5 Myths About Hispanic Voters

Challenging conventional wisdom on America’s second largest voting bloc.

Oct 24, 2024

With the 2024 presidential election around the corner, everyone and their dog is speculating about the path to victories for each candidate for the presidential contest. Things have gotten interesting with a more diverse electorate that is no longer monolithically white. Recent demographic figures point to whites being less than 70% of the electorate, with Hispanics and Blacks both at 13%, and Asians at 4%

36.2 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote in the 2024 presidential election, marking a 4 million increase since 2020 and an over twofold increase from the 14.3 million Hispanics who were eligible to vote in 2000. With these numbers in mind, Hispanic voters are now the second largest group of eligible voters in the US, ahead of black voters (34.45 million) and Asian voters (15 million). They will be playing a critical role in this year’s presidential elections and future elections to come. States such as Arizona (25%), Florida (22%), Nevada (22%), and Texas (32%) have significant Hispanic voting blocs and will play critical roles in shaping the outcome of the 2024 election on November 5.

As a Hispanic myself, being of Venezuelan origin, I’ve always taken an interest in analyzing how Hispanics move in the US political sphere. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the many nuances of the multitude of Hispanic communities in the US. That being said, I have become annoyed at the way many political analysts, even seasoned types that I generally respect, talk about the Hispanic vote. The fact is that folks across the political spectrum still don’t get Hispanic voters.

It seems that across the political spectrum people’s brains fall out when talking about Hispanic voting trends and political proclivities, so I’m here to clear up several common misconceptions about Hispanics’ political behaviors.

Myth #1: Hispanics Are One Single Voting Bloc

The #1 way I can tell someone is clueless about Hispanics’ political behavior is their assumption that Hispanics are a unified voter constituency. This could not be further from the truth. There are well over 60 million Hispanics residing in the US. Of this population, there are multiple races and nationalities of people that hail from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean islands, and South America. Some Hispanics such as the Tejanos of southern Texas have resided in the US for centuries, well before the founding of the nation. The experience of Tejanos differs greatly from that of Hispanics of Cuban origin in Miami or a Hispanic in Los Angeles.

Given the Cold War background of their arrival to the US, Cubans and their progeny have remained staunchly anti-communist and a reliable vote for the Republican Party. Other Hispanic groups and nationalities tend to vote for the Democratic Party, though that has gradually been changing since Donald Trump entered the political scene.

In sum, for pundits to talk about Hispanics in a cogent manner they must first recognize that Hispanics can come in all stripes — White, Castizo, black, mulatto, Asian, Arab, mestizo, among other racial permutations — and they have their own political idiosyncrasies that should be properly analyzed for better understanding of Hispanic political behavior.

Myth #2: Hispanics Are Faithful Members of the Democratic Party’s Rainbow Coalition

This one may seem counterintuitive, since Hispanics have proven to be a safe Democratic constituency for several decades. During any given election cycle, Democrats have generally enjoyed anywhere between 60% to 70% of the Hispanic vote. Democrats' peak with Hispanic voters came in 1996, when then-President Bill Clinton picked up 72% of the Hispanic vote. Barack Obama came very close in 2012, when he was able to get 71% of the Hispanic vote. Republicans would occasionally make decent gains with Hispanics as seen with George W. Bush’s performance in 2004 (40%) and Donald Trump in 2020 (38%)

Though this dynamic is slightly changing with gradually more Hispanics drifting to the Republican fold in the last few election cycles. In 2020, Biden bested Trump — 61% to 36% — among Hispanic voters. Most Hispanic registered voters (57%) indicated they would pull the lever for Vice President Kamala Harris while 39% signaled their support vote for former President Donald Trump, per a Pew Research Center survey conducted from August 26 until September 2, 2024. Republicans are gradually gaining ground with Hispanic voters, and it looks like this election cycle may further reinforce this trend.

If we’re being brutally honest, Hispanic support for the Democratic Party is a much more cynical, transactional endeavor than some liberal pundits would like to admit. The Civil Rights Revolution and the rainbow coalition rhetoric used by liberal boosters merely masks an uneasy coalition of diverse ethnic groups vying for political power, resources, and attention.

Simply put, Hispanics have voted for Democrats because it’s the party most likely to grant them more benefits as far as affirmative action, minimum wage, and healthcare is concerned. Truth be told, Hispanics aren’t animated by a Civil Rights era zeal to pact with blacks, white liberals, Jews, sexual deviants, and other members of the Democrats’ “coalition of the fringes.”

One needn’t look further at how Hispanics have settled across the US to see that they have major beef with other members of the coalition of the fringes such as blacks. From Los Angeles to Miami, Hispanic immigration has caused major scuffles between Hispanics and Blacks that have resulted in the former displacing the latter.

George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012 was a watershed moment in this factional beef between Hispanics and blacks. Zimmerman, a white Hispanic of Peruvian origin on his mother’s side, being branded as a “white supremacist” who murdered the 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, likely made many white, white-passing, and “white-adjacent” Hispanics reconsider the affiliation with the rainbow coalition. After all, if Hispanics are going to be politically treated as white in juxtaposition to blacks in their occasional inter-ethnic conflicts, they might as well question their allegiance to the negrophilic Democratic Party. Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder charges pressed against him in 2013 but this case opened a new attack vector against Hispanics of white European extraction.

Since the Great Awakening of 2014, this trend has accelerated as liberals pushed a more race essentialist line that frames political conflicts on black vs. white lines. This dynamic has made many a Hispanic left making the uncomfortable decision of siding with an immediate rival such as blacks or making strange bedfellows with whites — the group the corporate media brands as their mortal enemy.

The independent journalist Steven Sailer has observed that when the Democratic Party turns into the “Black Party”, where it is perceived as exclusively pandering to blacks, other non-white minority voters tend to question their otherwise ironclad allegiance to the Democratic Party.

For example, during the Black Lives Matter hysteria in the summer of 2020, Hispanic Democrats broke ranks with their fellow party members by demanding that the US military step in to crush the riots that ensued following George Floyd’s death. According to a 2020 poll by ABC News/Ipsos, 54% of Hispanic Democrat voters supported the military to step in and establish order at the time.

Similarly, a CNN exit poll published right after the 2020 presidential election found a near even split among Hispanic voters with regards to their views of Black Lives Matter. 47% of Hispanic voters held a negative view of BLM, while 49% had a positive view of the organization. Although Democratic Party politics have been marketed as joyful and vibrant, they’re still rife with conflicting interests that manifest themselves along racial lines.

Renowned political demographer Ruy Teixeira, who wrote the acclaimed The Emerging Democratic Majority has also observed Hispanics are against pro-black policies such as defunding the police, “decreasing the size of police forces and the scope of their work and reparations for the descendants of slaves by 2:1 or more” according to Pew data he analyzed in 2021.

Hispanics are politically content when they're able to receive their ethnic carve outs and play a key role in the Mos Eisley Cantina show that is the modern-day Democratic Party. But when they’re forced to concede resources to blacks or see black grievances take precedence over their own, that’s when things get prickly.

Myth 3: Hispanics Are Natural Conservatives

Those who have followed me over the years have witnessed my ideological transformation from generic conservatism/libertarianism to cultural nationalism. I’ve really enjoyed this journey and have no regrets about it. In fact, my experiences within Conservativism Inc. have been rather informative, in demonstrating how intellectually bankrupt and low-IQ that entire movement can be.

One of the main reasons I left the conservative movement and don’t respect it intellectually altogether, is its pathological tendency of engaging in wishful thinking. One form of conventional wisdom that was pervasive in conservative circles was the assumption that Hispanics are “natural conservatives” owing to their Catholic upbringing and family values, therefore they would be natural fits for the Republican Party. Such reasoning has been used to justify all manner of Hispanic outreach programs, which have been cringe-inducing in addition to being demoralizing for the very working-class whites that the Republican Party desperately needs to go to the polls to stay relevant.

Just looking at the data shows that such an assumption is based on faulty premises. Conservatives market the Republican Party as the party of small government. But when one looks at Hispanics’ actual views on issues that conservatives hold in high esteem, conservative assumptions about Hispanics fall apart.

Pew data has found that 71% of Hispanic voters believe the government should take a more proactive role in solving societal problems. 82% of Hispanic Democrats and even 51% of Hispanic Republicans share this view. With respect to the minimum wage, 79% of Hispanic voters indicated that they are in favor of increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. There’s a clear transpartisan consensus among Hispanics to increase the minimum wage, as 88% of Hispanic Democrats and 62% of Hispanic Republicans are in favor of such a move.

As far as gun rights are concerned, Hispanics are not friends of the Second Amendment. 73% of Hispanic voters indicated that it is more important to implement gun control than to safeguard the rights of Americans to own firearms. Hispanics of migrant backgrounds (81%) are more likely than those born stateside (65%) to indicate that it’s more important to pass gun control measures than to protect Second Amendment rights.

Despite all these data points demonstrating Hispanic’s affinity towards big government, why are they drifting towards the Republican Party in recent years?

My contention is that Hispanics are natural populists, with a strong racial streak to their politics. As I detailed in the previous section, there is no love lost between Hispanics and blacks — both in formal and street politics levels. As opposed to voting on ideologically reductionist grounds, increasing numbers of Hispanic voters have become more identitarian in their voting habits. This has naturally propelled them to vote for the GOP, America’s de factor white party. The harder Democrats push for reparations and other pro-black policies, the more it will repel Hispanics and even other non-white groups such as Asians.

Myth 4: Hispanics Are Staunch Religious Conservatives

The common Conservatism Inc. trope that Hispanics are “natural conservatives” because of their Catholic confession is dubious. Pew figures demonstrate that 65% of Latino Protestant voters have plans of pulling the lever for Donald Trump, while Harris enjoys more support from Hispanic Catholics (65%) and religiously unaffiliated Hispanic voters (67%).

Contrary to popular belief, Hispanic religiosity has actually been declining over the years. In 2022 for reference, 43% of Hispanic adults identified as Catholic, a significant decrease from 67% in 2010. Despite this, Hispanics are still twice as likely as the average American adult to identify as Catholic, and considerably less likely to be Protestant. More curiously, the percentage of Hispanics who are religiously unaffiliated (individuals describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”) has ballooned to 30%, a notable increase from 2010 when it stood at 10%.

The secularization of Hispanics is largely driven by younger Hispanics born in the US. 49% of Hispanics in the age cohort of 18 to 29 classify themselves as religiously unaffiliated. By contrast, 20% of Hispanics ages 50 and up identified as religiously unaffiliated.

On the abortion issue, Hispanics are not as conservative as many mainstream pundits think. 57% of Hispanics believe abortion should be legal in the majority of or all cases — a slightly smaller figure than the general American public (62%). Just 40% of Hispanics indicated abortion should be criminalized in the majority or all cases.

The abortion question gets more interesting when analyzing the religious backgrounds of Hispanics. 69% of Hispanic evangelical Protestants said abortion should be illegal in the majority or all cases, whereas 58% of Hispanic Catholics and 73% of Hispanics without religious affiliation indicated abortion should be legal in the majority of or all cases.

When it comes to differences between Hispanic nationalities, things get even more intriguing. 55% of Central Americans and 41% of Mexicans indicated abortion should increase in the majority of or all cases. On the other hand, barely one-fifth of Cubans and South Americans said abortion should be illegal in most or all instances.

All things considered, Hispanics are not a demographic that’s about to wage a Catholic Crusade in the US. Like practically all other groups in the country, Hispanics are embracing secularization across the board.

Myth 5: Immigration is the #1 Issue For Hispanic Voters

While it may seem that I’m excessively dunking on Republicans here, I have to dispel some misguided liberal notions about Hispanic voters as well. Namely, the whole idea that immigration is the primary impetus behind the way Hispanics vote. I vividly remember in the 2016 presidential cycle liberal pundits saying that Democrats would gather black-levels of support among Hispanic voters due to former President Donald Trump's strong immigration restriction stances. I, for one, was not convinced.

For a start, there is a tradition of pro-immigration restriction sentiments among Hispanics. Famed labor activist Cesar Chavez still commands respect among American Hispanics. He became famous for opposing illegal immigrant labor that undermined American farm workers’ labor power. His United Farm Workers Union was able to build a multi-ethnic coalition of workers who opposed the agricultural industry’s use of illegal aliens to break strikes and lower wages. In its efforts, the UFW was able to act as an effective complement to the defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in suppressing illegal immigration.

Even when Trump was running for re-election at the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, 69% of Hispanic voters were in favor of stopping nearly all immigration, per a Washington Post and University of Maryland poll carried out in late April 2020. It’s safe to say that Hispanic views on immigration policy are quite heterodox despite what the corporate media say.

For Hispanics, immigration is simply not the political lighting rod that mass migration boosters make it out to be. 85% of Hispanic voters singled out the economy as the most crucial factor behind their vote in the 2024 presidential election. Healthcare (71%), violent crime (62%), and gun policy (62%) were the following issues that Hispanics hold dearly in the 2024 election cycle. Contrary to conventional wisdom, immigration was not even the most important issue for Hispanics. Just 59% signaled that it’s very important to their vote in the 2024 presidential election.

All told, Hispanic voters will continue to be misunderstood by political actors across the aisle due to popular misconceptions and political operatives’ penchant to project their ideological biases on certain voting blocs. As a Hispanic with a strong desire to preserve the US’s white European character, I feel that it’s my duty to expose the corruption of our current two-party order. In my view, Hispanics, especially those of European or predominantly European extraction, can play a role in revolting against the corrupt DC political class.

The first step in doing so is to recognize that neither the Democrats or Republicans have their best interests in mind.

NEXT: The Populist Takeover of the GOP

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