We have made the case in these last pages that Latinos have the capacity to reshape the American political system and in fact have begun to do so. As a consequence of both their growing numbers and the ability (or inability) of the political parties to accommodate them, Latinos have completely reshaped California politics, begun to have a national impact in Senate elections and the presidential popular vote, and become politically engaged in a widening variety of issues.
Almost without exception, the majority of Latino political attitudes fall on the side of collectivism and mutual responsibility—the belief that government can and should act to improve the lives of citizens. Latinos have not shown themselves to be a monolithic bloc—there are too many differences among them to expect lockstep unity. For instance, though they vote overwhelmingly and increasingly Democratic, more than half of all Latino voters have cast at least one GOP vote in an election. Nevertheless, recent elections have revealed a growing Democratic unity among Latino voters, and recent polls on Latino views of pan-ethnicity highlight a sense of group identity, across nationality groups, that is strong and growing stronger. Not only are Latinos an electoral group, but they are having a systematic impact on the electoral arena.
We are cautious, of course, about oversimplifying the positions of Latinos. Even today, one-quarter of the Latino electorate remains reliably Republican, and there is every reason to expect that should the GOP revise and improve its outreach and messaging to Latinos—and get the issue of immigration reform off the table—the party could easily recover and collect one-third of Latino votes, or maybe more.
Moreover, politics sometimes changes. One hundred years ago, African Americans were understood as a Republican constituency group, which is hardly imaginable today. African Americans shifted in their ideological and partisan preferences over the years, however, as events and new issues arose, and the same could happen with Latinos. Indeed, we already have an example of a Latino electorate moving right—the Latinos of California prior to the passage of Proposition 187.1
On the other hand, it is hard for us to conceive of a set of circumstances that would shift Latinos to the GOP in large numbers anytime soon, and we have three reasons for thinking so. First, the role of race in the GOP coalition is profound and dates back to Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” if not earlier. The GOP collects a hefty share of white working-class votes in the South. Racial diversification of the party might win Republicans some new nonwhite voters, but it could very well cost them votes among poor whites; deprived of race as a reason to vote Republican, this constituency might rethink its political allegiance to a party that has never represented it economically.
Second, the religious engine of evangelical Christianity and Mormonism, which has played a powerful role in the GOP for so long, has proved far less effective at recruiting and retaining Latino voters. Latinos are deeply religious on average and attend church more often than non-Hispanic whites. But for Latinos, as we showed in Chapter 3, religion has little to do with voting, and even hot-button social issues do not appear to sway their political thinking.
Finally, it is difficult to know who would lead such an outreach effort in the Republican Party. George W. Bush, with support from longtime adviser Karl Rove, made Latino outreach one of his priorities, giving speeches in Spanish and publicly embracing comprehensive immigration reform. For his efforts, he received a strong 40% of the Latino vote in 2004. But Bush’s outreach to Latinos and his immigration reform efforts were also repudiated by his party; when GOP legislators, rather than assisting Bush in his efforts, passed legislation declaring undocumented immigrants to be felons, they sent millions of people into the streets and into the voting booths. As the party has gotten more, rather than less, conservative on immigration issues, the question of who will lead the effort to improve the party’s relationship with Latinos remains unanswered.
Political scientists, by and large, are loath to make predictions. The social world and human behavior are filled with way too many variables for them to be comfortable making predictions—and the further off in the future a prediction is, the worse it is apt to be. We cannot say for sure that the GOP will lose races in 2014 because of the growth in Latino voting power. But we would be comfortable betting that Republicans will lose races, in part because that outcome would be consistent with every national election in the last decade. We cannot say that the GOP is on its way to defeat in 2016. The right GOP candidate and the wrong Democratic candidate could combine to sway enough Latino voters and moderate whites to elect a Republican president. But we wouldn’t bet on it. In fact, barring an invasion or a profound economic collapse, both of us have a very difficult time seeing a Democrat lose the race for the White House in 2016.
Demography may not be destiny, but it dramatically constrains the range of the possible. In 2012 the Democratic incumbent president was African American, presided during a period of nearly 8% unemployment, and—as a consequence—managed to poll only 39% of the white non-Hispanic vote. And he still won by more than 5 million votes! Latinos played a role in that victory—as did Asian Americans and most importantly African Americans. A lot would have to change in the thinking of those electorates for the GOP to prevail in a national election anytime soon.
Limited time and space have prevented us from addressing here countless other aspects of Latino life in America. We have not been able to speak authoritatively about all of the social trends that affect Latinos, and apart from illustrating Latino disadvantages in education, we have said little about that area, knowing that there are volumes of good work on Latinos in the educational system. We have not offered a comprehensive overview of Latino opinion on all other issues—sometimes because their opinions were not important to their electoral behavior, and other times because their opinions were not meaningfully distinct from those of other Americans. In liking jobs, hating criminals, and knowing very little about international diplomacy, Latinos are exactly like most other Americans.
In the coming years, Latinos will exert greater electoral and policy influence in states and communities across the country and in national politics as well. They have come to prominence in the American political realm as many before them have done—by making their way down a difficult path and going against the occasionally active resistance of the existing majority. What sets Latinos apart is their rapid rate of growth, which has led them to surpass all previous newcomer populations in size and, by extension, potential for political and social influence. The spasms of racial and xenophobic antagonism toward Latinos can in some ways be better understood if viewed from a perspective that accounts for how rapidly this population has changed socially and demographically.
Latino Decisions has devoted the last seven years to watching these political developments, and all our polling suggests that major political change will follow from the demographic changes we have observed. In California such change is already a reality, and as Latinos across the country continue to show up at the polls in ever greater numbers, the rest of America, we believe, will quickly catch up.