In the battle for Hispanic voters, Dems say they win because they got more Hispanic lawmakers — or better Latino officials, more Latinos in congress and a more Latino president.
Of course, this election is very close — and it’s hard to know at the moment which candidate has more support, whether it’s Trump or Clinton. But there is something interesting here, at least as we speak.
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In the race for the Senate and House, more than one-third of the Hispanic vote went to the GOP in the midterm election. That’s less than a quarter of the total Hispanic vote, but a huge number for the GOP, which won the Senate with 53 percent of the total Hispanic vote, according to exit polls.
In the House, Republicans won 64 percent of the Hispanic vote. But not all Latinos that decided to vote for the GOP in the midterm were registered, or eligible to vote. In 2012, when Obama was in the White House, only about one out of six Latinos voted for the GOP; in 2014, the GOP picked up more Latinos, but less than a third of them were registered.
It’s not that Hispanics who aren’t registered and eligible to vote are voting for the GOP. The real Republican gains in the midterms came from the group that’s actually registered and eligible to vote, more than twice as many Hispanics as there were registered voters in the House or Senate, a recent analysis by Univision’s Jorge Ramos showed. What is happening here is that the Republican base can vote more effectively when they are more racially and ethnically diverse and when there are more immigrants and Latinos in politics and in American politics.
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This is what we saw in the 2014 midterms. In 2014, Latino support of the GOP was higher when Hispanic voters were more racially and ethnically diverse. And it wasn’t just that there were more Hispanics — there was also an increase in women in general, an increase in youth, a rise in the percentage of Latinos living below the poverty
