More Latino voters went for Trump. But was it a true realignment? : NPR

For decades, Democrats have counted on the support of the majority of Latino voters.

In this year’s election, that pattern continued, with Democrats receiving the majority share of the Latino voters. But exit polling data showed Latinos backing President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans at levels some see as a crushing blow to Democrats’ long-held hope that this community would be a reliably blue bloc.

Despite the GOP’s inroads with this electorate, Latinos’ shift to the right may not be as sharp or permanent as exit polling suggests, according to Eric Rodriguez, Senior Vice President of policy and advocacy for UnidosUS, a nonpartisan civil rights organization.

Rodriguez argues that exit polls “notoriously” have “questionable methods,” particularly when it comes to measuring subpopulations of Latinos. He said that there’s much actual voting data that needs to be considered to know how Latinos actually voted.

UnidosUS’ poll of Latino voters, which was conducted right up until election day, showed 62% of Latino voters supporting Vice President Harris compared to 37% backing Trump. Rodriguez said there was an uptick in support for Trump, particularly among Latino men.

“So the dust is going to settle on this. I think we’ll get true numbers. We’ll match up some to individual precincts. So we’ll get a better sense of how people actually voted and the reasons that drove them out there,” Rodriguez said in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep.

Making some sense of Trump’s gains with Latinos

Rodriguez doesn’t dispute that Trump made gains with Latino voters, however. Like most of the country, Latino voters were primarily concerned with the state of the economy – an issue that polling consistently showed voters overall favoring Trump to handle better than Harris.

UnidosUS’ polling found that the top four concerns for Latinos were inflation, jobs and the costs of housing and healthcare. Because Latinos were feeling this pocketbook pinch, Roriguez said he questions to what extent this election represented the unique qualities that Trump has versus an actual realignment of Latino voters.

“It just remains to be seen if what we’re going to see from the incoming administration and the new Republican leaders in Congress, if they’re going to go further in appealing to the policies that the Latino voters have said in a bipartisan way they support, which include things like comprehensive immigration reform, health care coverage,” Rodriguez said. “And if they don’t start to see some of those things matching up, how they react to what they see coming out of Washington.”

Still, Trump did manage to win in some areas that had long been blue. In South Texas, for example, Trump and Republicans have flipped 16 counties since the 2016 election, Texas Public Radio reports. Republicans there said this was the result of years of planning.

Rodriguez said this is proof of how investing in courting Latino voters makes a huge difference.

“Over the last few years there’s been a lot of conversation about the economy and a lot of conversation about how it is Biden’s economy, so changing opinions about that after three and a half years or so of that I think was quite difficult. It was baked into the cake,” Rodriguez said. “I was not surprised to see that. But it does point to the value of investment in voters to turn them out and to engage them.”

Daniel Alegre, CEO of TelevisaUnivision – the largest Spanish-language and Latino media outlet in the U.S. – told Morning Edition in an interview last week that the Latino vote “really was influenced by messages around the economy and messages around the border and security. You saw it reflected in the election results.”

Alegre also said that, after reviewing how political campaigns spent their money, campaigns that advertised in Spanish fared better than those that did not.

This story was edited by Treye Green and Kristian Monroe. The radio version of this story was edited by Adriana Gallardo and produced by Lilly Quiroz.