Trump’s New Latino Voters Are Sending Democrats a Message

A precinct-by-precinct examination of three key counties reveals the magnitude of the shift in the Latino vote

By Andre Tartar, Jeremy C.F. Lin, Katia Dmitrieva, Maria Eloisa Capurro, Catarina Saraiva and Demetrios Pogkas

November 24, 2020

From the Tejanos of Southeast Texas to the Venezuelan-American enclave west of Miami and the Dominican-Americans a few miles to the east, Latinos turned out in big numbers for President Donald Trump on Nov. 3.

Of all the election-night surprises, this may have been the greatest. Even in Maricopa, the key county that Joe Biden captured en route to flipping Arizona into the Democrats’ column for the first time in two decades, the Latino vote inched ever so slightly toward Trump.

Collectively, these voters sent a clear message to Democrats that night: The long-held assumption that the growing Hispanic population would inexorably turn large swaths of the Sun Belt into solidly-blue strongholds—and hand the party control of the electoral map in the process—is badly misguided. Yes, a majority of Latinos still voted for Biden and, yes, his victory in Arizona helped pave his way to the presidency, but he was trounced in Florida and Texas by margins that almost no pollster predicted. And the shifting Latino vote in those states was a big reason why.

Broad-stroke identity politics only go so far. That’s because the Latinos of the United States have no single identity, no shared world view. From state to state and town to town—even house to house—their politics are molded by vastly different experiences back in Latin America and here in the U.S.

Law and order, for instance, matters critically to some; containing the pandemic to others; and ending the lockdowns to others still. The facile premise of the monolithic Latino voting bloc is, once and for all, being put to rest.

“You’ve got conservatives, you’ve got liberals, you’ve got independents,” says Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a civil rights group founded in 1929. “It’s based more on geography.”

Bloomberg News did a precinct-by-precinct examination of three key spots on the map—the counties of Miami-Dade, Maricopa and Harris—to better understand the shifting trends among Latino voters. The whys behind the swings are impossible to know with any real precision, of course, but local experts identified several prime factors in each county for us.

Miami-Dade was the biggest shocker of the three. Trump won 53.5% of the total vote in the majority-Hispanic precincts, which account for almost three-fourths of Miami-Dade’s entire electorate. Back in 2016, he only got 40%.

Core to the Republicans’ playbook: Tarring Biden with the brush of socialism. For the Cuban-Americans, Nicaraguan-Americans and newly arrived Venezuelan-Americans—all exiles of socialist regimes—this was a powerful line and one the Democrats failed to respond to quickly. “The issue went unanswered for too long,” says Eric Rodríguez, senior vice president of policy and advocacy at UnidosUS, a nonpartisan Latino advocacy group.

Another key factor that analysts cite: Trump’s re-open-the-economy message, which resonated loudly with workers in the hard-hit tourism and restaurant industries.

Note: Outlying precincts show up as gray in the 2020 presidential results inset map because they had fewer than 100 votes cast this year or in 2016—in some cases, no votes were cast in these precincts.

Maricopa was more of a mixed picture. On a net basis, Latino votes shifted Trump’s way, when compared to the 2016 election, in 61% of the county’s 109 majority-Hispanic precincts. Still, Biden managed to defeat Trump in every single one of them.

The county is full of young Mexican-Americans and that youth, local political analysts say, proved a decisive factor. They’re progressive, they care deeply about equality and immigration policy after living through Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s decades-long crackdown, and they were rallied to the polls by groups of well-organized activists.

In Harris, the shift was stark. In almost 90% of the county’s 299 majority-Hispanic precincts, the vote count swung in Trump’s direction when compared to 2016. And while Biden still won nearly all of these precincts, the net vote shift towards Trump swelled to as many as 30 percentage points in some precincts.

Oil was part of the story. Houston, which makes up most of the county, is America’s energy capital. So Biden’s talk of banning new fracking on federal lands and gradually transitioning away from oil in coming decades wasn’t well received. Conversely, Trump’s call to open the economy was. Just like in Miami-Dade, the restaurant and hospitality industries are major employers in the area.

Socially, the Mexican-Americans, or Tejanos as some call themselves, are also more conservative here than they are in other parts of the country. The law-and-order message appeals to many of them. (Further south, in the Rio Grande Valley along the border with Mexico, Trump made huge gains in majority-Latino counties.)

And then there is the matter of the Democrats’ tepid efforts to reach out to voters in these communities. This was a theme to a varying degree in all three counties. In Harris, the lament was the loudest.

“Organizers from the region are furious with the Democrats because they were totally abandoned and denied support,” said Andres Bernal, a policy adviser who’s worked with Democratic candidates in Texas. “They have to stop taking it for granted that it’s just going to be Democrats forever.”

Sources: Harris County Clerk’s Office, Maricopa County Elections Department, Miami-Dade County Elections Department and U.S. Census Bureau (2010 Decennial Census and 2018 American Community Survey 5-year data)

Methodology

This analysis used precincts where at least 100 votes were cast in both the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections. Precinct-level results were sourced from county election departments and used to calculate party vote share, margin of victory, and net vote shift. Data is final as of Nov. 19 and includes certified results for Harris County and Miami-Dade County. Where precinct boundaries changed between elections, precincts were remapped as necessary for comparability. This process included merging precincts in Miami-Dade County. In Maricopa County, 2020 precincts were mapped onto 2016 precincts where at least 90% of the population were shared. Harris County precincts did not change between elections.

Demographic analysis was calculated by mapping 2010 Census blocks onto precincts using crosswalk files and spatial joins (where a precinct covered at least 90% of a block’s area). This process resolved more than 97% of 2020 precincts. Block group-level data from the 2018 5-year American Community Survey was used to calculate the Hispanic share of each precinct. Tract-level data was used to determine distribution by country of origin. These values were calculated for each precinct based on the block group and tract segments corresponding to it and weighted using 2010 population data.

Trump’s New Latino Voters Are Sending Democrats a Message

A precinct-by-precinct examination of three key counties reveals the magnitude of the shift in the Latino vote

The Pro-Trump Latino Trend

In 2020, Biden won Miami-Dade County in Florida with 53.4% of the vote, but Trump took 61% of Miami-Dade’s 482 majority-Latino precincts, up from 26% of them in 2016.

In 2020, Biden won Maricopa County in Arizona with 50.3% of the vote. He won all 109 of the majority-Latino precincts in the county. In more than half of them, his margin of victory was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s was in 2016.

In 2020, Biden won Harris County in Texas with 56% of the vote. He won 279 of 299 majority-Hispanic precincts in the county, but there was a net shift to Trump in 86% of them.

Methodology