The uncomfortable question about “Latino” voters

What does “Latino” mean? And is there still such a thing as the “Latino vote”?

At first glance, both questions are simple to answer. Latinos are simply any of the 65 million people of any race living in the United States with cultural or ancestral ties to Latin America (and Spain, if you consider the term “Hispanic”). Overwhelmingly of Mexican descent (about 60 percent), they live primarily in two states, California and Texas, and make up about a fifth of the American population.

The “Latino vote,” meanwhile, could simply be those Latino Americans who vote in elections. More than 30 million of these people living in the US are citizens who can, and more than 16 million turned out in the 2020 election — the Latino electorate. These voters have tended to vote for Democrats in national elections, and, since 2004, have given near super-majorities of support to the Democratic presidential candidate.

For a time, this vote remained pretty uniform in both its makeup and its support for one party. That stability fueled the idea that there was such a thing as a Latino voting bloc, leading parties to have “Latino strategies” aimed at winning these voters over. They could be thought of as Black voters tended to be: reached with appeals to racial and ethnic solidarity, reminders of discrimination and inequality, and in turn expected to behave like Black voters — who, along with LGBTQ voters, have been Democrats’ most loyal cohort. 

By 2024, this assumption has been called into question. To say that Latinos are not a monolith is now a cliche — the basic starting point for conversations about how these Americans vote. But now, is even the term “Latino” itself an oversimplification?  

Many strategists, academics, and activists agree, saying the category of “Latino” is too vague and amorphous to capture its diversity of race, language, national origin, and immigrant experience. And when it comes to politics, it can flatten the political ideology, partisan loyalty, and changing vote preferences of millions of people across 50 states.

That idea is gaining momentum, but it’s not universal. There are those who think the term has value, pointing out that it’s still useful to have a broad and more visible descriptor for these people; its members are stronger together, and despite diversifying political views, still tend to behave in similar patterns. 

The implications are big: For the last 40 years, political organizing, power building, and business interests have relied on there being such a thing as a Hispanic or Latino community to count, to mobilize, and to market to. In short: This quandary matters for anyone hoping to win the votes of tens of millions of people.

The case for specificity — and that “Latino” is too broad

The best political example to stop thinking of Latinos as a bloc or collective is to see what has happened when campaigns have tried to appeal to them as a group. The outreach and persuasion operation that President Joe Biden’s 2020 primary and general election campaigns ran is a prime example. 

In 2020, that was the focal point of criticism of Democrats’ Latino voter outreach. It was too generic, unsophisticated, and premised on outdated thinking about what matters to these voters: promises of immigration reform and humanitarian border policies for a community that was primarily native-born; reminders of Donald Trump’s racism when these voters didn’t necessarily think he was talking about them; and “Hispandering” with flourishes of Spanish and Latin celebrity endorsements when Spanish-language use rates were declining and those celebrities weren’t necessarily relevant.

The most widely referenced example: When Biden campaigned in Florida with the Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi, and bopped along to the star’s hit song “Despacito.” It went viral — for the wrong reasons: seeming like a cringey last-ditch attempt to get in the good graces of a community he hadn’t really been campaigning for.

That campaign continued to be a special target of this criticism for beginning outreach too late in the cycle, for not investing enough resources in persuasion and turnout efforts, for leaning too much on immigrant-friendly appeals in that pitch, and for missing just how damaging Republican attacks describing Democrats as “socialists” actually were. Biden still won a majority of these voters, but his results were a decline from the share of support Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had gotten in previous presidential cycles. 

These approaches still fit within the old model of talking to and about a “Latino vote”: one that assumed it could operate as a voting bloc, and it would remain monolithic. At one point in time, it was. But as rates of college education rise, as incomes grow, as the share of foreign-born Latinos declines, and as they vote differently, perhaps “Latino” should give way for more specific reference points, like “Mexican American,” “Cuban American,” “Southwestern voters,” or “Florida Latinos” — at least for the purposes of electoral politics.

Since 2020, the conventional wisdom has settled on a more tailored, targeted approach — what some Democratic Latino strategists and aligned groups call “culturally competent” campaigning. In 2024, that became the bedrock of Biden and Harris’s early and improved Latino outreach — what New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called a “diaspora strategy.”

“They care about the diasporas and looking at this from a diaspora strategy, as opposed to just an overall, monolithic strategy that we often hear discussed and unfortunately played out in a lot of different areas,” Ocasio-Cortez told Politico in September. “So I think that as time goes on, we’re going to see the results of that more refined approach.”

On the ground, that looked like tailored ads and campaign contact for Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in Pennsylvania and Florida, for Mexican Americans in the Southwest, and for using different surrogates, accents, and vocabulary in different media markets. After all, the thinking goes, what might sound familiar and credible to a first-generation naturalized Mexican American voter in Las Vegas is different from what appeals to the third-generation Puerto Rican voter who did not have to go through the same immigrant experience, even if they both speak Spanish.

Republicans performed their own version of this new identity politics between the 2020 and 2024 cycles — but it looked very different.

Instead of appealing to a broad “Latino” or “Hispanic” vote, they doubled down on specific segments of the electorate in an attempt to chip away at Democratic dominance. They played up the specter of “socialism,” “communism,” and “Marxism” in both Trump’s and other down-ballot candidates’ appeals to Cuban and Venezuelan American voters in Florida. It’s here where one 2020 jingle that was recycled for the 2024 cycle stands out: A Cuban band’s “Latinos for Donald Trump” salsa song that went viral four years ago was used by Trump’s campaign this year to double down on a segment of the Latino electorate they thought was already likely to surge for him at the polls.

They paired this with talk of the threat that illegal immigration posed to Mexican Americans and their safety in border communities in the Southwest in order to reach Trump-friendly working-class voters in Arizona, Nevada, and Texas — a mirror image of the traditional Democratic appeal to working-class, first- or second-generation Latinos.

These varying, hyper-specific approaches all demonstrated two things: Campaigning to “Latinos” was falling out of vogue — the preference now was for direct appeals to subset within the bloc. And the Latino electorate was now large, complex, and varied enough to be examined and treated with the same degree of sophistication as white voters are.

The case that “Latino” still serves a purpose

If Biden’s 2020 run suggested it was a mistake to think of Latinos as a broad, workable category, Trump’s 2024 victory suggests that maybe you can.

Even if the Latino category is too diverse, and doesn’t function as a monolithic voting bloc, reality suggests they still behave as a group. That’s the conclusion of early analysis conducted by the Latino research firm Equis, which found that the rightward shifts of these voters in the 2024 cycle cut across geographical location, population size, and country of origin.

“Broad-based shifts like these challenge the use of provincial theories to explain them,” Equis co-founder Carlos Odio wrote in sharing those results.

The implication? It might make theoretical and intellectual sense to think of and appeal to these voters with specificity and fragmentation. But as a whole, a broader category of people united by similar experiences as a minority in the US, primarily nonwhite, and which continues to assimilate, still exists on the ground.

Those similar experiences, some shared language, and growth across the country do make this cohort of people distinct from non-Hispanic white, Asian, and Black people — and therefore it makes sense to organize, mobilize, and campaign for the votes of these communities. That’s the premise that led to the formation of specific Hispanic- and Latino-focused advocacy groups and political organizations, and which continues to warrant specific data collection, policy work, fundraising, investment, and political outreach from institutions, businesses, politicians, and campaigns.

In practice, across race, age, and gender, this group is still also mostly motivated by a similar set of priorities and concerns. When asked about issues that might affect their vote in 2024, the overwhelming majority of these voters described economic anxiety. Immigration tended to follow — and for similar reasons: They were upset by the status quo of the post-pandemic migrant crisis. Though they may be becoming more of a swing voter group, by most metrics they are still siding with Democrats at higher rates than white voters. And above all, a majority of these people still conceive of themselves as distinctly either “Hispanic” or “Latino.”

In other words, we’re overcomplicating this question. Whether “Latino” is still useful in the political realm reminds me of something the sociologist G. Cristina Mora, who has traced the history of the “Hispanic” and “Latino” labels,” told me back in 2021.

“Sometimes people want to [say] that somehow Latinos are so different, like, ‘Oh my god, they’re too diverse!’ Like, ‘Latinos are not a thing.’ How is white a thing? How is Black a thing? How is Asian a thing? Somehow people think that there’s something really uniquely diverse and special and in many ways we’re the same as others,” she told me then. “We’ve never just had one term that everyone was into, we’ve never had one term that everyone’s happy with.”

For the never-Trump strategist Mike Madrid, the ambiguity is the point. “Latino” as a multiracial category distinct from the binary “white” and “Black” challenges both the nation’s political class and the greater American public to realize just how quickly the US is moving into a primarily multiracial, Latino-driven future. It might not be a label that is useful forever, but it’s useful now for carving out a distinct category of people who deserve attention.

“To talk about us as ‘Mestizo’ [someone of Spanish and indigenous ancestry in Latin America]  is more appropriate maybe than ‘Latino,’ but we are multiracial and there has to be a new language for that that doesn’t necessarily fit in this black and white paradigm,” Madrid told me.

How we should think of “Latino” in the future

For now, the “Latino” label doesn’t face the prospect of sliding out of relevance or usage soon, even if talk about the “Latino vote” seems to be on the decline.

Sure, as this category of voters continues to assimilate, enmesh itself into the fabric of the nation, and change the nation just as we are being changed, Hispanic and Latino identity itself will change. Labels don’t stick around forever. 

And that’s where the challenge of defining “Latino” and “Latino voters” suggests something more uncomfortable too: The idea of Hispanic-ness, Latinidad, is likely to change quickly in the next two decades. Rates of interracial marriage continue to remain high; the role of Spanish continues to decline; US-born Latinos are driving the growth of this part of the population; and ideological sorting within this part of the electorate appears to be increasing. That suggests to political parties, and those seeking power, that they can’t rest easy thinking alignments or realignments will stick around forever. But it also means “Latinoness” stands to lose its distinctiveness in the near future.