Not a Majority Yet, but Hispanics are Walking Away from Democrats in Startling Numbers

Democrats Face Brutal Reckoning with Hispanic Voters

By A.B. Stoddard

The Democratic Party these days is like a sad addict whose life has fallen apart with too much to resolve and repair all at once. Sure the broken relationships can be put off for another day, but the lost job, the wrecked car, and the empty bank account require immediate attention.

President Biden and the Democrats are – simultaneously – working to:
 

• Stave Off the Failure of his economic agenda
• Control a once-again Rampaging Pandemic
• Mitigate the effects of the Worst Inflation since 1982, and
• Rescue Democracy from new laws that permit the GOP to nullify the next election.

That's all they have to do before they likely lose both chambers of Congress next year.

There are too many liabilities to count, but there's one new and glaring problem that has nothing to do with bickering factions in Congress – and cannot be explained away by global trends or the potency of election conspiracies and propaganda.
 
A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed Hispanic voters splitting their support between both parties, with just 37% of them backing Democrats in the House of Representatives if the midterm elections were held today. That compares to the 60% backing they gave Democrats last November.

Republicans would also garner 37% if the election were today.

While Biden won 63% of Hispanic voters in 2020, this poll showed they would split their support in a 2024 rematch, with 44% for Biden and 43% for Trump.

Hispanic men are more supportive of Republicans than Hispanic women, and following the 2020 Election some Democrats dismissed this as a temporary loss, an attraction to Trump’s strongman persona. But Democrats are wrong to delude themselves with such a fiction.
 

• The data shows Hispanic voters not only rejected the left’s embrace of socialism, but they prioritized the issue of jobs and the economy over all else, even if they were critical of Trump’s stand on immigration and the border wall.
• Their focus remained the same a year later – Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin won the Hispanic vote when he defeated Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, and
• Hispanic voters strongly disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy.
• The WSJ poll findings showed that a negative outlook on the economy was 7% higher among Hispanics than it was for voters overall.

So it isn’t surprising that – like most other voters – Hispanics don't see the "American Rescue Plan" as good policy, let alone the boon Democrats thought Americans would now be thanking them for.
 
Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, recently quoted an older Latina swing voter from a focus group she attended in November who said that while “there were people who need the stimulus, like those who were unemployed,” Democrats “gave money to everyone, including those who didn’t need it. And now we are all paying for it because everything is going up.”

Layered on those differences, and the fact that many Hispanics are pro-life Catholics, is that the Democrats’ culture-war messaging is turning these voters off.

Ruy Teixeira, a political scientist who has studied emerging trends in the Hispanic electorate, wrote in “The Liberal Patriot”:
 
Have Democrats managed to miss all of this, or do they not care? Is it possible Republicans figured out Hispanic Americans are not woke, and many do not consider themselves non-white, but Democrats did not?

Democrats traditionally focus much of their election-time messaging on black voters, but in the first year of the Biden administration the party has sought to continue that outreach. Officials from the president on down have repeatedly highlighted the disenfranchisement of blacks by new Republican voting restrictions, especially in places like Georgia, calling those efforts a new era of Jim Crow, and Vice President Kamala Harris recently held an event on maternal morbidity rates, at which the White House issued a presidential proclamation marking “Black Maternal Health Week.”
 
The swing against Democrats last year – though it amounted to an 8% gain for Republicans nationally – was much larger in some places like the Rio Grande Valley in Texas (12%) and Miami-Dade County in Florida (20%), according to EquisLabs in an analysis of the 2020 Latino electorate.

In both of those places Democrats, it turns out, were asleep at the wheel. Passed out actually.

The Equis assessment described a unilateral disarmament by Democrats that bolstered Republicans with Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas. In those states, on the issues of socialism and control of the border, Republicans were communicating their message to these voters clearly and repeatedly while Democrats were absent.

“Both are seemingly cases of neglect – where one side completely owns a highly salient issue without meaningful competition. We aren’t talking about ad spending in the last months of the election; we mean multiple years of attention – appearances, photo ops, press conferences, policy rollouts … boosted by local media that echo it,” stated an Equis Research report on the findings posted on Medium in December.

Unless Democrats want to cede the Hispanic vote to Republicans, it’s high time they sober up.

A.B. Stoddard is a columnist & Associate Editor of RealClearPolitics. Having covered Congress since 1994, Stoddard appears regularly on MSNBC, CNN, FOX News and the FOX Business Network.