Latinos on track to be largest share of nonwhite voters in 2020, Pew says

In the next presidential election, 32 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote, just slightly more than the 30 million voters who are black.

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Jan. 30, 2019, 10:50 AM CST

By Suzanne Gamboa

For the first time, Hispanics are on track to be the largest racial or ethnic group to be eligible to vote in a presidential election, according to data on the 2020 electorate released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.

By 2020, 32 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote, just slightly more than the 30 million voters who are black. For Asians, the population is expected to be about 11 million, more than double what it was in 2000.

According to Pew, Hispanics are projected to be about 13.3 percent of the electorate in 2020, which would make them the largest racial or ethnic minority of the electorate for the first time. In 2016, Hispanics were 11.9 percent of the electorate; African-Americans were 12.5 percent and are projected to remain the same in 2020.

Voters who are of Asian descent are projected to be about 4.7 percent of the electorate.

White voters will continue to make up the largest share of the electorate, 66.7 percent, but the Latino and Asian growth mean that in 2020 about a third of eligible voters will be nonwhite.

Immigration is playing a role, although it is a small one. One-in-10 eligible voters will be foreign-born in 2020, the highest share since 1970.

The share that is eligible to vote does not necessarily transfer to turnout. In recent elections, black voters were “substantially more likely” than Hispanics to vote, Pew stated.

The number of Latinos who don’t vote, in fact, has been greater than the number who do in every presidential election since 1996, according to Pew.