Among the questions that stumped strategists, journalists, and pundits in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections — one in which Democrats surprisingly overperformed — was one big mystery: What happened to the much-hyped “red wave” of Latino Republican voters that was supposed to realign American politics?
In the wake of Donald Trump’s success with Latino voters in 2020, analysts expected a continuation of the same in 2022. But early clues suggested a more complicated picture. Republicans won Latino voters for the first time in 15 years in Florida; close races in the Southwest ended up tipping toward Democrats; and most of Texas’s majority Mexican American border districts did not flip.
Half a year later, we have even more answers — and they confirm something that some establishment Democrats and many party operatives need to wrestle with: Republicans did make gains in 2020 with Latino voters, those gains did stick in 2022, and they could still grow in 2024.
In other words, Democrats did better than expected in 2022 despite signs that their Latino support could continue to erode — signs they can’t afford to ignore heading into an election year.
Last week, Equis, a progressive research organization focused on understanding Latino voting trends, released a 130-page midterm postmortem analyzing the “Trump-era shift” of Latinos to the right in battleground states like Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
What they found: Republicans held on to the gains they made since 2016 (the recent low point of GOP Latino support) but did not exceed their 2020 high point (aside from Florida, which stands out as the national exception in all of this analysis). Democrats, meanwhile, didn’t do worse than they did in 2020 (and managed to improve in places like Arizona and Pennsylvania).
It’s a nuanced portrait but one in which Democrats may have more to be worried about. The hangover of the 2020 rise in Latino support for…
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