Republicans are slowly succeeding at wooing Hispanic voters, and what is wild about this is that the community has popularly aligned with the Democrats for decades. With this in-depth piece, I figured we should look at how that is becoming possible.
It seems like more and more Hispanic voters feel that Democrats no longer represent the values they stand for, and now they are aligning with Republicans.
The Democratic Party's long history of standing up for working people and underrepresented groups has long attracted Latino voters in the United States.
These early signs of strain in that political alliance as of late, a drop that is mostly scary considering that some Republican ideologies go against what the Hispanic communities stand for.
And it seems like the majority of these new Latino Republican voters claim that their party switch is permanent.
Polls all over the United States are noticing a decline in support from Latino voters - the fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the U.S. electorate since the last midterm elections - who have historically supported Democratic candidates.
A recent poll conducted by the Washington Post and Ipsos found that Democrats enjoy a 27-point lead among voters who self-identify as being of Hispanic origin.
Although this is a sizable lead, it is a significant drop from the nearly 40-point advantage the party held in 2018. And an estimated 34.5 million Hispanic Americans are eligible to vote this year.
More than half of Hispanic Republicans and those who lean Republican agree that the phrase "the Democratic Party works hard to acquire Latinos' votes" fits their viewpoint at least somewhat accurately. This number is estimated to be 56%.
This is occurring despite the fact that almost one-third of Hispanic Democrats and Hispanics who lean Democratic agree that "the Republican Party works hard to acquire Latinos' votes" captures their perspectives at least somewhat accurately.
During the midterm elections in 2018, when Democrats won back control of the United States House of Representatives, they also won the Hispanic vote nationwide by a margin of 40 points.
In 2020, Democrats still won the popular vote, but their margin of victory over Republican candidates across the country shrunk to 27 points from an estimated 33 points in 2016.
This was despite the fact that Trump won the election by an estimated 33 points. So, during the summer of 2016, several polls found that the percentage of Hispanics who identified with either party was statistically the same.
More and more people in the Hispanic community are also willing to run because they feel the Democrats no longer represent their values.
Strategists are of the opinion that immigration is a significant "threshold issue," but they went on to say that the worries of Latinos transcend much beyond the scope of just that subject matter.
They also believe that topics such as economics are rarely discussed among a group that is composed of a significant proportion of individuals from working-class backgrounds.
Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha said about the midterm elections:
It's very important for folks to know Democrats are going to win the Latino vote and Latino voters. But what's happening is we're losing a little support, a little at a time, to Republicans".
Rocha believes that increased attempts made by Republicans to obtain the support of Latino voters are a crucial factor in the development of this trend.
The Latino electorate is the one that is expanding the quickest and is the second-largest in the United States. The Republican Party is working hard to win over this population.
This is occurring at the same time that Democratic strategists are reiterating their vows to increase their share of the Latino vote.
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