From the disappointing results of key congressional races to victories in Arizona and Georgia, the 2020 election was full of surprises for Democrats. In the ongoing post-mortem analyses, another surprising trend emerged: the apparent rightward shift of immigrant voters.
The U.S. has seen a dramatic increase in eligible immigrant voters in recent years. The Pew Research Center estimates that more than 23 million naturalized citizens were eligible to vote in the 2020 election. That’s an impressive 10% of the nation’s electorate and a 93% increase since 2000. Most of these immigrant voters, Pew found, are Latino and Asian at a combined total of 65%. Asian voters are the only group that is primarily made up of immigrants.
Given the previous administration’s anti-Latino, anti-Asian and anti-immigrant rhetoric, it stands to reason that these new waves of immigrant voters would support Democrats in overwhelming numbers and thereby bolster the party’s prospects.
The results of last year’s election, however, have thrown a wrench into that line of thinking.
In December, the New York Times published an in-depth look at immigrant voting trends during the 2020 election. The Times’ analysis of precinct-level data found that across the U.S., areas with significant Latino and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) populations, including those with the highest number of immigrants, saw a shift to the right.
The Times also found that while there was a significant increase in voter turnout among Latinos and Asian Americans, Trump won “the lion’s share of the additional turnout.”
“The red shifts, along with a wave of blue shifts in Republican and white areas, have scrambled the conventional wisdom of American politics and could presage a new electoral calculus for the parties,” the Times wrote.
Reactions to this apparent shift rightward have been mixed, with some voicing skepticism at just how significant that pattern is (Biden did, after all, overwhelmingly win both Latino and Asian voters nationwide). Others, on the other hand, have expressed concern over what this means for Democrats moving forward, especially going into the 2022 midterms.
In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, Eric Garcia wrote that for many progressives, the trend was both a shock and a wake-up call.
“For a generation, Democrats have taken comfort in the assumption that long-term demographics were on their side: As America became less and less white, Democrats would enjoy an increasing advantage in national politics,” Garcia wrote. “The growing Latino vote was a—maybe the—linchpin of this thinking. Which means that if, in fact, Latinos are drifting from Democrats, it constitutes an emergency for the party, one that could haunt them in 2022, 2024 and beyond.”
Evidence of a shift
It’s impossible to get a full picture of what happened in 2020 until we have a more comprehensive data set, which likely won’t be for a while.
Most of the current analyses of the 2020 election rely on exit polls, which, as UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Initiative (UCLA LPPI) has noted, are not always accurate due to “small samples, unrepresentative selection of survey respondents, incomplete understanding of early and absentee voters, and language bias.”
For its research, the New York Times analyzed more than 28,000 precincts across more than 20 cities. However, because ballots are secret, there is no way to know the immigration status of the voter, whether they are U.S.-born or naturalized citizens. The Times relies on the overall demographic of the precinct in its research.
“It’s true that not all of these residents of these areas are immigrants, and many of those born abroad are not citizens and so are ineligible to vote,” wrote the Times. “But typically, immigrants settle in places where others like them already live, and their presence is a bellwether of similar populations and successive generations of earlier immigrants.”
How big the apparent shift right was among immigrant, Latino and AAPI voters depends on the data source.
According to exit polls, Biden won 65% of Latino voters and 61% of Asian voters, while Trump won 32% of Latinos and 24% of Asians. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 66% of Latino voters and 65% of Asian voters. Trump won 28% of Latino voters and 27% of Asian voters.
That’s not a particularly big change, especially when accounting for the significant increase in voter turnout. Looking at precinct data reveals a more complicated picture.
According to the Times, the pattern of immigrant voters shifting right is evident throughout the U.S. in cities like Chicago and New York, in California and Florida, and along the Texas border with Mexico. For example, in Chicago’s Chinatown, Trump’s share of the vote increased by 34% over his 2016 numbers. Although Biden still won precincts that had a majority of Asian residents, his margin of victory fell by 12 percentage points compared to that of Clinton’s in 2016.
In New York, where a full 38% of residents are immigrants, the Times looked at 1,164 precincts and found a 78% increase in votes in favor of Trump compared to 2016. Going against conventional wisdom, places like the Bronx and Harlem saw a shift right, while parts of Manhattan saw a shift left.
In Los Angeles County, the Times looked at more than 1,500 precincts. There, it found a 78% increase in votes for Trump in precincts where the combined population of Latinos and Asian Americans is at least 65%.
In precincts in both Los Angeles and Orange counties that had a Latino majority, there were 415,000 additional voters who cast their ballots. A surprising 87% of those precincts shifted right.
Democrats also saw losses in Philadelphia. Biden lost approximately 10,000 votes in precincts with significant Latino and Asian populations compared to Clinton’s four years ago. (Interestingly, the Times also found that Biden lost 5,000 votes in majority Black precincts.)
“Even as Mr. Trump lost ground in white and Republican areas in and around cities—ultimately leading to his election loss—he gained new votes in immigrant neighborhoods,” the Times found.
With the exceptions of places like Miami-Dade County and the Rio Grande Valley, Trump still lost the majority immigrant neighborhoods where he made gains.
Additional data
David Shor, who heads up data science for the progressive nonprofit OpenLabs, recently told New York magazine that Democratic support among Latino voters fell by about 8 to 9%, according to his firm’s analysis. And while more data is needed, he estimates that support among Asian voters fell by about 5% “with a lot of variance among subgroups,” particularly among Vietnamese voters.
“White voters as a whole trended toward the Democratic Party, and nonwhite voters trended away from us. So we’re now somewhere between 2004 and 2008 in terms of racial polarization. Which is interesting. I don’t think a lot of people expected Donald Trump’s GOP to have a much more diverse support base than Mitt Romney’s did in 2012. But that’s what happened,” Shor said.
Although these numbers may be alarming to Democrats, it’s crucial to look at them in the correct context. Regardless of these shifts, Trump won white voters overall, while Biden won both Latino and Asian voters.
A recent study by UCLA LPPI found that Latinos supported Biden in much larger numbers than originally thought and were instrumental in Biden’s victories in several key states. Even in Florida and Texas, which saw shifts right in areas like much-discussed Miami-Dade and Rio Grande Valley, Biden still won the Latino vote.
Like the New York Times, UCLA LPPI analyzed actual votes instead of relying on exit polls. UCLA LPPI looked at votes from 25,618 precincts across 13 states, which in total accounted for about 80% of all Latino registered voters in the country.
“As results for the presidential election started to pour in on November 3, 2020, the focus of the popular media on Latinos in Miami-Dade County created an incomplete narrative: Latinos delivered the state of Florida to the Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump. Exit polls with small Latino samples that showed a slight shift in Latino voter preference toward the Republican party relative to 2016 reinforced that narrative,” wrote UCLA LPPI.
“But zooming out from Miami-Dade,” it added, “the vote choice of Latino voters across the country paints a very different picture.” The study found that about 16.6 million Latinos voted in 2020. That’s a 30.9% increase from 2016 and double the nationwide increase.
Skepticism abounds
While there is conclusive evidence that there was, at least on some level, a shift right among immigrant voters, there still remains a fair amount of skepticism among some, particularly when it comes to Asian voters.
“It’s really hard to compare apples to apples unless you dig a little bit deeper into the data,” said Christine Chen, executive director of APIAVote, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to mobilizing AAPI voters. “I’m really hesitant to automatically jump,” she added.
AAPI Civic Engagement Fund Director EunSook Lee said, “We pay close and critical attention to how types of analyses like these make both intended or unintended generalizations of BIPOC immigrant communities at the cost of decentering and undervaluing the experiences and critical work of BIPOC-led organizations and leaders on the ground and steeped in community.”
“Additionally, we observed over time whenever data surprises us, we should avoid the rush to publish over the responsibility in delving deeper to affirm such findings,” Lee added.
While Lee acknowledged that there are pockets of Asian American voters that lean Republican, the AAPI Civic Engagement Fund did not see evidence of this shift. “Drawing from what we hear from over 20 community groups working on the ground and in immigrant neighborhoods throughout 2020, this is not a shift we have seen or heard,” she said.
“One shortcoming of the Times data we notice is mixing demographic characteristics of the voter not linked to the actual vote to generalize BIPOC communities’ vote choice longitudinally,” Lee added. “To better understand shifts in vote choice, we need to make an effort to pull out 2016 voters within the 2020 voter data in order to do an accurate longitudinal comparison of shifts through time. That will take time and careful, culturally competent data collection, which is something our communities deserve. While the Times’ findings are descriptive and exploratory, we caution jumping to conclusions while several data vendors prepare 2020 voter data for deeper analyses that get at these questions in a more meaningful way.”
Lee pointed out that the 2020 Asian American Election Eve Poll, whose sponsors include AAPI Civic Engagement Fund, found that roughly 1 in 5 Asian American voters were first-time voters.
“The poll also found Asian American voters overwhelmingly hold strong progressive stances on a range of issues from national mask mandates to police accountability for abuses, and white supremacy as a national threat,” Lee said.
Reasons behind the rightward shift
To the extent immigrant voters did move right in the 2020 election, a combination of factors was likely at play.
EquisLabs, a Democratic research firm dedicated to bettering the understanding of Latino voters, recently published a report that looked at Latinos in the 2020 election. It argued that while there are “various credible theories to explain Trump gains” among Latinos, there still isn’t enough data to fully explain the phenomenon. While the report looks at Latino voters overall—and not just immigrant voters—its analysis nevertheless offers insights into immigrant Latino voters.
EquisLabs argued that propaganda and disinformation is one possible reason behind this shift—an argument that Chen echoed when discussing AAPI voters.
Chen said that while she was hesitant about automatically accepting the Times’ assertions about the breadth of this shift, she also added that she “wouldn’t be surprised that there were segments that were conservative, right, and did trend that way,” pointing to the significant amount of dis- and misinformation prevalent during the election cycle.
The poet and author Cathy Park Hong published an op-ed in the New York Times discussing the right-wing conspiracy theories and disinformation reaching nonwhite immigrant communities.
Hong explained that these right-wing conspiracy theories haven’t reached Asian and Latino communities through traditional media outlets like Fox News. Rather, it has been through social media platforms like WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube. It also reaches immigrants through conversations with their friends.
According to Recode, outlandish claims about Biden include “misinformation ranging from exaggerated claims that he embraces Fidel Castro-style socialism to more patently false and outlandish ones, for instance, that the president-elect supports abortion minutes before a child’s birth or that he orchestrated a caravan of Cuban immigrants to infiltrate the U.S. southern border and disrupt the election process.”
EquisLabs found that YouTube is now “a leading source of political news.” According to its research, “64% of registered Latino voters said they got election information from YouTube—including 74% of Hispanic voters in Florida.” Those numbers are particularly troublesome, as both propaganda and disinformation are rampant on YouTube.
RT, for example, is a Russian state-sponsored media outlet found on YouTube that is widely considered to be a purveyor of propaganda and disinformation. It operates a popular Spanish-language YouTube channel that has more than 4.7 million subscribers.
For Shor, however, the problem goes beyond disinformation.
“I don’t think a shift that large can be plausibly attributed to what was said in WhatsApp groups or not buying enough in YouTube ads,” he said in his interview with New York. “I think the problem is more fundamental.”
Shor argues that as Democrats have made gains with college-educated white voters, white liberals “increasingly define the party’s image and messaging.”
“White liberals’ share of voice and clout in the Democratic Party has gone up,” said Shor. “And since white voters are sorting on ideology more than nonwhite voters, we’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left-wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, healthcare, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of ‘racial resentment.’
“So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us,” Shor added.
Carlos Odio, co-founder of EquisLabs, added his reaction to Shor’s interview on Twitter. He echoed Shor’s assessment that there’s a “disconnect between the college-educated elite of the Dem world and the working-class Latino voter.”
He also cautioned that EquisLabs had seen little evidence of Latino voters switching from voting Democrat in 2016 to voting Republican in 2020 outside of Miami-Dade. Its report found that while there were some voters that switched from voting for the Democratic candidate in 2016 to the Republican one in 2020, particularly in Miami-Dade, Trump appeared to make gains among voters who are usually on the “sideline of politics.”
Furthermore, the report cautioned that the Latino electorate is not static. “In fact, it is incredibly dynamic and fast-changing. The Trump coalition of Hispanic voters, still dwarfed in size by the Democratic coalition, grew on the margins thanks to a combination of defections and new voters, with likely a greater number of the latter,” the report stated.
Odio argued that one of the key differences between 2016 and 2020 was that the “salience of immigration” dropped and the media shifted its focus to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In our initial analysis of 2020 … immigration attitudes don’t appear to have had a significant effect on Latino vote choice. Immigration was less salient,” wrote Odio. In its report, EquisLabs found that in 2019, conservative Latinos strongly opposed the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border, even if they agreed with Trump on other aspects of immigration.
However, after the primaries in 2020, attitudes toward Trump and immigration began to shift, possibly because of the rise of discussion about the Obama administration’s policy on deportations.
Furthermore, while immigration was part of the zeitgeist in 2016 and 2018, in 2020, the focus shifted to the pandemic and the economic repercussions that came with it.
“Had 2020 been a referendum on immigration, Biden would’ve done even better than he did among Latino voters. But it wasn’t. An important segment of voters headed to the polls with economic insecurity on the mind and a stubborn view of Trump the businessman,” Odio added.
As FiveThirtyEight points out, Latino Decisions Desk’s Election Eve poll found that the pandemic was the No. 1 concern for Latino voters. Jobs and the economy were the second biggest concern, while healthcare costs came in at No. 3.
“In an election where the focus was more on COVID-19 and the economy, it’s not that surprising that Trump returned to a similar level of support among Latinos as other recent Republican presidential candidates,” wrote FiveThirtyEight.
The same can be said about Asian voters. APIAVote’s survey found that the economy was one of the top concerns for Asian voters (along with healthcare, education and voter discrimination).
According to the New York Times, some Asian American small business owners expressed concerns over the economic consequences of the pandemic-related business closures, with some switching their votes from Democratic in 2016 to Republican in 2020.
In his op-ed, Garcia echoed the idea that Trump’s image as a business leader appealed to swaths of Latinos, men in particular. “Trump’s image as a straight-talking businessman was definitely part of what appealed to my dad,” wrote Garcia.
Stephanie Valencia of EquisLabs told Garcia that plenty of Latino men were intrigued by Trump. “They see him as the successful businessman, and they see him as somebody who has built himself up from his bootstraps, even though we all know that’s not necessarily true,” Valencia said.
The image of Trump as a businessman who worked hard and bettered his situation for himself and his family may be particularly appealing to immigrants.
EquisLabs’ Project Juntos found that 32% of Latinos were more likely to believe that “people of color who cannot get ahead are mostly responsible for their own situations.” Members of this group were more likely to be older people, immigrants and bilingual. In addition, 28% of Latinos saw themselves as a group that “over generations can get ahead through hard work.” This group tended to be more conservative regarding race, class and government, and were the most likely to be Republican among Latinos.
Both the Times and Tenoch Flores, a political communications consultant who has advised progressive movement clients on electoral strategies, also pointed out that Trump’s name recognition may have played a part in winning over some voters.
“It’s difficult to say how much of this is unique or specific to Trump,” Flores said. “He was a candidate with 100% name ID for many years, a unique sort of political figure who dominated the news cycle.”
Why the focus on these shifts?
Matt A. Barreto, who is a founding partner of the research firm BSP Research and a professor at UCLA, said that the media’s fixation on small shifts right among nonwhite and immigrant voters is misplaced. (Barreto also conducted polling and messaging research on Latino voters for the Biden campaign.)
“Journalists, mostly white, and their white editors, became fascinated by vote data in Miami early on election night that showed Trump improving among Cubans and South Americans. Those of us carefully following the Latino vote had seen this trend all along and were not surprised,” said Barreto. “Then, instead of reporting on how Latino voters were a very important part of the Biden coalition, and provided the margin of victory due to very robust voter turnout in states like Arizona and Nevada, the media decided to go on a full-fledged assault about how Latinos were fleeing the Democratic Party.”
“This is complete nonsense,” Barreto added. “What we saw in 2020 was first and foremost an incredible voter turnout among Latinos; our ballots cast grew by about 30% since 2016 compared to 15% growth for the country as a whole.”
Rather than fixating on 4,000 Latino voters in Texas’ Zapata County, Barreto said the focus should be on the impressive number of Latinos who turned out to support Biden.
“Latino voters came out in huge numbers in Maricopa and Pima counties in Arizona for Biden. Latino voters, mostly Puerto Rican, came out in big numbers for Biden in Philadelphia. Latino voters came out in record-breaking numbers for Biden, and then Warnock and Ossoff in Georgia,” said Barreto. “These stories were ignored in favor of the Miami and RGV fixation of the Latino swing to Trump. It was bad reporting all around.”
Demographics do not equal destiny
Still, one clear takeaway from the 2020 election when it comes to both Latino and AAPI voters is that demographic shifts may not reliably translate into Democratic gains.
“For years, there’s been a cohort of advocates in progressive circles who have pushed the idea that demography is destiny,” said Flores. “That is to say that as more Latinos enter the electorate, they will automatically vote for the candidate with a D next to their name, or even better, vote for progressive policies. You know, that was always a flimsy notion.”
“The Latino community is not a monolithic voter block—it’s comprised of voters with a wide variety of racial, economic, religious and cultural backgrounds, and this impacts the way they vote,” said Nathalie Rayes, Latino Victory Fund’s president and CEO.
While AAPIs widely support Democrats, their political identity is in a state of flux, according to a recent report in the New York Times. “As relatively new voters, many Asian-Americans find themselves uniquely interested in both major parties, drawn to Democrats for their stances on guns and healthcare, and to Republicans for their support for small business and emphasis on self-reliance. But they do not fit into neat categories,” wrote the Times. “The Democratic position on immigration attracts some and repels others. The Republican anti-communist language is compelling to some. Others are indifferent.”
AAPI Data Director Karthick Ramakrishnan, told the Times that Asian Americans are “classic swing voters.”
“These immigrants did not grow up in a Democratic household or Republican household. You have a lot more persuadability,” said Ramakrishnan.
Implications for Democrats moving forward
The apparent swing right among some immigrant voters serves as a caution that Democrats shouldn’t take any voter group for granted, whether immigrants, Latinos or Asians.
Immigrants, like any other subset of voters, care about more than just any single issue. While topics like immigration and race are both important, research has shown time and again that immigrants, Latinos and AAPI voters care deeply about the economy, jobs, healthcare and education, among other issues.
If Democrats hope to make up for their 2020 losses and retain control of Congress in the 2022 midterms and beyond, they need to rethink how they can better appeal to a larger swath of voters.
“It turns out that candidates and campaigns will have to continue to understand this group of voters and work to earn those votes, just like every other significant voter subset in the country. That’s a good thing,” said Flores.
“The numbers for Latinos and AAPIs in terms of Biden over Trump, they’re strong,” he said. “Could they have been better? Sure. Does that mean that we need to continue to work hard to drive those numbers up? Absolutely.”
“If Democrats and progressives want to continue to win Latino and AAPI voters... we’re going to have to continue to invest in research, outreach and communications. That includes continuing to hire smart staff with cultural competence,” said Flores. “There’s no substitute for hard work.”
Blue Tent staff writer Noor Al-Sibai contributed to this report.
