Republicans struggle in the Southwest as Latino voters stick with Democrats : politics

You want to know a secret? “The Latino Voting block” you keep hearing about isn’t a thing. We try to homogenize Latinos into a single culture, background, and political persuasion when the reality is that Latinos are from ≈21 different countries with entirely different histories and each person is going to have a very different relationship to the US. Just within the southwest you can meet a Latino family who became citizens yesterday, or you can meet one that who’s family has lived in that same place since before the US was a country. New Mexicans tend to lean more left in the last twenty years but Floridian Cuban immigrants tend to lean more right both are significant portions of the “Latino Voting block”.

So why do we think a voters demographic can so strongly indicate how they are going to vote? Well the African American vote has been an incredibly important part of this countries history. And due to their history in this country they were a more homogeneous group. African Americans all largely lived in the same geographic area of the US, had a similar relationship with how they came to this country (by force), and we’re all grappling with a similar history of violence and mistreatment. This is not to say black culture in America is actually homogeneous (or ever was entirely) but for a long time the community seemed to move largely together towards and away from certain candidates and issues. This convinced us that we rely on racial voting groups as an indication of how a certain person or group of people might vote.

But this is greatly wrong as I have already indicated with Latino voters. The same holds for South Asian voters, Middle eastern voters, even Jewish voters can be wildly varied in their voting priorities depending on their geographic location and historical relationship with the US.

So in reality saying “Latinos are voting this way” is about as useful as saying “white people vote this way”. It is very bad at telling you how a particular group in a particular region is going to vote. Age, geography, gender, and education level are all strong factors in how we vote. And in reality it’s too complicated for us to plug in an algorithm and work out how someone will vote. The absolute disaster of 538s prediction algorithm in the last couple elections has been a strong example of the downfall of this philosophy.