Here's What Happened with the Latino Vote
CommentIf you are in shock over the election results, don’t blame Latinos.
They favored Hillary Clinton by better than two to one, according to the exit polls. They did not turn out in big numbers to protest Donald J. Trump, but it probably would not have mattered.
It turns out that Latinos were the election’s biggest losers and not just because Mr. Trump won the presidency after a long campaign of slinging threats and insults at them. The bitterest loss was dealt by the 59.5 million mostly white people who voted for Mr. Trump. That was a rejection by their own countrymen.
According to the exit polls — a rough measure of turnout at best — Latinos accounted for 11 percent of the votes cast Tuesday the same as 2012. If those numbers hold, there was little or no Trump effect, and however much the number of Latino votes increased was just a result of demography.
You may have been convinced that it would be otherwise. Years of reckless commentary, news stories and advocacy insisted that Latinos would be the great demographic firewall that would safeguard progressive politics with surging population numbers. But, the firewall only stands in a few states, and the biggest of them, California, New York and Texas, are already decided. Mr. Trump concentrated instead on the old industrial states where Latinos are a sparse presence. When he demonized Mexico and unauthorized immigrants, he gained more in the Electoral College by mobilizing white voters than he lost by alienating Latinos.
The national exit polls show that Mrs. Clinton drew 65 percent of the Latino vote compared with 29 percent for Mr. Trump. That is a landslide by any measure, and it is about the same margin in the exit polls for 2008 (67 percent vs. 31 percent). The disappointment sets in when you compare the outcome to 2012. President Barack Obama took 71 percent of the Latino vote in the exit polls that year compared with 27 percent for Mitt Romney.
Mr. Trump was supposed to be the bucket of cold water that aroused the sleeping giant, producing not only a stronger preference for the Democratic candidate but also, more important, a spike in turnout. In 2012, with immigration reform on the line, more than 12 million Latino voters stayed home, producing a turnout rate of 48 percent compared with 64 percent for whites and 67 percent for blacks.
The much ballyhooed and chronicled “Trump Effect” was supposed to have produced a surge in naturalizations and voter registration over the past year, and news organizations were churning out stories about the “surge” in Latino voting even after the polls closed Tuesday.
While more time and data is needed to get a full picture of Latino turnout this year, at first glance it appears Latino numbers were up, and perhaps significantly in some places, but that in fact the giant was barely stirred.
Four million more Latinos were eligible to vote Tuesday than in 2012. So, no matter who was running and no matter how low the turnout, the number of Latino votes counted Tuesday was virtually certain to be higher than 2012. In fact, demographic growth alone would have guaranteed Mrs. Clinton an additional 1.3 million votes (about 1 percent of the total votes cast), even if turnout remained at the same dismal rate as 2012, and she got two-thirds of the Latino votes.
In Colorado and Nevada, Latino voters surely helped keep the states blue, and under different scenarios those states could have served as the much-advertised Latino firewall. The one real bright spot for Latino Democrats Tuesday came with the election of Catherine Cortez Masto to the Senate in Nevada. That vote may illustrate what it takes to wake up the Latino electorate: a charismatic and qualified candidate, strong mediating institutions, in this case the hospitality workers’ unions in Las Vegas, and well-organized political operation like the one created by Senator Harry Reid, the retiring Democratic leader.
Meanwhile, something may have happened in Texas that needs a closer look. Mr. Trump won handily, but only by a 9 percent margin. President Obama lost the state by nearly 16 points in 2012 and by almost 12 points in 2008. A lot of non-Latino newcomers have begun to change the political complexion of the state in recent years, and that formula — newcomers plus Latinos — is what flipped Colorado and Nevada in the past.
Florida is the one place where Latinos might have been able to change the results of this election and didn’t. In the exit polls, Latinos accounted for 18 percent of the total vote compared with 17 in 2012, and the split was slightly more favorable to Mrs. Clinton than it was for President Obama four years ago. Mrs. Clinton’s vote tally was more than 200,000 higher than President Obama’s, but Mr. Trump’s was more than 400,000 higher than Mr. Romney’s.
And therein lies the result that Latinos will have to live with for the next four years. In a state that has vividly benefited from immigration and trade, a state where Latinos have for the most part prospered and contributed to the prosperity of their neighbors, white voters mobilized to elect a candidate who would angrily erase everything Latinos represent. No one else suffered that kind of defeat on Tuesday.
Roberto Suro is a professor of public policy and journalism at the University of Southern California.