The Democrats’ Hispanic Voter Crash

It’s not as bad as you think—it’s worse.

It’s been widely noted that the Democrats fared very poorly with Hispanic voters in the November election. But I believe that the scale of the Democrats’ crash among Hispanic voters has not yet been fully processed nor the extent to which this crash undermines Democrats’ plans for the future.

Let’s start by looking at some data on the scale of the Democratic Hispanic voter crash. Here are a dozen illustrative findings:

1. According to AP VoteCast data (the best data currently available), the national Democratic margin among Hispanics crashed by 16 points, from a 28-point advantage to just 12 points. This comes on top of another 16-point margin crash between 2016 to 2020, according to the gold standard Catalist data. Compare that to the overall national shift to the right across the entire time period, 2016-2024, which goes from Hillary Clinton’s 2-point advantage in 2016 to Trump’s point and a half margin in this election. That’s a total overall shift of just 3 and ½ points toward Trump, a shift that is simply dwarfed by the massive shift among Hispanics.

2. The Democratic margin among Hispanic working-class (non-college) voters declined by 18 points between 2020 and 2024. That is after a 19-point decline between 2016 and 2020, as measured by Catalist.

3. Hispanic men were a particular trouble spot for the Democrats this election. VoteCast data have the Democratic advantage dropping by 20 points in this election, down to a slender 1-point margin. But Hispanic women also shifted 14 points right in this election. And if you look back to the last election, the decline in Democratic margin between 2016 and 2020 among Hispanic women was actually twice as large (20 points) as it was among Hispanic men (10 points). So across the two elections, the decline in Democratic support among Hispanic men and women may have been quite similar.

4. The Hispanic shift to the right was concentrated among the younger generations of Hispanics who of course are the future of the Hispanic vote. Among Hispanics under 45, the Democratic margin dropped by a shocking 26 points. Trump actually carried working class Hispanic men in this age group by 7 points.

5. Turning to geographic patterns, here’s a New York Times chart illustrating the shift to the right in Hispanic-majority counties. Compared to Native American- and black-majority counties, the shift to the right in 2024 was larger in Hispanic-majority counties (13 points) and has been continuous since 2016 so these counties wind up way to right of where they were in that election.

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6. Similar findings come from Jed Kolko, who analyzed counties using a typology developed by the American Communities Project, which groups counties using a variety of demographic, economic and other factors. The counties grouped into the “Hispanic Centers” category had the largest shift of any county group, shifting to the right by 14 points.

7. Drilling down to specific geographic areas, there is no dearth of vivid examples of big Hispanic shifts. As Carlos Odio, a co-founder of Equis Research, a Democratic-oriented firm specializing in Hispanic voter research, observed somewhat ruefully:

[Hispanic] shifting was happening everywhere—so it’s happening in Lawrence, Mass., as much as it’s happening in the Rio Grande Valley, it’s happening in the Central Valley of California, it’s happening in Grand Rapids and Detroit…These places are so different that the only thing they have in common is that the kinds of people who are switching, they identify as Hispanic.

The New York Times, for example, mapped precinct level shifts in 11 cities—Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix and San Francisco. A continuing theme of their analysis was the strikingly large shifts toward Trump in Latino neighborhoods across this diverse basket of cities.

8. A vivid illustration of this dynamic comes from Philadelphia via a terrific Philadelphia Inquirer analysis of precinct results. Note the sharp rise in Hispanic support for Trump compared to other racial groups.

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9. Staying in Pennsylvania—the tipping point state in this election—AP VoteCast indicates a 16-point pro-Trump margin shift across the state among Pennsylvania’s Hispanics. In a fascinating analysis by Charles McElwee, “Main Street of the Realignment” that follows the 2024 vote along historic route 309 in Pennsylvania, he finds some amazing trends in Latino-heavy areas:

Route 309 begins around the northeast’s Wyoming Valley, continues through Luzerne County then past the Blue Mountain ridge and onward to the Lehigh Valley, where it passes Pennsylvania Dutch communities and enters suburban Philadelphia’s Bucks County before terminating at the state’s biggest city… This highway long ran through reliable Democratic territory. This trend dates back to a day in October 1960, when John F. Kennedy’s campaign caravan traveled on Route 309 as it targeted working-class Catholic voters in small industrial cities and towns.

The Latino shift in Republicans’ favor was dramatically evident in Luzerne County’s Hazleton, a small city where Route 309 runs through the downtown and past the old Altamont Hotel, the site of a [John F.] Kennedy stump speech before 12,000 on that October 1960 day…Trump won every ward in Hazleton, where Trump’s overall vote share—62 percent—matched Latinos’ share of the city population. Even in 2016, when Luzerne’s voting margins fueled Trump’s narrow statewide victory, Hazleton still favored Hillary Clinton, though Joe Biden handily lost the city in 2020. This Election Day, the enthusiasm for Trump was hard to miss in Hazleton, where I spent the evening watching returns with friends. In the city’s Nanny Goat Hill section, an historically Italian neighborhood once reliably Democratic, residents displayed Trump regalia outside their homes. In that neighborhood alone, Trump carried nearly 65 percent of the vote….

Last week, Republicans overperformed in Lehigh County while flipping Northampton County. According to a Morning Call analysis, some of Trump’s biggest gains came in Allentown—Pennsylvania’s Latino-majority, third-largest city—where some wards saw a 25-point swing in the incoming president’s favor compared with 2020.

10. How about New York and New Jersey? In New Jersey, AP VoteCast reports a statewide Hispanic swing toward Trump of 26 points. And check out these massive swings in heavily Hispanic cities and towns in the state.

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In New York, VoteCast estimates a 23-point statewide shift toward Trump among Hispanics. Notably big shifts took place in New York City, particularly in Queens. Matthew Thomas has analyzed the precinct data and here’s what he finds. In precincts that are 50-75 percent Hispanic the margin shift toward Trump is a whopping 36 points and in precincts that are more than 75 percent Hispanic the rightward shift since 2020 is an astonishing 48 points.

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11. Massachusetts? Sure. VoteCast shows a 32-point (!) statewide shift toward Trump among Massachusetts Hispanics. As it happens, this is exactly the size of the shift that took place this election in the historic industrial town of Lawrence. Steve Kornacki explains the significance of the result:

This was a disastrous result for Democrats in Massachusetts’ most heavily Hispanic city. When Trump ran in 2016, he was crushed in Lawrence, an old mill city on the Merrimack River, by 66 points. Four years ago, he brought it down to 49 points. His 57%-40% defeat this time around is the first time a GOP presidential candidate has cracked 40% here since 1988, back when the city was still majority white. Dominicans are the largest Hispanic subgroup in Lawrence, demonstrating the breadth of Trump’s gains.

12. Florida and Texas, of course. In Florida, VoteCast shows a 21-point margin shift toward Trump, including a 31-point rightward shift among Puerto Ricans. The latter explains how Trump was able to flip heavily Puerto Rican Osceola county into his column.

In Texas, VoteCast records a 27-point rightward shift among the state’s Hispanics between 2020 and 2024. This comes of course on top of sharp rightward Hispanic shifts in the state between 2016 and 2020. Indeed, according to a Washington Post analysis, 13 of the 15 hardest right-swing counties in the country between 2016 and 2024 were majority-Hispanic counties in Texas. And the king of rightward-swinging is Texas’ Starr county, which is close to 100 percent Hispanic. In 2016, Clinton carried the county by 60 points; this election Trump carried it by 16 points. That’s an almost unbelievable swing of 76 points across the two elections!

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These are big, big shifts. And Democrats seem at a loss on how to deal with this, outside of hoping for the ever-popular “thermostatic reaction” against Trump where Hispanic voters finally “come home” to the Democrats. That’s not much of a strategy. Paraphrasing Dylan, we might say: “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is….do you, Mr. Democrat.”

They’d better figure it out since these trends undermine what has been Democrats’ default plan for their political future. Consider that most Democrats like to believe that, since a relatively conservative white population is in sharp decline while a presumably liberal nonwhite population keeps growing, the course of social and demographic change should deliver an ever-growing Democratic coalition. It is simply a matter of getting this burgeoning nonwhite population to the polls.

But consider further that, as the Census documents, the biggest single driver of the increased nonwhite population is the growth of the Hispanic population. They are by far the largest group within the Census-designated nonwhite population (19 percent vs. 12 percent for blacks). While their representation among voters considerably lags their representation in the overall population, it is fair to say that voting trends among this group will decisively shape voting trends among nonwhites in the future since their share of voters will continue to increase while black voter share is expected to remain roughly constant.

It therefore follows that, if Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not cancelled out entirely, and this very influential Democratic theory of the case falls apart.

They’d better start planning for a very different future. And soon. To quote Dylan again: “Let us not talk falsely, the hour is getting late”.