WASHINGTON – California Gov. Gavin Newsom has stepped up his efforts to oust him in Tuesday’s withdrawal election. But the rosy result could overshadow an erosion of support among Latino voters for Democrats that has some in the party worried about the future.
“Donald Trump got a historic number of Latin votes in 2020 and it can be said that it was for this or that, but it’s not like Larry Elder opened the door to these people. There’s something else going on.” said Michael Trujillo, a Los Angeles-based Democratic strategist, referring to the top Republican candidate in the failed retreat attempt.
The former president raided Latin voters in places like South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas last year. But many Democrats analyzed these results with the idiosyncrasies of Latino populations in these areas, Trump’s unique personality, or the wrinkles of holding an election during a pandemic.
But in the first real-world test since the 2020 election, some data from California suggests that the issue may be more widespread, a potentially worrying sign for Democrats before mid-2022, when Latino voters will play a major role. in the battle for the House in places like California.
Democrats have long warned that they support minorities, including black and Hispanic voters, of course, assuming they will support the Liberals without doing enough work to earn their support.
“We’re seeing something happen in the blue state of California, where a certain segment of the Latino population is heading in the wrong direction,” Trujillo said.
California Latino voters sided with Newsom and opposed the 60 to 40 percent withdrawal, according to an NBC News exit poll – a slightly lower margin than Newsom and other Democrats have gained in the past in California, especially between Latino men, and almost identical to The 59 to 41 percent is distributed among whites.
In comparison, black voters broke between 83 and 17 percent in favor of Newsom, while Asian Americans supported the governor from 64 to 36 percent, according to the exit poll.
In its first gubernatorial election three years ago, Newsom won 64 percent of Latino voters, according to NBC News exit polls at the time.
Both whites and Latinos saw a large gender gap, with Latino women most likely to side with Newsom by 19 percentage points and white women most likely to support the governor by 16 percentage points.
However, Dorian Caal, the non-partisan director of civic engagement research at the NALEO Education Fund, is a branch of the National Association of Elected and Latin American Appointed Officers, who warned not to read too much in early polls. output.
“They are notoriously limited to subgroups,” Caal said. “When it is drilled lower and lower, it gets more and more margin of error. There is much more that needs to be unpacked as more and more information is published. ”
Caal noted, however, that generalist political discourse often obscures diversity among Latino voters, with differences by gender, education, and age, among others, reflecting more familiar breakdowns between whites.
Exit polls can be reinforced with real vote data from the state’s most Latin county, Imperial, in the southeast corner of the state along the Mexican border, where more than 80 percent of residents are Latino. .
The withdrawal performed slightly better in the strong Latin imperial county than statewide, with 38.7% of county voters voting to remove Newsom from office, compared to 36.1% statewide , although not all votes have been counted yet.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 won Imperial County by 41 percentage points. President Joe Biden won it by 25 percentage points in 2020. Now, the pro-Newsom anti-withdrawal effort has earned it 22.6 percentage points so far.
“There’s a canary in the coal mine and it’s called Imperial County,” Trujillo said. “This canary has a cough and, as a party, we have to do more than give him a throat pill or a cough suppressant. We have to cure the cause.”
About 4 in 10 Californians are Latino, so even small changes in their voting preferences can be significant.
“We all do such a good job of dissecting the white electorate, and for some reason we can’t do that with Latinos,” said Christian Arana, the vice president of policy for the California-based Foundation for the Latin Community. .
“Because the historical spread has been late, little reversed, and frankly a little lazy, I think a lot of people are just losing sight of the big picture,” he said. “You can’t come to our community and talk to us about immigration.”
Arana noted, for example, that about a quarter of small businesses in California are owned by Latinos. A Latino college graduate working in Los Angeles may vote differently to an older relative in California’s Central Agricultural Valley who listens primarily to Spanish-language radio, for example.
“The big warning is that you can’t give in to disclosure. The broadcast has to happen every day, ”he said. “We are a complex and broad group of people who form the Latin vote and the candidates and political parties that recognize it and also invest in dissemination will probably have the best.”