In the previous update, I analyzed Kamala Harris’s relatively poor polling among Black voters. I concluded that, while she’s indeed likely to lose support among that group in 2024 compared to Joe Biden’s performance in 2020, there are several reasons to expect that it won’t be as damaging to her electoral college prospects as current national polls indicate.
In this update, I’ll move on to discussing another demographic with which she’s polling poorly: Hispanic voters. And to preview the upcoming analysis, my outlook here isn’t as optimistic for her.
Returning to Adam Carlson’s 2024 crosstabs aggregator, we can see that with Hispanics, Harris is currently polling an average of 10 points below Biden’s 2020 showing:
To me, what’s most concerning about this finding is that, unlike with Black voters, it comes on the heels of Biden performing quite badly with this subgroup in 2020. As you can see below, Trump gained a whopping 8% share (16 point net gain) with Hispanic voters in 2020 compared to 2016:
Plus, also dissimilar to Black voters, Hispanic voters weren’t substantially under-polled for Democrats in 2020. As I wrote in the last piece, Biden’s support among Black voters was underestimated in 2020 by about 10 points. His support among Hispanic voters was also underestimated, but only by a negligible 4 points:
This all paints a dark picture for Harris for multiple reasons. Firstly, Hispanics are the fastest-growing voting block in the nation. Secondly, certain swing states contain large amounts of Hispanic voters: the Arizona electorate, for example, was 19% Hispanic in 2020, and Nevada’s was 17%. In 2024, the figures in both states promise to be even higher. Even in Pennsylvania, 7% of the 2020 electorate was Hispanic. A 10-point loss for Harris among those voters in 2024 would lead to a loss of 0.7 points across the state, an unhelpful handicap given the thin margins expected there.
Why have Democrats plummeted so spectacularly with Hispanic voters since Trump’s ascendancy? The answer appears to lie in a massive political miscalculation made in the early and mid-2010’s. At that time, it was thought that taking a strong stance against illegal immigration at the southern border would alienate Hispanic voters—an undesirable outcome given their increasing prominence in American politics. Even though Barack Obama had dealt with illegal immigration fairly harshly while in office—deporting more undocumented migrants than any president in history to that point—Democrats adopted a practice of largely avoiding the issue, and their proposals on the matter often focused on offering amnesty to those who had already crossed the border.
So widespread was the political wisdom against too-strong anti-immigration rhetoric that Republican Party elites, too, adhered to it. They believed that Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 could partly be attributed to his having been forced to adopt an extreme (for that time) stance on immigration in the Republican Primary, thanks to pressure from upstart, populist-leaning candidates like Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Michele Bachmann. In one primary debate, Cain memorably suggested building a giant electrical fence across the southern border, which Romney let pass without criticism. (What a bad look for the party!) Later, Romney infamously proposed changing domestic policies in such a way as to incentivize undocumented immigrants to “self-deport.” With moments like these—so the thinking went—Romney had offended a critical constituency.
We now know that these political assessments were massively off base. That’s because, with Republicans in 2016 aiming to dial back their anti-immigrant rhetoric (perhaps by coalescing around amiable Florida governor Jeb Bush), political newcomer Donald Trump took a different tack. He instead ran a campaign focused almost solely on curbing illegal immigration and demagoguing the immigrants themselves. For this, he not only amassed a cultish following among rural White voters that persists to this day, but he suffered no penalty whatsoever among Hispanic voters, an achievement both parties had assumed impossible. Four years later, as we’ve said, he gained an unbelievable net 16 points among the demographic.
Trump’s astonishing success with Hispanics proves that the parties greatly miscalculated how these voters felt about illegal immigration. Firstly, keep in mind that, despite what Elon Musk would have you believe, undocumented immigrants can’t vote, so there’s no direct political benefit to catering to them. Still, circa 2010-2015, both parties seemed to believe that Hispanic citizens would largely identify with the undocumented migrants, taking their denigration as a personal attack on their communities. Of course, for many or even most Hispanic voters, this may have been correct; after all, Democrats still poll ahead of Republicans with the group overall. But for a very large portion of Hispanic voters, it wasn’t. For these Hispanics, in fact, it seems that the opposite was true: they were uniquely averse to allowing illegal immigration to continue unfettered.
There’s ready logic available to explain this. If someone undertakes the arduous process of legally immigrating to the United States from Mexico or Central America, it stands to reason that they prefer, for whatever reason, the environment of United States to that of their original country. These voters, then, may react with particular alarm to Trump’s warnings that heavy migration threatens our national identity. For example, his wild and untrue statements about undocumented migrants murdering and raping people at high rates may concern immigrant families who associate their country of origin with higher rates of violent crime. In other words, for White people, Trump stirs up xenophobia, a powerful force. But for some Hispanic voters, he stirs up an even more powerful and more chaotic one: intergenerational trauma.
Of course, many “Hispanics” aren’t from Mexico or Central America. Many are Puerto Rican, so they aren’t immigrants at all. On what basis, then, would we expect them to feel particularly compelled to defend those who have immigrated illegally from the South? This is to say nothing of other Hispanic groups in the US such as Cuban-Americans, who broke strongly for Trump in 2020, helping him win Florida with ease. Cubans, of course, have little cultural or geographic connection to activities at the border, so it’s hardly surprising that they haven’t adhered to media expectations of Hispanic voters. All in all, the census designations of “Hispanic” and “Latino” have proven less politically meaningful than the parties seemed to anticipate in the early 2010’s. Trump has been able to exploit that error for tremendous political gain.
Let’s return to the troubling data for Democrats. If they were to lose 10 points among Hispanics nationwide, as Carlson’s aggregator reflects, they would incur a loss of about 2 whole points in Arizona (where Biden won by only 0.3 points in 2020) and Nevada (where Biden won by 2.3 points). Could Harris overcome those blows?
Nevada may seem friendlier, since Harris starts from a better 2020 benchmark. The 2-point loss among Hispanics, if every other demographic held steady, would still allow her to eke out a win in the state. But I’m still pessimistic about it. The problem in Nevada is that only 16% of the electorate is classified as “suburban,” far below the national average of 51%. Instead, most of its electorate falls under the designation of “urban” due to the overwhelming population of Las Vegas compared to that of the rest of the state. Thus, the White, college-educated suburban voters who’ve comprised so much of the Democratic gains over the past decade are, in Nevada, a rare breed. No wonder that in 2020, Nevada was one of only seven states to swing toward Trump compared to 2016. Biden still won there, but the trend looks dicey. A large rightward swing among Hispanics plus a small rightward swing among Blacks—without a compensatory leftward swing among suburban Whites—could spell doom for Harris in the state.
This is only one person’s forecast, though. Surprisingly (to me), Harris has actually polled relatively well in Nevada this cycle. She currently leads by 1.1 points there in the FiveThirtyEight average. Believe who you like. But Nevada is a notoriously difficult state to poll, and, polling aside, I don’t like the look of it.
Arizona poses a more complicated picture. That’s because despite the large and growing Hispanic population there—a likely source of Democratic losses in 2024—it also boasts a healthy and growing suburban population, thanks to the Phoenix metro area, a likely source of Democratic gains. Which shift will dominate the trend in 2024? Two data points may provide encouragement to Harris supporters:
- In the 2022 midterms, Senator Mark Kelly won reelection in Arizona by a comfortable five points, demonstrating impressive strength in the Phoenix area—indicating that leaning on the suburbs may be a winning strategy in modern day Arizona politics, even amidst losses in other subgroups.
- In 2020, Biden improved in Arizona by 3.8 points relative to Clinton in 2016 despite the aforementioned net loss of 16 points among Hispanics nationwide. So there’s already precedent for gains among White suburbans outweighing sharp Hispanic losses in the state.
While these points are compelling, I remain skeptical. Arizona, after all, is the only swing state that actually lies on the southern border, meaning that its voters of all ethnicities may be more captivated by Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric. This may apply especially to this cycle, in which Trump has attempted to brand Harris as personally responsible for much of the problem on the border. Indeed, Arizona has been Harris’s worst swing state in the polling so far: she trails by 1.0 in the FiveThirtyEight average.
To her credit, Harris seems to recognize the obstacles facing her. Last week she visited the border for the first time and delivered a speech that, for a Democrat, was surprisingly forceful on illegal immigration. In particular, she emphatically tied Trump to the failure of a bipartisan immigration bill that he convinced Republicans to reject last year in an apparent attempt to keep the issue alive for his 2024 run. Will this message sway any skeptics? Or is it too little, too late?
Unfortunately, it looks to me like, all things considered, the more likely outcome is the latter.
–Jim Andersen
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