Latinos might just define who will sit in the Oval Office for the next four years. With more than 32 million eligible voters, Hispanics and Latinos make up the largest racial or ethnic minority in the United States’ electorate — for the first time.
That’s about 13% of all Americans who will cast a vote in the November elections. Latinos could very well shape the electoral outcome in 2020, as they are expected to vote in record numbers this year, with 90% in Texas saying they intend to cast a ballot next month. What does this mean for them and the US?
Historically, Latinos have leaned towards the Democrats. According to the Pew Research Center, 63% of Latino registered voters identified with the Democratic Party in 2019, up from 57% in 1994. On the other hand, 29% identified with the Republican Party last year, a percentage that has remained unchanged since 1994.
This doesn’t mean that the Democrat candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden, should take the Latino vote for granted.
Latino voters in key states
Florida
Latinos are far from being a homogenous group. Americans of Latin American descent range from Jewish Argentinians to Black Colombians and Cubans who left their country following the mid-century revolution. This diversity also applies to the role they play in their adopted country’s political arena.
In Florida, Hispanics are the largest minority group, according to data from the 2019 US Census Bureau. Cuban-Americans make up the largest group of Hispanic origin in the state, and they have historically leaned conservative and sided with Republican candidates.
Florida has the third highest number of members of the Electoral College, with 29 electors, the same number as New York, behind only California, with 55, and Texas, with 38. This gives the southeasternmost US state — and thus Cuban-Americans — political power.
Cubans come in as the third largest population, along with Salvadorans, of Hispanic origin living in the US, according to the Pew Research Center. The vast majority of them, 66%, live in Florida. Comparatively, only 5% of Cuban-American are in California, the state with the second highest concentration of this ethnic group, according to the same Pew Research Center report.
In 2016, 54% of Cubans backed President Donald Trump, making them twice as likely to support the Republican candidate as non-Cuban Latinos.
While there have been bipartisan efforts to dissuade Cuban in Florida from voting to re-elect Trump, they are unlikely to succeed. An NBC News/Marist poll shows Trump leading Biden among Latino voters, 50% to 46%. In fact, recent polls show Biden is trailing behind among Florida’s Latino voters even when compared to his predecessors Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
California and Texas
The two other major electoral states, California and Texas, also have large Latino populations. Unlike Florida, both have Mexico as the country of origin most commonly found within these groups. And, unlike Cuban-Americans, Mexican-Americans lean Democratic.