If you want to get a sense of just how abysmal Latino voter turnout rates are, this chart says it all:
As you can imagine, those numbers are even worse in non-presidential election years. Yet as a key component of the Democratic coalition, reversing these trends is critical. So what accounts for this woeful performance?
YOUTH
The median age of American Latinos is 27 years, and just 18 among native-born Latinos. For non-Hispanic whites, that number is 42.
That doesn’t just mean that about half of all Latinos can’t vote (remember, not all Latinos are U.S. citizens), but it also means that even those who can are much younger than the overall population.
And how good is youth turnout? Fact is, it’s hard to separate problems with overall youth turnout from problems with Latino turnout. The overlap is simply that large.
The optimist would say that Latino turnout rates will increase as the demographic ages. The oldness of Americans who are non-Hispanic whites certainly helps increase their turnout rate. But the realist would realize that 1) the earlier we instill a tradition of voter participation with Latinos, the greater chance of long-term success, and 2) we need Latinos voting now.
And this is where Donald Trump may prove a godsend to Democratic GOTV efforts. In the latest Quinnipiac poll, only 7 percent of Latinos hadn’t heard enough about Trump, and he only had a 9 percent favorability rating compared to 84 percent who hate his fucking guts. No other Republican was anywhere near as well-known—or as disliked—as Trump. He is a viral sensation in the Latino community, and not in a good way.
INCOME
There is strong correlation between income and voter participation.
The median income of a Latino household (so generally more than one wage earner) is $39,000. That number is $57,000 for non-Hispanic whites. That puts Latinos along that blue line, and whites on that clump at the top.
Note however that it is possible to bust through this limitation. While African-American household income is at just $33,000 (in large part because of a higher rate of single-parent households), African-American voting rates are much higher than those of Latinos, and even surpassed white rates in 2012 (see chart up above).
Still, the double-whammy of youth and poverty have a decided effect on turnout rates.
CULTURE
Many Latinos residents skip full citizenship—and the right to vote—for any number of reasons. They could be holding on to their mother country out of patriotism or nostalgia. Or the right to work is what’s currently most important to them, and everything else is a financial or time burden when struggling just to survive. Learning English suddenly becomes a very low priority.
Many immigrant Latinos also come from highly charged situations, where political participation oftentimes meant the difference between life and death. That is the case with immigrants from Peru or Chile, El Salvador or Honduras, or Nicaragua, or Guatemala, or pretty much the entire f’d up hemisphere. Per Pew:
5.4 million [US Latinos] are adult legal permanent residents (LPRs) who could not vote because they have not yet become naturalized U.S. citizens. The naturalization rate among legal immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean trails that of other legal immigrants by a sizable margin—49% versus 72%
Then they arrive in the U.S., dealing with hostility from various quarters, from the latest GOP demagoguery to locals upset about the changing character of their neighborhoods or towns. Thus, they heed the lessons they learned back home: Keep your head down, don’t make any noise, don’t provoke, don’t call attention to yourself, and just … survive.
It’s hard for people who haven’t come from those types of environments to understand, but for most Latino immigrants, family is all that matters—providing for, caring for, and protecting your small nucleus. Voting is a hazard. Just lay low.
And here’s where Trump, once again, is changing the equation. You have Latinos realizing that laying low and under-the-radar won’t protect them from xenophobic-race baiters like Trump. In fact, doing nothing empowers and encourages even greater hostilities toward them.
Current polling has Republicans garnering support in the mid-teens, even though Mitt Romney got 27 percent of the Latino vote in 2012. Now this doesn’t mean that inactive Latinos will be galvanized into action. But the early rumblings are there. After years of threatening to wake this sleeping giant, Trump may finally pull it off.
California Latinos were certainly dragged to action after Prop. 187, so there is precedent. If Texas Latinos voted at the same (still low) levels as California Latinos, Texas would be a purple state.
But we’re not quite there yet, and nothing guarantees new levels of participation. Latino turnout faces serious challenges, as noted above—youth, low income levels, and a culture that discourages political participation.
But if we crack this code?
According to Pew Hispanic Center projections, Hispanics will account for 40% of the growth in the eligible electorate in the U.S. between now and 2030, at which time 40 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote, up from 23.7 million now.2
Add up African Americans (21 percent) and Asians (15 percent), and fully 76 percent of voter growth will come from demographics that are strongly Democratic. But if they don’t vote? Well, that would just make Republicans really happy.
And that’s among the biggest challenges that Democrats face.