The Myth of the Hispanic Republican

and why the GOP won't win the Hispanic vote this election

For the last four years, conservative media and activists have led their voters to believe that Hispanic Americans are on the verge of a mass exodus from the Democrat Party. That belief has, so far, turned out to be nothing more than a myth. In the two elections held over that timespan, the Hispanic exodus never materialized.

In 2020, Joe Biden comfortably won the Hispanic vote in every state. Two years later in the 2022 midterms Democrats again won the Hispanic vote in every major state (with the exception of Florida) by a margin of two to one, which is consistent with how Democrats have performed with Hispanics for the last 50 years. In the 21st century, Democrats average around 65 percent with Hispanics in every presidential election.

Republicans have never carried the Hispanic vote, and 2024 will be no different. Democrats will win the Hispanic vote this November.

The polls are wishful thinking

Over the last few months, virtually every poll has shown Biden and the Democrats losing support among Hispanics. In February, Gallup reported that the Democrat Party’s advantage over Hispanics had dropped to 12 points. A month later, a New York Times poll found an even greater swing: Trump was actually leading with Hispanics 46 to 40. The dip in Democrat support has since sparked a media panic. Could Trump really win the Hispanic vote?

It’s highly unlikely, if not impossible. Trump’s chances of winning the Hispanic vote are only slightly higher than his chances of winning 20 percent of the black vote, which is what the polls currently show. And Trump’s chances of doing that are near zero. But that hasn’t stopped his supporters from claiming that either of these outcomes will occur. The Right has, predictably, been quick to embrace these polls.

Trump supporters would likely argue that his rising support among Hispanics isn’t as farfetched as his rising black support, since Trump increased his support among Hispanics to 35 percent in 2020 (up 7 points from 2016). Even so, Trump could miraculously increase his support among Hispanics by another ten points this November and he’d still lose the Hispanic vote. That scenario would likely also do little to change the ultimate outcome of the election if other demographic groups, specifically white working class voters, vote in similar patterns as the last two elections.

And while it’s true that Hispanic voters trended rightward in some states in both 2020 and 2022, it did little to affect the results of those elections. Democrats took the White House and Senate in 2020, and only narrowly lost the House to Republicans in 2022.

The truth is, despite what the polls or political analysis claim about why Republicans are gaining Hispanic support, a better understanding of who Hispanic voters really are provides a simpler explanation as to why Republicans—at least in the Party’s current form—will never win the Hispanic vote.

Who Hispanics are, and why it’s a meaningless term

What does Hispanic even mean? Or better yet, who are Hispanics? Most people mistakenly believe Hispanic is an ethnicity. The reality is, it’s just a term to describe any person with ties to Spain or Latin America.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Hispanic origin “can be viewed as the heritage, nationality, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person’s parents or ancestors before arriving in the United States.” Past definitions from the Census Bureau define Hispanic to refer to people of “Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin.”

The Census Bureau also correctly notes that people who identify as Hispanic can be of any race. There are white Hispanics, which include Hispanics of Iberian descent (i.e. descendants of conquistadors) and Hispanics of German and Italian descent. There are of course black/African Hispanics (largely descendants of the some four million slaves brought to Latin America) and indigenous Hispanics too (descendants of indigenous tribes like the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas).

Hispanics are also part of every socioeconomic class—there are wealthy and highly educated Hispanics, working class Hispanics, and lower class Hispanics. More on that below.

The only thing Hispanics really share among each other is language and religion. There are some instances of shared international culture between Latin American nations, like food for example. But even food isn’t universally shared across the continent. There are few broadly Hispanic cultural or ethnic traditions that apply to all Hispanics.

Because of these clear and obvious differences among Hispanics, it’s a mistake to group them as an entire voting bloc. Polling outfits seldom ever breakdown Hispanics by nationality, which is a much more helpful predictor as far as elections are concerned. One-size-fits-all approach strategy towards Hispanics should be avoided. Yet that is exactly what the Republican Party has employed when messaging to Hispanic voters about socialism.

Most Hispanic voters didn’t flee socialism

In challenging my assertions about Republican support among Hispanics, I suspect most readers would point to Florida as proof of how Republicans can win the Hispanic vote. In the 2022 midterms, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Marco Rubio won 58 and 55 percent of the Hispanic vote respectively. DeSantis even shockingly won 60 percent of Puerto Rican voters in the state, who have traditionally been a solid Democrat voting bloc.

But Florida’s Hispanics are unlike Hispanics in the rest of the country. The state’s 2022 result is also not indicative of a future national trend, but rather it’s an anomaly confined to Florida alone (if history proves me wrong about this, I will gladly eat crow).

Florida is also the perfect example to disprove a few of the false narratives about Hispanic voters.

In the last few years, you’ve probably heard an ignorant commentator on Fox News explain how Hispanics are destined to support Republicans because they fled socialism and are horrified by the Democrat Party’s embrace of it. They point to immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua as proof. The problem is most Hispanics in the United States are not from these countries, and an overwhelming majority of Hispanics did not come to the United States to flee socialist regimes. Most Hispanics are from Mexico, and that largely explains Hispanic voting patterns.

According to a 2021 Pew Research analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, nearly 60 percent (37.2 million) of the 62.5 million Hispanics living in the U.S. came from Mexico. Where Mexicans are the majority among Hispanics, which is the case in most areas of the country, Democrats have historically and will continue to dominate.

Less than six percent—less than four million—of Hispanics can claim they came from countries with oppressive socialist regimes, like Cuba, Venezuela, or Nicaragua. And that’s assuming that every Hispanic immigrant from those three nations truly came to the U.S. to flee socialism, which is an extremely generous interpretation of the socioeconomic and political realities of those countries and the reasons their citizens flee.

For example, are we really supposed to believe someone coming to the U.S. from Cuba in 2024 is only now fed up with socialism? Or that it took the millions of Venezuelan immigrants Biden has let into the country 20 years of living under socialism to realize it was too oppressive of a system to live in? That idea, which again is so often promoted on Fox News and conservative media, is absurd.

In order to get a clearer understanding of Hispanics and their voting patterns, a distinction should be made between migrants who fled these regimes in the initial years after the socialist takeovers and those who wait decades before deciding to “flee.” Unlike the millions of immigrants Biden has let into the country, Hispanic immigrants in these early refugee waves tended to be wealthy and well-educated. Today most immigrants from these countries, and really Latin America overall, are gente del pueblo—laborers and peasants.

For example, the initial wave of Cuban migrants who fled the Castro regime in the immediate aftermath of his takeover between 1959-1962 became known as the “Golden exile” generation because these Cubans were of a higher socioeconomic class. Jorge Duany wrote the following about these Cubans for the Migration Policy Institute:

The majority were urban, middle-aged, well-educated, light-skinned, and white-collar workers. Most were born in the largest cities, particularly Havana. Many fled for political or religious reasons, fearing persecution by the revolutionary government.

Cubans who fled during the Golden exile, and their direct descendants, are largely responsible for the conservative characterizations about the Cuban vote and Cuban-Americans’ support for the Republican Party. They of course should be viewed differently than the some 400,000 Cubans who have entered the U.S. under Biden.

As time went on, each migratory wave from Cuba became more and more blue-collar, and less about fleeing communism. This later wave now represents most Cuban-born immigrants living in Miami. According to a 2022 survey from Florida International University, two-thirds of the Cuban immigrants living in Miami-Dade County came after 1980, which is also the same year the Cuban government emptied its prisons and psychiatric hospitals to send some 20,000 undesirable citizens to the United States as part of the Mariel boatlift.

The same migratory patterns are true for Venezuela. According to the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration & Integration, the first Venezuelans who fled the country after Hugo Chavez’s takeover in the early 2000s comprised of Venezuelans “with favorable economic conditions and high education levels.” Even the globalist International Monetary Fund concedes that the first wave of Venezuelans “were mostly professionals with high levels of education. The second consisted of middle-class young people with a university degree.”

By the mid-2010s, migration out of Venezuela began to skyrocket. Something had changed, but it wasn’t the regime. The socialists were still in power. The only thing that had changed was that the Venezuelan economy was completely collapsing. In 2014, the country had the highest inflation rate in the world at 69 percent. Seven million Venezuelans have since fled the country. The IMF describes this wave as Venezuelans primarily coming from “low-income households and with lower levels of education,” and, according to Bloomberg, it even includes criminals. The outlet reported in December of last year that Venezuela’s violent death rate was the lowest it had been in two decades “as both criminals and victims” have fled the country.

Hispanics aren’t natural Republicans

Before they thought blabbering on about socialism was an effective strategy, Republican strategists loved claiming that Hispanic voters are “natural Republicans.” The late great Charles Krauthammer once mistakenly wrote that Hispanics “should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example).” Almost none of this is true, especially on the issue of abortion.

According to a CNN 2022 midterm exit poll, 75 percent of Hispanics said abortion should be legal. Abortion was also the top issue for Hispanics. In Texas, 35 percent of Hispanics said abortion was the most important issue. And among Hispanics who answered that way, 90 percent voted for Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who was running against Republican incumbent Greg Abbott.

A Pew poll just before the midterms showed similar results. Pew found nearly 60 percent of Hispanics believe abortion should be legal. The number was nearly identical among the same Catholic Hispanics that Krauthammer believed were so naturally conservative. Even two-thirds of Cubans said abortion should be legal in all cases.

The truth is, on nearly every major political issue, Hispanics lean further left than most Republican voters.

On gun rights for example, Pew found that almost three-quarters of Hispanics believe “it is more important to control gun ownership than to protect the right of Americans to own guns.” Among all U.S. adults, that number was just 52 percent. Even Hispanics who identified as Republican were far less likely to say it’s important to protect the 2nd Amendment compared to non-Hispanic Republicans.

Hispanics are also opposed to free speech. A Cato Institute poll in 2017 found 62 percent of Hispanics believe that “people who don’t respect others” don’t deserve free speech, compared to just 36 percent of white Americans who felt the same. 72 percent of Hispanics also said hate speech is an act of violence, compared to 46 percent of whites.

A 2020 Pew poll found 86 percent of Hispanics favor granting amnesty to illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, otherwise known as DACA. Even among Hispanics who identify as Republican that number was 77 percent. Another Pew poll two years later showed on nearly every immigration policy issue, from border security to deportations, and amnesty, Hispanic Republicans were further left than non-Hispanic Republicans.

Among Hispanics overall, Pew found Hispanics were more likely to support more work permits for asylum seekers than non-Hispanics. Hispanics were also less likely than non-Hispanics to say that increasing deportations and making it harder for asylum seekers to get legal status would make the border crisis better.

On the role of government, Pew recently found that 74 percent of Hispanics support a larger government that provides more services, compared to just 41 percent of white Americans.

Even on the very question of which political party they most associate with, Hispanics consistently say the Democrat Party. A 2022 Pew poll found 60 percent of Hispanic adults said the Democratic Party best represented their interests. A CNN 2022 midterm exit poll showed 41 percent of Hispanics identified as Democrats, compared to just 26 percent who identified as Republican.

So what does that mean for the Republican Party

It’s obviously not a bad thing that some Hispanic populations across the country are trending toward the GOP. Any political party should want more voters, not fewer. But the reporting around these trends is overstating Hispanic support for Republicans. The GOP’s increasing Hispanic support also presents a few issues. In most of the states that will likely determine the outcome of the election (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan) the Hispanic vote isn’t as important as the white working class vote. So will the Republican Party’s courting of Hispanic voters compromise its efforts to regain white working class voters or suburban voters it lost in 2020?

For now, the Trump campaign and the Republican Party should avoid any broad national strategy toward Hispanic voters. Instead, they should view and treat Hispanic voters differently on a state-by-state basis. For example, the Trump campaign shouldn’t view and treat Hispanics in Arizona the same way it would treat Hispanics in Florida.

Republicans should also realize that, regardless of what efforts are spent trying to court Hispanic voters, in most states and congressional districts Democrats will dominate the Hispanic vote. Republicans should identify those areas now, and redirect resources elsewhere.