Donald Trump’s electoral victory once again caught pollsters by surprise. In the wash-up, a finding surprising to some was almost half of Hispanic Americans voting Republican.
According to NBC News exit polling – admittedly an imperfect read on political views – 46% of Latinos voted for Trump. This included 55% of Latino men.
A working paper released earlier this year by political scientist Marcel Roman sheds some light on this dynamic. The paper found significant negative responses from Hispanic voters to candidates who use the “Latinx” term.
“Latinx” relatively new. It only took off in Google Scholar results from 2016.
Latinx is meant to supersede the gendered terms “Latino” for male and “Latina” for female, and is especially pertinent for groups. Traditionally speaking, the word “Latinos” should be used even for a mostly female group that includes a small number of men.
Latinx was has been used by Kamala Harris and half of the Democratic congress. In a sign of the partisan nature of the term, in 2023 a Republican congresswoman from Florida introduced a bill (that did not pass) to ban Latinx from use in government documents and policies.
Marcel Roman’s study found that among self-identified Hispanics who support the Democrats, 24% say they would be less likely to support a candidate using the term “Latinx” and 20% say they would be more likely to support the candidate, while the remainder say their view would not change. In other words, the shift is -4% for a candidate using “Latinx”, among Hispanic Democrat voters.
Unsurprisingly, among Hispanics who support the Republicans, 43% say they would be less likely to support a candidate who uses Latinx and 6% would be more likely to support the candidate, that is, a -37% support shift. Among independent Hispanic voters, the shift is -16%.
This is of course just one study, but it points to a bigger issue with the coalition of minorities electoral strategy. While US white progressives consider themselves as supporting justice for ethnic and sexual minorities, as a whole their political positions are more liberal than those of US ethnic minority voters. For instance, Hispanic voters are slightly more likely than the average US voter (and much more likely than the average Democrat) to agree with the proposition, “if elected Kamala Harris will let in too many immigrants”. The pattern will likely become even more obvious in future elections if the Democrat candidate is white.
Thumbnail image courtesy of @yaelgonzalez via Unsplash.
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