Recent polls indicate that the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party might be threatened by a demographic drift by Hispanics away from their column.
President Donald Trump tweeted last month that he now had a 50-percent approval rating among Hispanics. “Wow, just heard that my poll numbers with Hispanics has gone up 19 percent to 50 percent. That is because they know the Border issue better than anyone, and they want Security, which can only be gotten with a Wall.”
Whether it is because of the wall, in spite of it, or because of other reasons, it is true that a Marist Institute for Public Opinion poll taken for National Public Radio (hardly a bastion of conservative politics) indicated a strong surge in approval for Trump among America’s Hispanic voters. Not surprisingly, Marist rushed to caution that there was a high margin of error in the poll, and perhaps they had over-sampled Republicans.
A POLITICO/Morning Consult Poll seemed to confirm the Hispanic surge for Trump, pegging him at 42 percent among Hispanics.
On the other hand, polls have tended to understate the support for Trump among Hispanics. For example, a Latino Decisions poll, conducted just prior to the last presidential election in 2016, found only 18 percent support among Hispanics for Trump; he wound up garnering 28 percent. Had Trump received the lower predicted percentage of the vote among Hispanics, he would have lost both Florida and Michigan, and we would have President Hillary Clinton.
If Trump were to get anywhere in the neighborhood of the 40 percent of the Hispanic vote won by George W. Bush in 2004, his reelection is all but assured.
Even in the 2016 election, Trump took 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in Florida, and he bested Mitt Romney’s performance among Hispanics nationally (28 percent to 27 percent). He was far ahead of the dismal 21 percent scored by Bob Dole in 1996.
It is the elephant in the room that the Democrats are increasingly for “open borders” — with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even condemning any border wall as “an immorality” — mainly because Democrats see the surge of immigrants as their best hope to win federal elections for the presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Pew Research estimates that in 2020, Hispanics will have 32 million eligible to vote — and will make up at least the 11 percent of the national vote they took in 2016 and 2018. Democrats have been counting on this increased Hispanic electorate to win in 2020 and beyond.
But if Democrats cannot count on the large percentage of the Hispanic vote they have enjoyed in the past few elections, their electoral hopes are all but dashed.
If the Hispanics are truly shifting their political allegiance, at least to some degree, what could be behind it?
First of all, there has been a slight slowing of Hispanic immigration in recent years. The longer an immigrant person and their descendants live in America, the more likely they are to assimilate into the culture, and become increasingly protective of that culture. They are increasingly likely to cast their lot with the political party they perceive will protect their way of life, their property, and their income. We saw this with the immigration surge of 1880-1920. Descendants of those immigrants became increasingly conservative a generation or two later, producing the Nixon and Reagan landslides.
One reason that Hispanics are more likely than non-Hispanic white voters to vote Democratic is that they tend to be younger, and younger voters are part of the more liberal millennial generation that has been indoctrinated by left-wing media, academia, and popular culture.
Two-thirds of the Hispanic electorate is now native-born. These native-born Hispanics are more likely to approve of Trump than recently naturalized immigrants, according to Pew Research. While Hispanics are still more likely to vote Democrat than Republican, they tend to be more conservative than the average Democrat voter. Twenty-two percent of Hispanic Democrats describe themselves as moderate or conservative, compared to only 12 percent of Democrats in general.
As Democrats continue their leftward surge — emphasizing such liberal positions as gun control and draconian laws to curb supposed global warming — they risk losing more and more Hispanics. The increasingly extreme pro-abortion positions taken by Democrats can be expected to further alienate Hispanics, who tend to be more pro-life than the average voter.
According to Census Bureau data, the median income for Hispanics grew by 3.7 percent, adjusted for inflation, in 2017. That is more than double the increase enjoyed by all households in the booming U.S. economy. Median weekly earnings for Hispanics working full-time has increased by 4.3 percent, adjusted for inflation, for the past two years.
The economy is so good that this could explain why former President Barack Obama traveled to a friendly college campus last fall — the University of Illinois — to claim credit for just how well the economy is faring.
Labor Department statistics indicate that the less than five-percent unemployment rate among Hispanics is now the lowest ever recorded. In stark contrast, this level of unemployment is less than half the unemployment rate for Hispanics during Obama’s second term.
It has been suggested that economic fortunes among Hispanics are so rosy because they tend to start their own businesses, more so than other Americans. When Obama was president, he regularly ridiculed the small-business owner, with such snarky remarks as “You didn’t build that” in reference to his argument that it was government that should get the credit when a business succeeds. Trump, on the other hand, has implemented policies that include reducing the regulatory burden on business owners.
Is it surprising that Hispanic business owners have taken notice? In the Trump tax cuts, there was a 20-percent small business tax deduction, which allows entrepreneurs to keep one-fifth of their earnings out of the hands of the tax collectors. This money can be plowed back into the business, reducing the need for loans, and thus growing the business, rather than the debt of the business.
As the 2020 presidential and congressional elections loom, Hispanic voters, and indeed, all American voters, will have to ask themselves if they are willing to kill the goose that laid the golden egg in exchange for unconstitutional gun control, job-killing environmental regulations, and abortion-on-demand up to birth.
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