The national media pays little attention to Hispanics, except at election time when the thinking appears to be: If there were 55 million Jews in the U.S., we’d totally kick ass.
But once again …
From the New York Times:
Here’s What Happened with the Latino VoteIt’s almost as if the Cubans and Puerto Ricans of Florida don’t really care about their Mexican compadres getting amnesty.By ROBERTO SURO
If you are in shock over the election results, don’t blame Latinos.
They favored Hillary Clinton by better than two to one, according to the exit polls. They did not turn out in big numbers to protest Donald J. Trump, but it probably would not have mattered. …
You may have been convinced that it would be otherwise. Years of reckless commentary, news stories and advocacy insisted that Latinos would be the great demographic firewall that would safeguard progressive politics with surging population numbers.
The national exit polls show that Mrs. Clinton drew 65 percent of the Latino vote compared with 29 percent for Mr. Trump. That is a landslide by any measure, and it is about the same margin in the exit polls for 2008 (67 percent vs. 31 percent). The disappointment sets in when you compare the outcome to 2012. President Barack Obama took 71 percent of the Latino vote in the exit polls that year compared with 27 percent for Mitt Romney.
Mr. Trump was supposed to be the bucket of cold water that aroused the sleeping giant, producing not only a stronger preference for the Democratic candidate but also, more important, a spike in turnout. In 2012, with immigration reform on the line, more than 12 million Latino voters stayed home, producing a turnout rate of 48 percent compared with 64 percent for whites and 67 percent for blacks.
The much ballyhooed and chronicled “Trump Effect” was supposed to have produced a surge in naturalizations and voter registration over the past year, and news organizations were churning out stories about the “surge” in Latino voting even after the polls closed Tuesday.
While more time and data is needed to get a full picture of Latino turnout this year, at first glance it appears Latino numbers were up, and perhaps significantly in some places, but that in fact the giant was barely stirred.
Four million more Latinos were eligible to vote Tuesday than in 2012. So, no matter who was running and no matter how low the turnout, the number of Latino votes counted Tuesday was virtually certain to be higher than 2012. In fact, demographic growth alone would have guaranteed Mrs. Clinton an additional 1.3 million votes (about 1 percent of the total votes cast), even if turnout remained at the same dismal rate as 2012, and she got two-thirds of the Latino votes.
In Colorado and Nevada, Latino voters surely helped keep the states blue, and under different scenarios those states could have served as the much-advertised Latino firewall. …
Florida is the one place where Latinos might have been able to change the results of this election and didn’t.
