The New Latino Myth
An anti-Trump march on the streets of New York City. Photo by a katz/Shutterstock
Hey, media! Hey, politicians! Here’s your free post-election tip: Don’t exoticize Latinos. Report on them as American voters
Editor’s Note: The trial in the second impeachment of Donald Trump marks a symbolic end to a presidency that began with racist remarks about Mexican immigrants. In political retaliation, Latinos were expected to flood polling stations last fall. They did vote for Joe Biden, but it wasn’t the absolute blowout pundits expected. What does this all mean? A veteran journalist says the November vote shows just how “American” U.S. Latinos have become--a story the media keeps missing.
*A version of this article appeared in Nieman Reports, the online publication of The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
*This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
If a candidate for high office carries a group of voters by more than 30 points, why would you call that a “loss?” When that same candidate flips five states his party lost in the last election on his way to victory, why do reporters work to find the stories of the ways he really “fell short?”
Joe Biden won the Latino vote nationwide by a two-to-one margin, in a result only somewhat different from Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 and Barack Obama’s in 2012. However, from the national news coverage after the 2020 presidential vote, casual observers might conclude that the largest demographic group in the country—Spanish speakers and their descendants—are the new “problem child” for Biden and the Democratic Party.
And they aren’t. Not yet, anyway.
As the House Impeachment Managers present their case to the United States Senate for convicting former President Donald Trump, the ashes of last year’s election are still cooling.
New numbers from the Federal Election Commission put Biden’s popular-vote margin over Trump at just over 7 million. And the final numbers from Quinnipiac University show that Latinos disapproved of Donald Trump as president (2-1), that they now approve of the young Biden presidency (2-1), think the country is on the wrong track (2-1), think the President’s election was legitimate (3-1), and are optimistic about the next four years (more than 2-1).
The impression you might get from all those numbers is different from the profile drawn up in media coverage of the Latino vote in the days after Election Day.
Instead of lazily falling into the “they don’t show up” political storyline about Latinos, the smart money is analyzing results from Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina.
Reporters are trained, through practice and habit of mind, to look for patterns, to detect anomalies, and to highlight exceptions rather than rules. On most days, it works. As I watched the unfolding story of the 2020 election and its weeks-long aftermath, I wondered whether relentless application of that training, added to long-held stereotypes, forced the news business into questionable story lines about the Latino vote.
Numbers speak volumes
President Trump lost the Latino vote just about everywhere in the country, and in many cases by enormous margins. The troubled census will likely count the number of self-identified descendants of the Spanish Empire at close to 60 million people—approaching one out of every five U.S. residents. More than half that number trace their ancestry to Mexico and the parts of the country that were once Mexico. They are by far the largest single national origin group in that 60 million. Mexican-American voters chose Joe Biden by a roughly 74%-23% margin.
What I saw leading up to and after November 3, 2020 were problems I’ve often seen in reporting on the Latino vote. Across the country—from a college freshman in the Bronx to a small business owner in San Antonio to an auto mechanic in East Los Angeles—Latino voters tell pollsters they fret over access to and cost of health care, the quality of K-12 education, the cost of college, and the ability to find a good job at decent pay.
Is immigration an issue? Sure it is, but it’s further down the list.
An iron fence separates the United States and Mexico along a stretch of the Arizona desert. Photo by Chess Ocampo/Shutterstock
Yet too many stories about Latino voters put immigration at the center of their political universe, in ways that fail to recognize or explain that a majority of Latinos, and Latino voters, are native-born American citizens. At the same time, the success or failure of the Biden Administration’s efforts to reverse Trump initiatives and solve long term problems with immigration will be closely watched by Latino voters. Immigration can act as both a strong signifier, and be a less urgent personal matter at the same time.
For broadcasters, there is the inevitable moment of “sound up” from a Spanish-language campaign ad from one side or the other, fetishizing that specific outreach as a sign of a candidate’s commitment to doing better among Latino voters. A minority of Latino voters base their ballot decisions on Spanish-language media, and the more interesting questions about how to reach the huge, English-dominant portion of Latino voters under 30 don’t get asked often enough.
If you set out to particularize, exoticize, make foreign a group of U.S. citizens, the stories you tell will do that, too. Latino voters in Los Angeles voted differently from those in rural Texas. The young voted more heavily Democratic than the old, and women more than men.
You know who else did that? Americans.
When a reporter is in a high school gymnasium in Phoenix, a suburban strip mall in Florida, or a bodega in Brooklyn, being aware of local detail is part of the job. Playing like Margaret Mead observing Samoans is not. Latinos in this country are already accustomed to being treated as permanent foreigners. They shouldn’t have to face it even when doing that most-American of things: voting.
We’ve known for decades that older Americans vote more reliably than younger ones. We also know wealthier Americans vote more often than lower income citizens. Similarly, more educated voters head to the polls at higher rates than people with fewer years of school. It is no surprise therefore, that an enormous group of younger, less wealthy and less educated citizens are still working on turnout. Latinos aren’t shirking their civic duty as much as growing into it.
A landmark Latino vote
The just-completed elections are probably making different sets of political consultants reach for the antacid, or excitedly counting the days to the next primary. Instead of lazily falling into the “they don’t show up” political storyline about Latinos, the smart money is analyzing results from Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina.
Mastering the intricacies and diversity of a large, multiracial, population with roots in two dozen countries is interesting. But as reporters turn their attention to impeachment, cabinet confirmation hearings, and inevitably, the 2022 midterms, it makes more sense to look at Latinos and the pandemic aftermath.
Latinos are heavily urban, disproportionately represented in battered service industries, more likely to number among the sick and the dead due to the coronavirus, and more heavily represented among new graduates entering the labor force. Their political sentiments will be shaped by the trajectory of young families trying to get over in America.
The median age for Latinos in the United States hovers around 30. The average for all U.S. residents is close to 40. If you struggled to become the first member of your family to finish college and find yourself working alongside a cousin with a high school diploma for the same wage, your view of the country and your future in it may significantly influence your vote, or indeed whether you become a voter at all.
Reporters’ hunger for “man bites dog” stories can mislead. If a Republican nominee wins a majority among white voters, and loses among Black and Latino voters, is it a stretch to report that Latinos “denied” the Democrat a victory in, for example, Florida? By imposing their own impression of what was “supposed to” happen—a wider margin for the challenger—voters who delivered a majority of their votes for Joe Biden became puzzling, a subject for countless articles and cable-TV panel chats.
Which headline better informs news consumers: “Latinos offer lukewarm enthusiasm for Biden after Democrat fails to woo voters” (The Guardian), “Confounding Democrats, Trump makes inroads with Latinos” (Associated Press), or “In Florida, reliably Republican voters reliably voted Republican?”
A mobile political message in New Jersey, just before the November, 2020 election. Photo by Julian LeShay/Shutterstock
I think you know the answer.
The second largest group of U.S. Latino voters are Puerto Rican, both island-born and living on the mainland, and descendants of the people who’ve come here in past generations. They voted for Biden by a nearly 3-1 margin. Relatively smaller groups of South and Central American voters also gave a majority of their votes to the Democratic nominee.
One exception? Cuba-born and U.S.-born Cubans, roughly 4% of the nation’s Latino population. They’ve voted Republican for decades. Even in Florida, where Cubans have long constituted a potent, pivotal force in state politics, Biden won the Latino vote, if by a smaller margin than elsewhere in the country.
The myth of Latino ‘underperformance’
In Texas’ Rio Grande Valley counties, Joe Biden won by clear margins over Donald Trump, though by less commanding margins than those posted by Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the state’s giant urban areas, including some of the country’s biggest cities, Latinos overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the Democratic nominee.
Still, Latino “underperformance” in a Texas loss became the metanarrative. That became the story even as tens of thousands of newly registered Latino voters, voting for the first time in a presidential race, strongly supported Democrats and made the campaign in Texas a closer race than it’s been in decades. This points to future races where the Latino vote, it’s complexities and its potential, will merit more attention from both parties.
Is the Rio Grande Valley result a story? Of course it is. Are Florida Cubans and Venezuelans part of an important story to tell about the outcome in that vital electoral prize? No hay duda. The degree to which those voters responded to a conservative message in general, and the threat of “socialism” making America like Cuba or Venezuela in particular, are definitely part of the story.
Both parties will study those results ahead of the next election.
As Election Day 2020 recedes in the rearview mirror, and primary filing deadlines approach for the 2022 midterm vote, the assignment for Democrats becomes clearer: build on strong advantages in 2020 to push for more Latino registration and high “presidential” style” turnout; move on vaccines and economic recovery in ways that read as tangible success to vulnerable Latino workers and families; back up good intention with some achievement in immigration. A steady stream of tearful families united with separated children in custody, Central Americans who aren’t being torn from their families by the loss of Temporary Protected Status, and a newly secure DACA recipient in a cap and gown send potent messages to the wider population and the Latino community.
For Republicans, the “to-do” list is much less clear. Without the immediate memory of receiving aid prominently labeled “President Donald Trump,” without the constant spectacle of the Trump presidency on TV, and the strong support for Trump-era initiatives making immigrants lives harder, a GOP roadmap for mid-term candidates may rely heavily on the 2020 approach.
Will reporters head out into neighborhoods from Connecticut to Chula Vista in California and use the same narrative frames they did in 2020? Coverage, good and bad, is no more or less than the result of choices -- of narrative lenses the news business imposes on a story to make it novel and interesting. A Democratic candidate pulls Arizona into the win column for the first time in decades after massive Latino organizing? Nah. How about we talk instead about the places where Latinos fell short? How about we talk about the things we expected to happen, but didn’t?
Look at the numbers: Latino voters didn’t “deny” Biden a Florida victory. White voters, still more than 60% of the voting population, pulled the state into the Trump column by giving the president a 25-point victory.
Accept that Latino voters are Americans. Cover the splits and tensions as you would those in any group of voters. And the next time you type that hoary old line, “not a monolith,” drop a buck in your newsroom’s cliché jar.
Ray Suarez is co-host of “World Affairs” on KQED-FM and public radio stations nationwide. He’s the author of “Latino Americans: The 500-Year Legacy That Shapes a Nation” (Penguin).