Despite his restrictive immigration policies and rhetoric disparaging Mexicans and Central Americans, President Donald Trump gained ground among Latinos this election, according to a survey of thousands of voters of color in California and other states.
The American Election Eve Poll found that an overwhelming majority of Latinos backed the Democratic ticket, as they have in previous elections. But fully 27% supported Trump nationwide, compared to 18% in 2016.
In reliably blue California, 22% of Latinos voted for the Republican candidate, up from 16% who backed Trump on his first run for the presidency.
“I do think there’s been a shift and the question is, why?” said Gary Segura, senior partner with Latino Decisions, a lead pollster for the survey.
One reason for the shift was that Joe Biden was not as well known among Latino households as the Clinton family was, Segura said. But more importantly, Democrats didn’t do enough to engage these voters in California and other non-battleground states.
“There was little outreach by the Democrats and the Biden campaign,” said Segura, dean of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA. “And there’s an important lesson here. I think the one place where President Trump did invest in Latinos is in South Florida, and he was rewarded for that. So investment matters, being on the ground matters.”
In Florida, 38% of Latinos voted for Trump, including a majority of Cuban Americans, according to the election eve poll. That level of support for Trump’s reelection led to concern among more liberal voters in the hours after the polls closed, as well as reminders on social media that the 60 million Latinos in the U.S. have never been a monolithic group.
“People look for simple metrics,” said Louis DeSipio, a professor of political science at UC Irvine who has studied Latino voters for decades. “And any community is diverse, not just in national origin, but in terms of generation, the region they live in. That’s reality.”
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—Farida Jhabvala Romero (@Farida Jhabvala)