Democrats are scrambling.
They know that Joe Biden is in big trouble politically.
And now, one demographic nightmare could make their defeat all but inevitable.
When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he did it without the widespread support of one demographic Democrats had all but taken for granted: Latinos.
After winning Hispanic voters in landslides in 2008, 2012, and 2016, Democrats had all but convinced themselves that Latinos were solid blue voters that would never leave the party.
But everything changed in 2020.
Donald Trump ended up winning more Hispanic votes than any Republican in American history, and in doing so, he erased Democrat margins in places like Miami and the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas.
His gains in Hispanics in both Florida and Texas are what enabled him to win the two states, which gave him over 60 electoral votes.
What’s more, Trump turned the tide in deep blue California, a state which Democrats had improved their vote margin in in virtually every election since 2000.
For the first time in years, California ended up being redder in 2020 than it was in 2016, in large part due to Trump’s gains among Latinos in Los Angeles and the rest of southern California.
Now, Democrats are realizing the mistake they made and are beginning to realize that Hispanics are emerging as a true swing demographic that they can no longer take for granted.
NPR reports, “New data from the 2020 election shows a big swing in one voting group away from the Democratic Party. Latinos made a significant rightward turn, and partisans of both parties are looking hard at why.”
“Everywhere where there were large concentrations of Hispanic voters, there were large swings [to the right] in the 6 to 9% range,” adds NPR.
The result has been that Democrats can no longer assume that states like Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico will remain Democrat-leaning or safe Democrat strongholds, like many in the party were hoping would happen just a few years ago.
In other parts of the country, the shifting of Hispanics to the right has made Florida a Republican-leaning state for the first time in a generation, representing a shift away from its long-held status as the largest swing state in America.
This has improved Republican chances of winning the Electoral College tremendously.
What’s more, Democrat hopes of flipping Texas, long the crown jewel of the far-left, have all but evaporated. So long as Hispanics in south Texas continue to trend Republican, the odds of Texas flipping blue will continue to fall.
The reason why this shift is happening is one that Democrats don’t want to hear either.
“This was a national trend that happened basically everywhere. Andone of the biggest predictors of switching from voting for Clinton in 2016 to voting in Trump were attitudes toward crime, attitudes toward policing,” adds NPR.
If Democrats continue to push for radical liberal policies like they have the last four years, it’s likely that Hispanics will continue to drift away from them.
