The election: Why so many Hispanics backed Trump

In this issue of The Week. If you have trouble viewing this email, [read the online version]( . NEWS In this issue of The Week --------------------------------------------------------------- Dear newsletter reader, We thought you'd appreciate this special preview from the latest issue of The Week magazine, where you'll find everything you need to know about the most important stories in news, business, technology, and culture. Today's preview comes from the Controversy of the week section. If you like what you read you can [try 6 Risk-Free issues of The Week](. The election: Why so many Hispanics backed Trump [The Week cover]( We may not fully understand for weeks why the pollsters once again bungled a presidential election, but one point is already clear, said Sabrina Rodriguez at Politico: They badly underestimated Donald Trump's support among Hispanics. On election night, returns from Florida's heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County showed Joe Biden leading Trump by only 7.3 percent — a shocking drop-off from the 29.4 percent by which Hillary Clinton "blew Trump away" in 2016. Democrats tried blaming the shift on Miami's unique population of Cuban and Venezuelan exiles, whom Trump had targeted with "four years of nonstop outreach" and dire warnings that Biden would turn the U.S. into a socialist dystopia like the ones they'd fled. But as more numbers rolled in, it became clear that Miami-Dade was not unique, said Tiana Lowe at Washington Examiner. Biden underperformed Clinton's share of the Hispanic vote not only in Florida but also in Texas, Georgia, and Ohio. Trump, exit polls suggested, won about 36 percent of the national Hispanic vote. For years, the conventional wisdom has held that the growing Hispanic population would eventually doom Republicans to permanent minority status. But as of this dramatic week, "racial demographics are no longer destiny." Democrats made a condescending miscalculation, said Christian Paz at The Atlantic. They figured that after four years of Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric, Hispanics would troop en masse to the polls to vote him out. Some of them surely did — Biden's 30-point Hispanic advantage over Trump in Arizona helped flip that state blue for the first time since 1996. But many Hispanics who've been in the U.S. for years or even generations simply don't "identify with the plight of Latin American immigrants today." They see themselves as "American first" — with many rejecting the woke label "Latinx" and even "Latino" — and they believed Trump's warnings that "unregulated immigration could have a negative effect on their own well-being." Hispanics "tend to be family-oriented, religious, hardworking, and often run small businesses," said Tim Stanley at The Telegraph (U.K.). That made them "a natural fit for Trump's populist coalition." About 30 percent of Hispanics have reliably voted Republican for decades, said Jeet Heer at The Nation. Trump did a good job of turning them out, but the real story here is Biden's failure to motivate his own, larger Hispanic base. Progressive activists have been warning that Biden wasn't spending the money, or hiring the staff, needed to get Latino Democrats to the polls. His "tepid centrist" message may have helped woo a few "erstwhile Republicans," but Hispanics' strong preference for Bernie Sanders during the primaries was a compelling clue that Biden needed a robust dose of "economic populism." Don't oversimplify these results, said Ruben Navarrette Jr. at The Daily Beast. Biden won eight of the 10 most Hispanic states in the nation, and did well with Mexican-Americans. But Hispanics "were treated as an afterthought by Democrats," who focused far more on wooing African-Americans. The lesson is that Latino voters are "more complicated than most people thought" — and can decide elections. In some states, the Latino vote helped Trump; in others, it helped Biden, said Jorge Galindo at Spain's El País. This should disprove the long-standing claim that Hispanics resist "cultural assimilation." The 2020 election has shown that Hispanics can be just as polarized as the rest of the divided nation. [Try 6 Risk-Free issues of The Week]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?](    [unsubscribe from this list](    [update subscription preferences]( The Week Publications, Inc · 155 E 44th St Fl 22 · New York, NY 10017-4100 · USA