There’s a column by Ruy Teixeira in today’s WaPo that has a scary title: “The evidence mounts: Hispanic voters are drifting toward the GOP.” (Gift link here.) Teixeira was a controversial hire for The Post. The paper foolishly (in my opinion) dumped Radley Balko, who does original investigative work that challenges assumptions (gift link here), and hired “think piece” people like Teixeira along with National Review benchwarmers Jim Geraghty and Ramesh Ponnuru earlier this year. Bad move, IMO.
But I digress. If you care to, you can read Teixeira’s column and make up your own mind about it. My opinion is that while the Hispanic electorate’s right turn in Florida has been a disaster for the state, we can’t necessarily draw wider lessons from the experience here. Florida is still quirky in the sense that it’s been a serial outlier of Team Red success lately.
Also, maybe it’s as pointless to analyze the Hispanic vote for clues to party fortunes as it is to evaluate votes by gender, e.g., women’s voting patterns, and for the same reason: the groups aren’t monoliths. There are baseline factors that political analysts need to know. But it’s not all that helpful to harp on metrics or subset statistics drawn from the behavior of a gigantic group of human beings as if it’s super meaningful. Too many other factors come into play, e.g., region, religion, class, education, marital status, etc.
If you chart Latino votes in presidential elections over time, support for Dems and Repubs fluctuates. Analysts in Florida are understandably trying to get a handle on it, and there was a piece about that in yesterday’s Tampa Bay Times: “Florida’s Latino evangelicals back DeSantis amid fear of new law.”
The law in question is a crackdown on undocumented workers which requires, among other things, emergency room patients to disclose their immigration status. But this paragraph from an evangelical group spokesperson attempting to explain evangelical support for DeSantis stopped me cold:
“We want a country that provides freedom and opportunity for everyone. We want leaders who will inspire the best in us, not pander to our fears and prejudices.”
Having been raised among evangelical Christians, I think that person has it exactly ass-backwards — there’s nothing the evangelicals I know enjoy more than having their fears and prejudices stoked, which is why they watch Fox News and support politicians like DeSantis and Trump.
I don’t know if that’s true of Latino evangelicals. Maybe a message from Democrats emphasizing personal freedom and minding your own damn businesses might resonate with them. I think it would definitely resonate outside evangelical circles.
Open thread.