In Reply to: Should the QOP have Hispanic panic? posted by mh on September 16, 2026 at 10:12:41
Back in the pre-Trump days, there was a common belief that if Democrats could consistently win around 65% of the Hispanic vote, Republicans couldn't win the presidency.
At around 60%, Democrats were thought to be vulnerable. That is why George W. Bush placed such an emphasis on his relationship with Mexican President Vicente Fox, and why Jeb Bush was viewed as a potentially strong Republican candidate, given that he was fluent in Spanish and married to a Hispanic woman.
That was before Trump reshaped the Republican coalition and brought many infrequent and previously non-voting rural voters into the electorate. In 2024, Pew found that voters who had been eligible to vote in 2020 but did not turn out in 2020 favored Trump by 54% to 42%.
The surprising part of the Hispanic numbers is that Democrats still haven't completely recovered the level of support they had among Hispanic voters during the Obama years.
Obama won about 67% of the Hispanic vote in 2012, compared with about 71% in 2008. Clinton received about 65% in 2016, and Biden received about 61% in 2020. In 2024, Harris received about 51% of the Hispanic vote, according to Pew's validated-voter analysis.