There are not many things in life proven, or thought, to be inevitable. Death and taxes famously make the shortlist, alongside the sun rising in the east and a precious few other of life’s certainties. Then there’s this one: All minority groups will forever favor the Democratic Party.
Hold on a sec; that last one we may need to discuss. A stunning new poll released by the Wall Street Journal breaks new ground in concluding that the long, slow rightward march of Hispanic Americans may finally have reached a tipping point. Indeed, the Republican tortoise may finally have caught up to the Democratic hare among America’s Spanish-speaking voters. The survey numbers are stark: 37% support for each party in the 2022 midterms, the rest undecided. Perhaps even more stunning is that, in a hypothetical rematch, Joe Biden would finish just one point ahead of Donald Trump – 44% to 43% – among Hispanics. And it was not racism or other social issues constantly attached to these communities by race-obsessed media which registered as the main source of concern. It was, like everyone else, the economy.
Republicans’ efforts to woo Latinos, while always an uphill battle, have historically centered on a generalized cultural conservatism endemic to most of these communities, and thus met with considerably more success than the GOP’s half-hearted (until Trump) attempts to expand their pitiable support among blacks. Since 1980, while Republican presidential candidates averaged just 9% support from African-American voters, they received three and a half times as much – 31% – from Hispanics.
Though few took notice at the time given the outcome of the election and ugly aftermath, this new poll may in retrospect make the 2020 election look like a watershed. After capturing 29% of the Hispanic vote in 2016, a remarkable number considering how he was presented by elite media, Trump improved his performance by a full 9% in his re-election bid, just two points shy of the GOP’s high watermark of 40% by George W. Bush in 2004. And this new poll reveals that the daylight between the two parties among Spanish-speaking voters has now vanished.
It is important to point out that the word Hispanic is in many ways a misnomer, one we start hearing around election time. The so-called Hispanic vote is actually multiple and varied votes summarized under one convenient but distorted Spanish-speaking umbrella. Try walking up to a Cuban and asking about Mexico, or conversing with a Venezuelan about Puerto Rico, and you will understand. The Hispanic universe is less a melting pot than a mosaic of distinct cultures and national identities, just as Swedes are very different from the Irish, but both are characterized as Caucasian. Another tendency fed by fake-woke corporate media is to lump blacks and Hispanics together as “minorities,” as if they have anything in common other than not being part of the increasingly slender white majority in this country.
Nevertheless, distinctions aside, this new poll shows collapsing support for Democrats across the full spectrum of Spanish-speaking voters. As Democratic pollster John Anzalone told the WSJ, “Latinos are more and more becoming swing voters.… They’re a swing vote that we’re going to have to fight for … there’s a group of Hispanic men who were without a doubt enticed by Trump and have become more Republican.“
It is hardly a secret that Democrats have relied on winning roughly two-thirds of the Latino vote in presidential elections without much effort over the years. But they may now have to actually work to win back what they long took for granted but now have lost from this voting bloc vital to its past – and future – success. How ironic it would be if the era of Donald Trump is viewed by future historians as the tipping point, the time when Hispanic voters finally abandoned the Democratic Party.
~ Read more from Tim Donner.
