A new report from UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Initiative (UCLA LPPI) found that Latinos not only turned out to vote in greater numbers than originally thought, they also overwhelmingly supported President Joe Biden.
In the days following the election, the prevailing narrative about Latino voters revolved around the surprising results in Florida’s Miami-Dade County and Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, where the majority of Latinos voted for Donald Trump instead of Biden. Some cited these results as a sign that Latinos had failed to come through for Democrats and, more ominously, would be increasingly in play in future elections.
But as numerous Latino organizing groups pointed out, the early results didn’t tell the full story. Latinos not only turned out to vote, they were likely instrumental in Democrats winning the key swing states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia.
Now, new data is offering support to that narrative. UCLA LPPI points out that early analyses were based solely on exit polls, methodology that “undersamples Spanish-speaking voters, voters with lower education, and voters in majority-Latino precincts.”
UCLA LPPI’s study offers a clearer look at the Latino vote in 2020 by focusing not on exit polling but rather on actual ballots cast in 25,618 precincts across 13 states. The report “rebukes the inaccurate perception that Latino voters had made a significant shift toward Trump, handing him victories in some states.”
A growing electorate
According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 32 million Latinos were predicted to be eligible to vote in the 2020 election. That’s about 13% of the 239 million total eligible voters in the U.S.
Latinos are often referred to as the “sleeping giant” electorate due to the wide gap between voter turnout and the number of those eligible to vote. The voter turnout gap is significantly higher with Latinos than with white or Black voters. As a result, Latino voters have been characterized as politically disengaged.
Data from both the 2018 midterms and the 2020 general election, however, tells a different story. UCLA LPPI found that the growth of Latino voter turnout outpaced that of any other demographic. It estimates that about 16.6 million Latinos voted in the presidential election—a 30.9% increase from the 2016 election and double the national increase of 15.9%.
But what happened in Florida?
While much has been written about Florida, it’s important to understand that it is an outlier when it comes to Latino voters.
Democrats’ continued hopes in the Sunshine State rest on its robust Latino population (3.1 million eligible Latino voters). Miami-Dade County has the highest number of Latinos in the state, and many were assuming it would go decisively for Biden. That assumption, though, was based on faulty reasoning and a misunderstanding of the Latino population in both Miami-Dade and Florida as a whole.
Despite an increasingly diverse Latino electorate, Cubans still represent the largest subgroup of Latino voters in Florida. Approximately 29% of Latino voters in Florida are Cuban Americans, and 27% are Puerto Rican. Other subgroups include Mexican (10%), Colombian (8%), Dominican (4%), Nicaraguan (3%), Peruvian (2%), Venezuelan (2%), Ecuadorian (2%) and Honduran (2%).
According to Pew, 47% of Florida’s 1.5 million Cubans live in Miami-Dade and this group has the highest turnout of all Latino voters in the state. That’s significant because most Cuban American voters identify as Republican. Therefore, if most Cuban voters live in Miami-Dade County and most of them identify as Republican, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump did so well in Miami-Dade.
But why did he do so much better there than previous GOP candidates? And so much better than he himself did in Miami-Dade in 2016? Although there are many possible factors behind this shift, one of the most impactful is likely Trump’s significant overtures to win over Latino voters in Florida.
According to NBC News, Trump’s “constant courtship” of Latinos led to an improvement over his 2016 numbers. In addition to winning over Cuban voters, Trump also made inroads with several South American subgroups, including Venezuelan, Colombian and Nicaraguan voters.
Republican strategist Bertica Cabrera Morris told NBC News, “Trump showed up in Florida. He asked us what our issues are and he addressed them. He didn’t take us for granted.”
The Democratic Party’s efforts in the state were not as robust. Florida International University professor Eduardo Gamarra told NBC News that Democrats “didn’t have a very effective ground game in Miami-Dade County. From the beginning,” he added, “they were trying to defend themselves from the communist accusations. So it was difficult for them to develop a ground game. They did, but it was late.”
But Miami-Dade’s numbers don’t reflect that of the state overall.
UCLA LPPI found that Latinos in Miami-Dade voted for Trump by a two-to-one margin. However, Latinos in the rest of the state voted for Biden by a two-to-one margin, and he won the Latino vote in Florida overall.
“Miami-Dade represents only 3.1% of the overall U.S. Latino population and is not typical or representative of Latinos nationwide,” wrote UCLA LPPI. The narrative that emerged on election night, that Latinos had swung right, proved to be “inaccurate and one-dimensional.”
“But zooming out from Miami-Dade, the vote choice of Latino voters across the country paints a very different picture,” explained the report.
The impact of Latino voter in battleground states
Outside of Florida’s Miami-Dade County and a handful of other regions, Latinos supported Biden. In fact, according to the report, Latinos supported Biden at about the same margins that they supported Obama in 2008 and 2012.
In 2020, Latinos proved to be instrumental in several key swing states. UCLA LPPI’s report found that in Arizona precincts where there was a larger concentration of Latino registered voters, Latinos voted “overwhelmingly” for Biden. In precincts that had lower concentrations of Latino registered voters, Latinos “generally supported” Trump. Even in Texas, whose Rio Grande Valley received a lot of attention for its rightward swing, “Latino density was positively correlated with voting for Biden.”
In other states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Biden received strong support in both high-density Latino precincts and in low-density Latino precincts.
“Our precinct-level data shows that Latino voters not only supported the Democratic candidate overwhelmingly across the country, but their historical growth in turnout and the narrow margins that decided elections in swing states make it clear that they were a decisive force in the outcome of the 2020 presidential election,” wrote UCLA LPPI.
In Arizona, Latinos helped flip the state blue for the first time since 1996. They also helped flip a senate seat—the second since the 2018 midterms.
The margins of victory in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin were narrow, at 11,000, 12,000 and 21,000 votes, respectively. The report’s authors argue that Latino voters “helped tip” the states in favor of Democrats.
The political power of Latinos
So what does all this amount to? UCLA LPPI cautions that analyzing Latino voter trends based on the National Exit Poll is a flawed operation, and that analyses “need to be based on accurate and reliable data.”
Additionally, UCLA LPPI’s founding director, Sonja Francine Marie Diaz, argues that as the Latino population grows, so, too, does their political power. This, however, hasn’t translated into an increase in policy influence.
“Latinos are often left out of the conversation when it comes to shaping policy, and are seen as an afterthought when it comes to elections,” wrote Diaz.
Diaz added that “both the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election point to a new way forward focused on the expansion of the electorate that builds winning coalitions of voters and achieves substantive representation through more diverse candidacy and an inclusive policy agenda.”
Additional research from UCLA LPPI found that Latinos are more likely than other racial and ethnic groups to earn lower wages and lack health insurance. Diaz argues that it is crucial to listen to these communities and “ensure substantive representation at all levels of the government.”
As Latino activists and organizers have pointed out, Democrats cannot take Latino voters for granted. It’s a wholly unsustainable strategy to continue to rely on Latino voters and then fail to create policy agendas that benefit their communities.
“With a new administration and new Congress coming into office,” wrote Diaz, “we can make bold change to achieve a more inclusive democracy, but only if we seize the opportunity.”
