Tuesday's Top Questions
We've waited two years to find out how Latinos will vote in 2022. What will we learn?
It’s really amazing to think about how much attention we’ve paid to Latino voters since the 2020 presidential election. The opinions. The news stories. The polls. The surveys. It’s both dizzying and not enough. Nevertheless, anyone who confidently asserts that they know exactly how Latinos will vote on Tuesday is selling something. In my view, the more informed you are, the less you know for sure. Below is a list of the questions that will be on my mind as the results roll in. I’d love to know what’s on your mind, if you care to comment.
How will Latinos vote in Senate races in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin? Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania are all toss ups. Arizona leans Democrat. Wisconsin is a likely Republican hold. All of this is according to FiveThirtyEight. These are 5 of the 6 tightest races in the country, and they’re in places with enough eligible Latino voters to tilt the race one way or another.
How will Latinos vote in House races in Texas 15 (Michelle Vallejo vs. Monica De La Cruz) and Texas 34 (Vicente Gonzalez vs. Mayra Flores)? There are many other tight house races with sizable numbers of eligible Latino voters where Latino candidates are running—California 22 and Oregon 5, for example—but Texas 15 and Texas 34 will be the most watched, because they’re districts that had previously been ruled by Democrats, where Trump made huge gains, in a juggernaut of a state that Democrats—for like 20 years—have been hopeful they could flip someday. Judging only by the percentage of the Latino vote they’re expected to win, the Republicans De La Cruz and Flores could lose the races, but could also do even better than Trump did in 2020.
Regardless of who will actually win any of these Senate and House races, commentators matter of factly state that the Latino vote will be decisive. But how will we know? When they say this, I think they, like I do, usually mean that there are enough eligible Latino voters in the state to cover the margin of victory. But that’s also true of many other groups of voters—Black voters in Georgia, White voters in Wisconsin, for example. In Texas 15 and Texas 34, which are between 80 and 85 percent Latino, it seems safe to say that Latino voters will decide the election. But whether or not Latinos will be the decisive voters in elections elsewhere seems very hard to say with certainty. It seems to me that it will only be possible for Democrats to say that Latino voters “decided” an election if they push in the same direction and the Latino split is, I don’t know, 65-35, 70-30, or 80-20 in favor of Democrats. The closer the split is to 50-50, it seems harder to claim that Latinos decided a particular election, because they will have given their support to both candidates in fairly equal measure and wouldn’t have helped the candidate win more than any other group did. Conversely, I think it’s more possible for Republicans to claim that Latinos decided the election in their favor the closer the split is to 50-50, because that will mean in a tight election that their better-than-expected performance among Latinos helped them win.
How many Latinos will vote? Historically, eligible Latino voters participate in elections at lower rates than non-Latinos. NALEO (The National Association of Latino Appointed and Elected Officials) reported that 11.6 million Latinos are expected to participate in the 2022 midterm elections, compared with the 11.7 million Latinos who voted in 2018, which was a dramatic jump compared with 2014. It’s curious to me that 100,000 fewer Latinos are expected to participate, even though the number of eligible and registered Latino voters has increased along with the Latino population. NALEO CEO Arturo Vargas said, “One of every 10 U.S. voters is expected to be a Latino or a Latina in 2022.” It’s hard to say how impressed to be by this figure, which is about the same as it was in the 2020 presidential election. The bottom line is this: polls mean nothing at this point, and the only thing that matters is how many Latinos actually vote, and where.
How will different cohorts of Latinos vote? How will young Latinos vote? How will men vote? How will women vote? How will Latinos with college degrees vote compared with Latinos who don’t have college degrees? A recent report by Equis Research, based on interviews with 16,000 Latinos, found that young Latinos, in particular, were overrepresented among those who reported voting for Joe Biden in 2020, but now disapprove of his job performance and might vote for a Republican going forward. Data collected by the Pew Research Center, shared with me by Mark Hugo Lopez, showed that young Latinos weren’t more likely to lean Republican or Democrat compared with other age cohorts. That is interesting, if true, since the assumption has been that younger Latinos are more progressive or liberal compared with older Latinos. As for the other questions—about men, women, and level of education—reports over the past two years have suggested that men, like Latinos without college degrees, were more likely to vote Republican, while women, like Latinos with a college degree were more likely to vote Democrat. All of these things are potentially interesting because maybe the real political divide in America is between those with and without a college education, or between men and women. I don’t know that the midterm elections will provide definitive answers, but they’ll provide more data.
How will particular issues actually shape the decisions Latinos make when they head into the voting booth? Liberals, Democrats, and progressives hang on to the fact that a majority, and maybe even a supermajority, of Latinos favor many (but not all) of their policies compared with the Republican agenda, summarized rather vaguely by Mayra Flores as faith, family, and country. They also argue (correctly, I believe) that too many Republicans today pose a threat to our Democracy, and that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has proven to be unpopular among many American women, including Latinas, a clear majority of whom support legal abortion, and that the court’s extremism and overreach will drive women to the polls in opposition. It’s less clear to me now than it has been before that immigration reform—support for DACA, opposition to the border wall—will cause Latinos to support Democrats. Joe Biden and other Democrats haven’t exactly been awesome, and a New York Times/Siena poll with a Latino oversample found that 37% of Latinos agree more with the Republican Party’s position on “illegal immigration,” compared with 46% who agree more with the Democratic Party’s position. That’s closer than any time I can recall. The Democratic version of possible election outcomes based on Latino policy preferences is plausible. But that doesn’t mean it’ll happen. Even though a majority of Latinos favor most Democratic policies, the other issues on which Republicans have an advantage—inflation, to name just one—might take precedence this cycle. Democrats might respond that Democracy itself is on the ballot this year. I agree, but that’s irrelevant if the argument isn’t persuasive to enough Latino voters.
How will day-of voting compare with early voting? Democrats have been excited that early voting is up this year compared with 2018 and 2020, and the early votes seem to favor Democrats. They’ve used that datapoint to suggest that things will go well for their candidates. But this year even more than others, will Republicans, who’ve been assaulted with, and have largely embraced, the stories about election fraud and stolen elections (certainly ironic considering it was their candidate who tried to steal the election), wait to vote on election day, in which case the early voting and day-of voting will balance each other out?
How might Democrats and Republicans spin the results of the election regardless of the outcome? I don’t think that all of the results will tell the same story, which means that there will be plenty of opportunity for spin and interpretation. If Latino voters in most places vote 75-25, 70-30, 65-35 in favor of Democrats, which has been the historical mean, Democrats will surely breathe a little easier, but they will also say, with some justification: all of this bluster about the coming red wave, see, we told you that 2020 was an anomaly, and once we put in the work this election cycle, Latinos came home. Even if the split is something more like 60-40, or 55-45, and Democrats pull off narrow victories in any of the races named above, they will say that Latinos carried them across the finish line and showed that they’re strongly in the corner of Democrats. If Republicans win any of the tight races with something like the level of Latino support Trump won, they will say what they’ve been saying for the past couple of years: Latinos are becoming more conservative, and the GOP is now the party for the non-white working class (as if all Latinos are working class). If Republicans lose, though, and Latino voters don’t show up for them as they’ve hoped, then I wonder whether the GOP will pull the investments they’ve made in Latino communities (through the RNC Hispanic Community Centers and other efforts). There are certainly scenarios I haven’t covered, but the main point I want to make is that none of this spin will be good for Latinos if it allows the parties to go back to doing business as usual. If anything good has come out of post-2020 analyses, it has been a concerted effort—by some, at least—to understand what motivates Latinos. I’d hope for the same, or even greater, attention and curiosity going forward.
What won’t be answered on Tuesday? I think the main thing to keep in mind here is that all of these Senate and House races unfold in particular places, among particular communities, and focus as much on local issues as they do on the national political picture. And this won’t make it easy to tell big sweeping narratives about “the Latino vote.” Even as I type this, I’m thinking of caveats; so many that it might make my point meaningless or even wrong. All politics has become nationalized. Moreover, I don’t know if it has ever been possible to tell big sweeping narratives about Latinos, because of all of the ways in which particular communities are different—different national groups, rural and urban, rich and poor, religious and non-religious, etc. But that certainly hasn’t stopped media and politicians from trying. Still, I still think that in midterm elections—at least from the perspective of voters rather than candidates—there’s more of a focus on whether a candidate will represent local interests, of the town, city, county, or state. It has to make some difference that there’s no presidential candidate on the ballot. This may go against the idea that Democracy itself is on the ballot this year, but I do wonder how much voters are motivated by that argument, instead of others that—rightly or wrongly—feel even more important to their daily lives. And in any case, I would be cautious about concluding that tomorrow’s results give us some idea of what Latino voters will do in 2024. Tomorrow’s results will only be the beginning of another chapter.
I got so close to having 10 questions! Wouldn’t that have rounded things out nicely? Oh well, Latino-themed lists of any sort are bound to have some rough edges. See you here again on Thursday! We’ll see what the next couple of days bring. I’m sure it’ll be a lot, so hang in there!