeling very favorably toward police or unfavorably toward BLM didn't show any significant effect beyond what we would predict based on a Hispanic voter’s partisan and demographic profile.

One factor that seemed to have had salience across the board is the fact that between the 2016 and 2020 election, the conversation shifted away from immigration to the economy.

Hispanic voters tended to give Trump his highest marks on the economy. 

Contrary to what the neo-New Democrats claim, Stephanie Valencia (the president of Equis Labs) told Brownstein that, "Biden might have performed better with Hispanics if the campaign debate had focused more on immigration." According to Pew Research, "86% of Hispanics say there should be a way for undocumented immigrants who are living in the U.S. to remain legally, if certain requirements are met.

With all of that, it is important to balance things out with the other side of the coin - which was provided by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative.

The analysis of votes cast in 13 states is the most comprehensive look at how Latinos voted in the 2020 general election. In 12 of those states, Latinos supported Biden over President Donald Trump by a margin of at least 2 to 1. And in nine of the 13 — including the battleground states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — the margin was at least 3 to 1. Only in Florida was Biden’s margin among Latino voters less than 2 to 1.

The authors write that Latinos played a key role in swinging election results in several battleground states. In Arizona, where Latinos represent 25.2% of all registered voters, the size and turnout of the Latino electorate helped Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1996. And even in Wisconsin and Georgia — where Latinos make up less than 5% of registered voters — the Latino electorate helped tipped the results in favor of Biden, whose margin of victory was less than a single percentage point in each state.

Arizona is the one heavily Hispanic state that bucked the trend when it comes to Trump's improved performance. The reason why is likely related to what Black women accomplished in Georgia after years of organizing.

Latinos represent one of every five voters [in Arizona]—six hundred thousand went to the polls this year—and the vast majority of them voted for Biden. “Arizona was no fluke,” Valencia said, noting that Trump won the state four years ago by merely eighty thousand votes. She credited a decade of organizing in response to Senate Bill 1070, the “show me your papers” law, which was designed to crack down on the state’s immigrant community by allowing police officers to arbitrarily question individuals about their legal status. For years, Latinos whose relatives, friends, or acquaintances had been impacted by the law and scarred by the climate of fear fostered by Sheriff Joe Arpaio had organized politically. In 2016, Arpaio lost his reëlection bid, ending a two-decade tenure. The same civil-rights groups that helped defeat him continued mobilizing in 2020, including Living United for Change (lucha), which placed twelve million calls to potential voters with a coalition of organizations. “We’ve been here for ten years,” Tomás Robles, lucha’s executive director, said. “Elections are simply a marker for us.”

Rather than repeat the errors of the 1990s, that provides the answer for what Democrats can do to win increasing shares of the Hispanic vote...work tirelessly on the ground. Even with the massive increase in turnout in 2020, only about half of Hispanics who are eligible voted. There's plenty of work to do.