A 'Realignment' Among Latino Voters
41:11 Share

We all have plans in life, maybe to take a cross-country road trip or simply get through this workout without any back pain. Whether our plans are big, small, spontaneous, or years in the making, good health helps us accomplish them.

At Banner Health, we're here to provide more than health care. Whatever you're planning, wherever you're going, we're here to help you get there. Banner Health. Exhale. Oh, you're trying to go cold open? I would have been snappier. You want me snappier? I can do that. Um... You want me to s*** on exit polls? I can do that. If you had to describe exit polls in a sentence or less, how would you describe exit polls? Polls. But don't we love polls? Banner Health.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and the quest to sort through all of the data that the 2024 election bestowed on us continues. You've probably heard me say at some point on this podcast that the racial or ethnic group that swung the most between 2016 and 2020 was Latino voters, eight points to the right, according to the research firm Catalyst.

It looks like Latino voters may well take that distinction again with another big shift to the right. According to the exit polls, Trump increased his vote share amongst Latinos by 14 points this time around. According to the AP VoteCast, it was eight points.

It'll be a minute before we get post-election research that suggests which is closer to the truth. But either way, it's a big swing. And the geographic election data backs it up. According to the New York Times analysis, the 86 Hispanic-majority counties that they looked at were 13 points more Republican than in 2020.

And the shifts in some of the counties in South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley over the past decade are simply eye-popping. 40-point swings on margin in places like Miami-Dade and Starr counties. So today, we're going to talk about the data that we have so far, why these shifts are happening, and what they could mean for politics going forward. And here with me to do that is friend of the pod, Carlos Odio. He's the co-founder of Equis Research, which focuses on polling and research of the Latino electorate. Welcome to the podcast, Carlos.

Glad to be back. So, Carlos, there are the usual shifts in the electorate from one cycle to the next that ebb and flow. And then there are full on realignments like the post 1960s South or the current diploma divide. From where you stand, are we in realignment territory when it comes to Latino voters? It sure looks and sounds like a realignment. I've been hesitant to use the term realignment.

for a variety of reasons, among them that it felt like some of this could be unique to Trump. That at this point seems like a moot point because we still have another four years of the Trump era. So for all intents and purposes, we can call it a realignment with all the caveats that entails, which include that realignments are not inevitable in their future trajectory, nor irreversible, especially when you're talking about such a dynamic electorate like Latinos who are both swingy and very fast growing.

I mentioned up at the top the complications with the data that we have in this moment. But from the data that you have looked at, what's the clearest picture you can describe of what happened with the Latino electorate in this past election? It's pretty eye-popping. I mean, when you look at

The results that were coming in election night, I understand why people pounced on it as much as it did. We had to spend a few days helping to clarify that, no, you could not blame Latino voters for Trump's win or credit them if you're on the opposite side of that.

simply because a lot of what we saw happening was foreseeable. You know, we saw in our polling, others saw in their pollings that there was going to be a shift among Latinos in the battleground states. That was then baked into campaign strategy. That is a reason why everyone narrowed focus to the blue wall, to Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, where Latino shifts were

were not determinative. You could have actually erased the Latino shift into Pennsylvania and Trump still wins. That said, you have these deep shifts that require understanding and they cut across geography. They cut across urbanicity. They cut across country of origin. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, which is 82% Hispanic, it's mostly Dominican. Trump goes from 25% support in 2020 to 41%.

in 2024. If you go back to 2016, he was at 15%. So that's 26 point improvement in Trump's share of the two-way vote from 2016 to 2024. That said, you had massive shifts in the Rio Grande Valley, as people have discussed, where Trump actually wins the four counties that make up the South Texas Valley.

That is a very Tejano area. It's of Mexican descent along the border. The experience of Dominicans in Lawrence, Massachusetts and of Tejanos in the Rio Grande Valley is not parallel. So as we think about explanations, we can't resort to provincial theories. The reason South Americans shifted in Broward County have to have something in common with the reason Mexican Americans did in Michigan or Wisconsin as well. Well...

I mean, there's a simple explanation, which is that the diploma divide that has manifested itself amongst white voters could be extending to Latino voters as well. And then that's just kind of a blunt theory that could run across all of this. Obviously, there are lots of non-college educated Latino voters who are still casting ballots for Democrats in that case. But what you know, is that a good blunt theory or are there better ones?

Any reflection has to start with Latinos. It has to extend to gender. We have to talk about men. We then have to talk about class and working people. I will say I am always hesitant to look at the diploma divide and concede that education is a meaningful proxy among Latinos in the way that it is among others. The data just doesn't agree on that front. And by the way, here is a point where I'm willing to be persuaded. But because you have an audience that cares about the numbers, I want to be very clear. We love it. We should not...

blunt force apply theories that work in other parts of the electorate to non-white voters. There is something, there's a class and culture divide. No one is denying that. And so much of what happened here is economic in ways that we can unpack. But I would caution everyone

attributing it to any given variable like education. In our pre-election polling, which did show a big shift, education didn't explain the variance in the way that other variables like religion do.

Or even just a straight up ideological sorting, meaning that Latinos who are more conservative, who identify as conservative, but weren't voting for Republicans in the past, have been sorting back into what is their more natural political home as ideology becomes much more salient and Trump polarizes the electorate along ideological lines.

So of the possible explanations that you have mentioned, what do you think is the most persuasive? Like, you know, a result is that conservative leaning Latinos who used to vote for Democrats are now voting for Republicans. But what's the impetus for that? So we have a six point uniform swing nationally, right? Trump improves on his 2020 margins in nine out of 10 counties. So this is broad based win for Trump.

in a way that you cannot bring down to any single demographic. Now, Latino shifts were greater than other shifts, it appears. So we have a foundational shift that we need to explain broadly. And then we have to explain the residual, the difference between everyone else and then Latinos. The broad-based, I don't think is that hard to explain. You had the twin crises of inflation and migration that rocked the world.

I think at this point now, everyone has beat to death the charts showing the penalty that parties have faced who oversaw that post-pandemic period. But I don't, I treat that as a starting point. Different decisions could have led to different outcomes. And so the question is, did the Biden White House rise to the occasion of the inflationary crisis? In reality, the Biden White House spent a lot of time arguing that it wasn't happening. Yeah.

The Biden White House held to an almost philosophical belief that you should not talk about things that are not already popular. And so they didn't talk about the border. They didn't lean into the border. And it allowed an impression that

magnified, amplified, juiced up by the fact that Joe Biden was not a very visible president. His age and vitality gave the impression to many voters that he couldn't, wasn't going to be able to steer us out of this crisis. That is a hard impression to shake. And I think a lot of that was baked in by the midterms. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've made this exact argument on the podcast earlier this week, in fact. So,

So that's the baseline. And I think, you know, some people will quibble with pieces here and there, but I think that's a pretty broadly accepted take at this point. And it's very much backed up by the data. So what's the differential then for Latino voters?

Yeah. And let's be clear. So we're talking about outright defection. We're talking about the fact, and we saw it in our pre-election polling, that pretty consistently in our last poll, I will cite, 9% of Latinos who voted for Joe Biden in 2020, who told us they voted for Joe Biden in 2020, said that they were going to vote for Donald Trump this time. That level of straight up crossover voting was consistent throughout the cycle. At some points it got worse, but it never got all that much better.

Harris was able to recover some voters, but was not able to entirely narrow that divide. So overall, that meant that we expected 4% of all Latinos to shift to the Trump side to get to defection of that sort.

You got to flip a lot of switches. It's like a complicated override sequence. Partisanship is a deep identity. You know, you have a cognitive dissonance in voting against it. Lots of things have to line up. You can't point to one factor. And so you had to have the crisis. You had to have a president you had no trust in. You had to have another alternative to

who you thought had fit into your narrative. And so Trump is a very big aspect of this story, which is people had, especially the people who shifted, had a more positive view of his first time out as president and that they had developed a narrative about him when it came to the economy, shaped in the midst of COVID, that he cared about the economy above absolutely everything else. There is a Latino...

origin story for those who are immigrants or descended from immigrants that is very much about being in this country in order to work hard and support your family such that you are willing to sacrifice absolutely everything else. And a lot of voters who had major qualms about Donald Trump said, I'm going to put those aside because I think economy is the main decider. But here's the big one, Galen. The big one is the social aspect of this.

When you're talking about what allows someone to override their partisanship, it's that you have to see other people doing the same. So the shifts that you saw in 2020, where Donald Trump improves among Latinos, it meant that more people had people they knew in their lives who were supporting Donald Trump. And where previously it was socially unacceptable to support a Republican, all of a sudden a permission structure is created.

It doesn't seem as taboo when people in your life are now far more vocal about it. When frankly, every single headline is blaring that Latinos are moving toward Donald Trump.

We saw this in our own polling. You know, you could disapprove of Joe Biden's job performance. You could actually have a favorable view of Donald Trump. The thing that bumps up our ability to predict whether someone is going to defect toward Donald Trump is whether they report when we ask them that of the people that they interact with regularly, their friends, their family, their coworkers, that either most are supporting Donald Trump or more are supporting Trump than have in the past.

You said that there was one thing that we couldn't overlook when I first asked you, and you said that was gender. And so if you look at the exit polls, you do see that there is a large shift amongst Latino voters, but you see that it varies according to different attributes, which is the case across all different groups. But for Latinos in particular, we see that comparing between 2020 and 2024, Harris dropped off 20 points with 18 to 29 year olds and 16 points with men.

By contrast, older voters only fell by eight points and women fell by nine points. So we see basically a 10 point difference on margin overall there. I think that the answer may be, well, that's the same as the entire electorate. And that's true. But is there anything particular because these are more exacerbated amongst the Latino electorate that you would point to?

Galen, you invite me on and then you just throw exits at me all day long. What have I done to hurt you, Galen, that I have to talk about exit polls?

You can also come for the exit polls if you like. No, no, no. Listen, I will say like, you know, Edison exits had Trump winning Latino men. AP vote cast had Harris winning Latino men. Even within the Edison exits, you had a different story depending on states. Actually, in most of the battlegrounds, it still shows Harris winning a majority of Latino men. That said, in our pre-election polling, we had...

women, Latinas, essentially in line with Biden 2020 levels of support. And we saw men at 50-50, which was a drop from 2020 support. In fact, when Harris joins the race, and I said she recovered a lot of voters who had been lost when Biden was top of ticket, a lot of Latinos who had moved off of Democrats, most of what she recovered was women. And what was left behind was very male.

We saw this in focus groups with undecided men and swing men, that there was simply a credibility gap. You would put Harris economic proposals in front of them and they'd say, yes, those all sound very good. We saw this in our polling. Even Latinos who trusted Trump more on the economy showed high support for any of these proposals in isolation. But they just didn't believe in these focus groups that Harris was going to be able to execute any of it. They had lost faith in Democrats' ability to deliver.

And then you have to talk about the reality that among especially the young Latino men, a lot just liked Trump. We can make this about policy and we can make this about these very wonky topics all day long. And yet there was a kind of younger Latino male who simply liked him more. They liked his vibe. They liked the persona. They felt like it was more aligned with their own. And that was a harder thing to overcome in this election for Democrats.

Is this of a piece with other trends that we see in the American electorate of running against American institutions, given that trust in institutions is so low, is a popular path or a feasible path to the presidency? Is it just that he is kind of can be funny at moments? Is it that he's masculine? Is it?

You know, we could bring the diploma divide back into this, although I think you're you're pretty down on that. You know, if from a Republican perspective, you only got Trump for one more term and we've already seen that down ballot Republicans face some difficulties, even when Trump is at the top of the ticket. Like, how do you try to shore up this support? Like, if you're actually trying to figure out what wins it for you in this situation, what is it? Listen, the hot take factories are amazing.

are producing takes at a very high rate right now. So I don't know that I have to add many more to them. I will. I just want to underline a point that you were kind of that you were making there, which is Republicans cannot assume that the whole of Trump's gains are going to apply to them automatically and forever. When you look at

Republicans underperformed Trump. And it seems like they underperformed Trump more in the most densely Latino areas. That's very evident. I mean, Nevada and Arizona was like they were running five to seven points behind Trump. That's right. If you look at Maricopa County in Arizona, you look at majority Hispanic precincts. Trump was at 32 percent. Lake was at 26 percent. So you had a six point gap.

There that's very meaningful. You know, I mentioned South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley. So Trump wins the Rio Grande Valley counties. So does Colin Allred running for Senate as a Democrat. You can see it when you look at House Republicans as well underperforming as kind of across the board, with the exception of Florida Republicans underperformed. So there is something unique to Trump. We saw it also in twenty twenty two.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you what it is. There is a lot we can unpack there. The man has been a celebrity for 30, 40 years. He has a persona as a businessman, as someone who shakes things up.

That I don't know how a John Thune or other mainstream Republican figures can claim that mantle when he has, it is very central to his entire persona and is part of the snapshot that even very low information voters have had of him since the very beginning.

I want to read an excerpt for you from Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini's book, Party of the People, which makes the case that a multiracial working class coalition is on the ascent within the Republican Party. And I just want your reaction. So this is on Ruffini.

the topic of the economy broadly, but maybe Trump in particular. He writes, with ingrained fears of financial collapse, people gravitate towards political leaders who will take strong, decisive action to keep them safe. The concept of the honest public servant, the goody-two-shoes grad from the Ivy League or Wellesley, reforming the system from within is almost completely foreign to Hispanic voters. This kind of candidate, one who might send the hearts of wonky fans of the West Wing racing, scans as weak,

to Hispanic voters who judge them as unable to stand up to the bad people cheating them. Trump's 2020 Spanish language ads got right to the point. Biden es debil. Biden is weak. Whatever Trump was, he did not come across as weak. His tough guy persona, an upgrade from generations of country club Republicans. I've got his book right behind me. Rufini, I read your book. And it makes a lot of great points. I would say, I think there's a danger in singling out

Latinos in terms of these strongman characteristics being uniquely attractive to Latinos somehow. The thing that's true of Trump, that was also true of Bernie, because I think these days we've talked a lot about some of the similarities on the extremes, on the kinds of candidates that Joe Rogan endorses of Bernie and Trump, is that whatever else you might say, they're

personas break through to the kinds of voters who don't pay close attention to politics. The Democratic side did some focus groups in 2016, and they did these exercises where they put up photos of different politicians. And so before saying who they were, before introducing any biography, just asking people, what's your reaction when you see a photo of this person? So, you know, as an example, you put up a photo of Ted Cruz and people would go, oh, gross, right? But then you'd put up Donald Trump and tellingly people's first reaction was to laugh.

And then the next thing they would say is, well, you know, he's the apprentice. He's a business guy and he's an outsider. He's going to shake things up.

And so part of the appeal simply is that his core characteristics break through in a way that it does it for a more technocratic politician who just comes across as another politician. You know, what you're describing as being unappealing is essentially a description of what the Obama years were, right? Were like a very technocratic approach to politics. It's like, trust us, we've got this. We've got smart people who are implementing these nudge strategies who seem to know better than you do.

without plugging into sort of the populist element of it, something that Obama had done to great effect in the 2012 election,

I think is not necessarily the legacy of him on the governance side of things. So there is something to this, but I don't want to, I want us to be careful not to add some sort of ethnic essentialism to the mix. When at the end of the day, like I said, I think the value that is most shared between Latino voters and Donald Trump is this prioritization of economic values, is a sense that Trump is

seems to understand what I am going through, seems to fight on the side of people like me, and seems to be the kind of guy who delivers, who's going to cut through red tape and is going to get done. And while I think Democrats care more about me, I have doubts that they are going to be able to deliver in the same way.

Today's podcast is brought to you by SelectQuote. In an uncertain world, life insurance can provide just a little bit of certainty. SelectQuote is one of America's leading insurance brokers with nearly 40 years of experience helping over 2 million customers find over $7 billion in coverage since 1985.

Other life insurance brokers offer impersonal, one-size-fits-all policies that may cost you more and cover you less, while select quotes licensed insurance agents work for you to tailor a life insurance policy for your individual needs in as little as 15 minutes.

And have you ever worried about getting coverage with a pre-existing health condition? SelectQuote partners with carriers that provide policies for a variety of health conditions. Even if you don't have any major health issues, they work with carriers that can get you same-day coverage with no medical exam required. Head to SelectQuote.com and a licensed insurance agent will call you right away with the right policy for your life and your budget. SelectQuote. They shop, you buy.

you save. Get the right life insurance for you for less at selectquote.com slash 538. Go to selectquote.com slash 538 today to get started. That's selectquote.com slash 538.

Today's podcast is brought to you by GiveWell. You're a details person. You want to understand how things really work. So when you're giving to charity, you should look at GiveWell, an independent resource for rigorous, transparent research about great giving opportunities whose website will leave even the most detail-oriented reader stunned.

Busy. GiveWell has now spent over 17 years researching charitable organizations and only directs funding to a few of the highest impact opportunities they've found. Over 100,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than 2 billion dollars.

Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 200,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more. GiveWell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high-impact giving. You can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free, and you can make tax-deductible donations to their recommended funds or charities, and GiveWell doesn't take a cut.

Go to GiveWell.org to find out more or make a donation. Select podcast and enter 538 politics at checkout to make sure they know you heard about them from us. Again, that's GiveWell.org to donate or find out more. Let's talk about immigration. We've talked plenty on this show about how Democrats lost Americans' trust on the issue. And I imagine that Latino voters are part of that broader electorate trend.

Although if I'm wrong there, you know, shout it out. I'm curious, though, what happens next? Trump appears to be gearing up to make good on his promise of mass deportation. His, you know, early picks for his administration have said they'll focus on deporting criminals and the like.

We saw sort of record levels of support for immigration during his first term as part of a result of thermostatic public opinion. Trump is unpopular, so his positions become unpopular. And Democrats were eager to sort of just reject him and his ideas broadly. But we are in a different situation now where we have had four years of a migrant crisis. And so how do you see this issue evolving in the second Trump term?

After the 2022 midterms, when we were looking back at the results, you know, Republicans didn't make additional gains over Trump's support in 2020. But we had cautioned the movement we were seeing was among the people who didn't vote in the midterms. And that one of the real wild cards was that immigration wasn't was no longer playing the role it once had. You know, when we talk about polarization in this country, you know,

Immigration played a real role for many Latino voters in signaling which party was more welcoming. What we were seeing in 2022 was that some of Biden's worst approval numbers were on immigration. Republicans had taken over ownership of the issue, essentially, and had dropped in salience. Voters were no longer deciding their vote based on immigration.

The border debate gave them even more of an advantage where all of a sudden we weren't even talking about the fate of long established immigrants. We were just talking about what to do about the border and it became a law and order concern. So for the first time that I can remember, immigration helped Republicans among Latinos. That's a new dynamic. That said, if you look at the polling on deportation and we'll just talk about Latinos for a second.

When people were asked about deportation in the context of this election, their understanding of what deportation was, was that Donald Trump was going to clean up the border, that they saw that there was a problem of migrants in the cities and that he was going to address that so that he was going to deport people who had more recently crossed the border and criminals. In fact, J.D. Vance at the VP debate when asked about this said, we're going to round up the criminals and throw them out.

Now, that's not actually their deportation plan, right? Their deportation is to deport all undocumented immigrants in this country. But voters' understanding was that they were just going to stop the immediate surge. And what we hear from Latinos all the time is there's sympathy for the plight of immigrants coming now.

But there was essentially a sense of fairness. You know, you have Latinos with family who are undocumented saying, my mother's undocumented, my spouse is undocumented, my cousin's undocumented. And I'm being told on social media that people crossing the border today are getting handed papers. They're getting handed legal status, which wasn't true, but that was the rumor that people were getting handed legal status and a thousand bucks. And they're like, well, what about my family, right? Who've been waiting in line a long time. That's a matter of fairness. That's not a matter of xenophobia, right?

If all of a sudden, as we expect, this now becomes a question of deporting the exact kind of family members that I just described...

I think we're going to have a very different conversation about it. And the polling substantiates that, you know, 45% in the New York Times Siena poll of Hispanics said that they supported mass deportation. But when asked, do you think we should give a pathway citizenship to all undocumented immigrants? Only 29% opposed, right? So there's so much that it is sensitive to this phrasing. In the NBC Telemundo poll, 39% supported mass deportation. But when you asked,

should we give a pathway to citizenship to the undocumented spouse of American citizens? Only 8% opposed. When you asked a pathway to citizenship for dreamers, people brought here as children, only 12% opposed. So if we go back to the kind of Bush era tactics of workplace raids, as the Trump folks have already signaled, of rounding people up at schools as they're dropping off their kids, I think you'll see a backlash closer to what we saw around family separation in the Trump term.

Do you think that for Democrats part, their Biden era approach to migration is over? Because it's interesting, you know, we're seeing blue state governors like Gavin Newsom or J.B. Pritzker or more Healy in Massachusetts say, you know, my state is a safe haven. Like if you're going to come for, you know, immigrants who are in the country illegally, you're going to have to come through me.

Other folks in New York, for example, seem to be a little bit less playing the part of the hashtag resistance that we're familiar with from 2017. And it's unclear to me which way this goes. Like, do Democrats say we lost this election in part because we were too dovish in the face of a migration crisis and we need to be more serious and more clear about securing the border?

Or is it thermostatic public opinion rules of the day? And as soon as Trump starts doing unpopular things, Democrats go back to abolish ICE and decriminalize crossing the border.

The issue wasn't that the Biden White House was dovish on the border. It was that they were unengaged from the border. So they weren't talking about the border, didn't want to didn't want to deal with the issue whatsoever. Well, I guess dovish in the sense that they did, you know, and remain in Mexico, oversaw the end of Title 42 and also didn't implement any executive actions to try to stem the flow until his last year in office.

Well, it was actually the worst of both worlds, right? They weren't taking action on some fronts. They were taking very aggressive action. Other fronts, you remember the border patrol on the horseback riding a Haitian migrant across the border? They were getting the most of both worlds because the sense was, well, they don't have this under control one way or the other. It's unclear what their vision is for the border at all because they don't seem to want to talk about it.

The way for Democrats to talk about immigration is as it was before, which is as both and. That is what Americans want. They want both and. The problem is when you only talk about one side of it. Democrats are never going to win just on a border conversation. They're just not. It's a law and order consideration. What you're saying is that Americans will always trust Republicans more on securing the border. Yes. Yes. I mean, the best you can do is stop some of the bleeding, and that's important to do. But as Democrats, you can't be seen as out to lunch on this. You can't be seen as out of touch.

All Americans, including Latinos, want order at the border. And so you have to stand for order at the border and be able to defend a humane and orderly process when it comes to people who've been here a long time. I do think there will be a thermostatic change in public opinion as they react to whatever Trump does. I think on the part of Democrats, that doesn't mean altogether just adopting the Trump line and conceding on this.

That would be a terrible mistake. But it also isn't to go too far in the direction of open borders, which I don't think anybody is arguing for at this point. There is a reasonable ground to be had. And I think for Democrats generally on a host of issues, immigration being one of them is a matter of not falling for Trump's traps, but being able being being ready to pounce when he overreaches.

so that they are owning the conversation about who represents order and stability and common sense. Let's talk about polling for a moment before I let you go. You guys did pretty well at Equis in terms of capturing the amount of support that Harris would ultimately get, at least what we know based on exit polls of the Latino vote. I think your final polling was something like she would get 55% of the vote. But

A lot of polls seem to underestimate how much

Trump would ultimately get, which suggests to me one of two things. Looking at your polls, it could be that late deciders, for example, undecided voters, low propensity voters ended up shifting things towards Trump. And I'm talking about the Latino electorate here in particular. But then there's other polls. I'm thinking about Unidos, for example, that just really got it wrong and showed Latino voters supporting Harris, you know, like 65 percent or something like that.

So are there particular challenges in capturing the opinion of the Latino electorate that pollsters can learn from from this cycle? Yeah. And by the way, I'm happy to take all the credit for our polling. And yet at the same time say that there were things that were surprising to us. I think we were on the more conservative side. I think we were showing Trump support higher. We were showing the Biden defection at levels that not necessarily others weren't.

And yet, I think we missed some of the magnitude. I mean, Florida, nothing in Florida surprised me. Nothing in Texas surprised me. The levels in the battleground, we'll see where they end up at the end of the day when we get Pew and Catalyst estimates. I think they were probably a little bit more of a shift than we saw. You know, first of all, we are one of the last true believers in live phones. So,

I think that phones are a big dimension of getting Latino vote right. Online is a real challenge. If you look at any of the online providers and the panels for polling, they have a real hard time capturing people who speak Spanish. They have a real problem with getting a lot of fake Latinos, people who say they're Latino but are not. On the phones, you can do a better job of reaching foreign-born Latinos, of reaching non-college, especially high school and less Latinos.

And I think it's what the benchmarks are. You know, we did wait to vote recall. So we waited to how people said that they voted in 2020. I know that there was a lot of derision toward that approach. We're going to get to that. We're going to get to that in one of these episodes. Bring me back on because I actually thought it was it was a meaningful reason that we showed numbers closer to the end reality.

is that we were waiting on it. Now, it's very challenging to wait on pass vote when it comes to a subgroup because you don't have hard election results to point to. So you're having to wait to what are still essentially estimates. You know, we wait to catalyst estimates. But I defend that decision because I think that was part of the mix. Part of it is also making sure that you have

enough low propensity Latinos. You know, we'll see when it comes in, but we've been saying at least 30% of Latinos who voted in 2024 will not have voted in 2020. That's just a huge element of volatility. And Trump had this strength among the irregular voters, the people who have been registered in the past but didn't vote in 2020.

And I'm really intrigued to see to what extent they showed up because they're not the kind of voters who normally do. But Trump clearly had some kind of boost among the kind of voter who didn't show up in 2020. And so getting that mix right in the polls is a real challenge. You know, this is art as much as science. You know, I tweeted recently, I don't know how anybody who polls, how anybody who's had to field and wait polls comes to treat any polling numbers as sacred.

Because you understand all the decisions that go into whatever number you're putting out into that world. Right. If you put out your raw data, you're just showing something that is basically nonsensical. Yes. All polling results this day and age are modeled. Response rates are so low.

that you are taking data and you are making decisions that are essentially building a model. Even when, in our case, we stick to polling registered voters, we never added a likely voter screen, in part because we didn't think that there was a reasonable way to do it when it came to Latino voters, given what we saw in 2020.

Lastly, it looks like this may be the first election in which Latinos made up the largest minority group in the electorate. You know,

Latinos have for a while been the largest minority group in America, period. Almost 20 percent of Americans are Latino. But it looks like they may have made up up to 12, 13 percent of the electorate in this case, which would be a general high. How should the parties be thinking about the growth of the Latino electorate over the coming decade? And also, what does it mean for Latino

Latinos themselves in America that they have increasing political power and are increasingly swingy. So, you know, if the theory is the sort of squeaky wheel gets the grease, Latinos have the opportunity for both parties to be the squeaky wheel in some sense. The two numbers I point to often, first of all, if you look at 2020, Latinos then also grew their share of the electorate more than any other racial or ethnic group.

at the same time that they turned out at a lower rate than anybody else. Only 50% of eligible Latinos voted in the 2020 election. For Black API voters, it was 62, 63%. For white voters, it was like 70%. Also, of registered Latinos today, less than 30% voted in the 2008 election, the first Obama election. Even though the Obama elections had established many of our frameworks for understanding Levitino voters today,

And as I mentioned, at least 30% of Latinos who voted in this election will not have voted in the last one. What all that adds up to is a lot of uncertainty into the future. Nobody can take any of this for granted. This is a high degree of dynamism, both in terms of swing and in terms of who's actually showing up. It's not the same people coming back every single election. You know, Latino power has often been talked about in the future tense. Well, someday Latinos will wake up the sleeping giant

awful sleeping giant stereotype of one day the sleeping giant will awaken, that Latinos will reach some threshold of turnout that will make them major political players, make us major political players. The reality is that Latino power exists in the present tense. You're seeing it shape election results today. And so I think it is incumbent on all of us to stop thinking about it in some future sense and understand that Latino voters are here and they are swing voters, but they're not just swing voters. It's more complicated than that.

We cannot use the old frameworks that we have for understanding other parts of the electorate to understand this part of the electorate that is both about persuasion and that is, at the end of the day, also about turnout and mobilization.

And new generations. You mean they're not all over the age of 65 and sitting in a diner in New Hampshire somewhere? What will the political reporting class do? I mean, we're going to have to really, I don't know, go to Miami-Dade instead of New Hampshire in the middle of February? That sounds great to me. Yeah, just a thought. Yeah, I mean, you saw more people ending up in Nevada and in Arizona for sure, or showing up in Allentown or Redding, Pennsylvania for the first time.

I'm surprised that people surprise when it comes to Latino voters in 2024. I think anyone who was paying close attention to this election knew there were going to be big results. Some of the shifts were larger than people expected, but the idea that Latinos would play a central role, that you'd see big movement, shouldn't have surprised anybody. So part of this is that I hope going forward, we don't have to wait until 2020

November of 2028 for people to catch on to the Latino story. There's lots of great reporting from people who've been embedded in these communities, and I hope we can have people paying attention to those in cycle and not just after cycle. Well, that's also part of the reason we're going to keep on talking to you, Carlos. But thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Tretavian. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.

But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion.

And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads. Go to LibsynAds.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com today.