To no one’s surprise, a majority—63 percent—of Hispanics voted for Joe Biden for president on November 3. Yet the Hispanic vote still has the pundit world in a tizzy. About a third of them decided that the man who spent four years insulting their Spanish-speaking homelands and landsmen was preferable to a diversity-embracing opponent with a fondness for the Latin pop hit “Despacito” and a textbook-perfect intersectional running mate.
In truth, Donald Trump improved his percentage of the Hispanic vote by only four points over his showing against Hillary Clinton 2016, but even that modest gain befuddled most everyone embracing—or resigned to—the “emerging Democratic majority.” Hispanics were supposed to be redrawing the electoral map by turning Florida and Texas blue; instead, Biden carried Miami Dade county by only seven points compared with Clinton’s 30-point win, thereby killing the Dems’ Florida dream. Hispanics in the poor, immigrant border counties of Texas were even more of a surprise. Hillary Clinton’s 60-point margin in Starr County in 2016 vaporized into a mere five-point win for Joe Biden. It was the largest swing to Trump of any county in the United States. Hillary took nearby Zapata County by 33 points in 2016; this year Trump won it by six. Hispanic support for the anti-immigration, border-wall-obsessed president increased in New Mexico, Colorado, and Georgia. Even in true-blue Massachusetts, a surprising number of Latinos gave Trump a thumbs up. As Tim Carney observed in the Washington Examiner, Trump improved his performance by 21 points in Lawrence, a once white, working-class factory and mill town now 80 percent Hispanic and 40 percent foreign-born.
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