The gerrymandered Latino vote is trending, but slowly as conveyed below in this informative Texas Monthly piece by R.G. Ratcliffe.
While Hispanic voting was at its highest level ever in 2016, it was an incremental increase to 19 percent of the total turnout, up from 17 percent in 2012. The long-term demographic trends favor Hispanic voting strength over white voters, but at last year’s level of increase, it would take about two more presidential election cycles to close the gap between Republican and Democratic votes.
Dr. Rogelio Sáenz, dean of the College of Public Policy at the University of Texas at San Antonio, had already researched and explained all of these things in a December 31, 2016 piece published in the San Antonio Express-News titled, "White births, migration explain why Texas remains a red state" where he also mentions that whites face fewer blockages to their vote relative to Latinos and minorities, generally.
Dr. Saenz also calls out Republicans' deliberate attempts to limit the political power of both Latinos and African Americans, such as through the passage of voter ID laws and gerrymandering, as well as through the "slashing of public education funding in public schools that are majority non-white and mass incarceration, which has taken away the vote of many persons of color."
Our policy and legal challenges are significant, but with good research and information such as that which is provided in these and other publications, provide excellent guideposts for the future.
Angela Valenzuela
c/s
FEB 21, 2017
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For
the past twenty years, Texas Democrats have entered every election
saying demographics are on their side. They’ve been hoping that the
state’s burgeoning Hispanic population will carry the party back into
power. If the 2016 election loss of Democrat Hillary Clinton in Texas
proves anything, it is that the state’s Latino vote is less the Sleeping
Giant than a growing adolescent who has not yet come of age. And
probably won’t anytime soon.
Last fall I reported that there was a surge in Texas of about 530,000 Latinos who had registered to vote amid
the anti-Mexican, build-a-wall rhetoric of Republican presidential
candidate Donald Trump. That registration increase apparently played a
major role in the spike in Latino voters who showed up to vote in Texas
last November. About 395,000 more Latino voters went to the polls than
did in the 2012 presidential election. But it was still far too little
to make a difference for Democratic candidates statewide. That
trend—increasing numbers of Latino voters, but not enough to help
Democrats win consistently in Texas—seems likely to continue for the
next few elections cycles.
The
caveat to that is whether President Trump’s crackdown on undocumented
immigrants might motivate a group of voters who usually don’t vote, no
matter the ethnicity: young voters. A Pew Research Center report
estimated that 32 percent of the 2016 eligible Hispanic voters in Texas were between the ages of 18 and 29. Because the great migration of undocumented immigrants from Mexico to Texas occurred before the year 2000,
that means many of these young voters were born here and are citizens
even if their parents or older siblings are undocumented immigrants
fearful of deportation. Trump’s hard-line immigration policies could
prompt these youthful voters to flock to the polls next year.
Short
of that kind of sea change, Texas Republicans can feel confident of
holding the advantage in statewide elections for years to come.
Non-Hispanic whites may constitute just 43 percent of the state’s
population, but in 2016 they represented more than 65 percent of all the
votes cast, according to state voting results provided to me by the
Legislative Council. And Anglos gave about 69 percent of their votes to Trump.
To
get an idea of how much Hispanic voting will have to grow to offset the
white vote, consider this: If the Spanish surname votes of Bexar
County, Corpus Christi and all the counties of South Texas and along the
Rio Grande to El Paso were added together, they would account for
almost half of all the Spanish surname ballots cast in 2016. However,
all those ballots together are still outnumbered by the votes cast by
whites just in three heavily Republican counties combined: Collin,
Denton, and Montgomery.
While
Hispanic voting was at its highest level ever in 2016, it was an
incremental increase to 19 percent of the total turnout, up from 17
percent in 2012. The long-term demographic trends favor Hispanic voting
strength over white voters, but at last year’s level of increase, it
would take about two more presidential election cycles to close the gap
between Republican and Democratic votes. But elections for governor and
most other statewide offices occur in off years, and the gap is even
wider. The number of Hispanic votes cast in the past two off-year
elections was almost stagnant, increasing only by 14,500 from 2010 to
2014. The Republican advantage in the 2014 off-year elections was close
to a million votes.
One
thing that might make a difference is a major voter registration
drive. The state’s Hispanic population is estimated at 10.4 million, but
there were only 4.8 million Hispanics eligible to vote last year,
according to Pew estimates. After children too young too vote and
non-citizens are winnowed out of the population, Hispanics only make only up 28 percent of the eligible voters. The
Texas Secretary of State’s office reported that there were about 3.5
million Spanish surname registered voters in 2016, so the 1.7 million
turnout accounted for close to half of all the registered Hispanic
voters. But that means more than a million eligible Hispanic voters are
still not registered to vote.
Matt Barreto,
a University of California Los Angeles political scientist and pollster
with Latino Decisions, told me that if Texas Democrats want to increase
voter turnout, they first need to increase voter registration. “You’re
never going to get a humongous increase unless you get a humongous
increase in registration,” he said. “That’s the first thing that needs
work in Texas: voter registration drives in the big cities and the
Valley.”
Barreto,
who has been an expert witness for the Texas Democratic Party in
redistricting cases, said the state party also needs to encourage more
minority candidates to run for statewide office—even if the prospects of
winning are not good. “They won’t all win. A lot of them will run and
lose. That’s how you turn a state. You run and lose. That will bring
more people into the system. … If you don’t think the system cares about
you, there’s almost nothing we can do to get you to vote.
“They
need to be encouraging candidates who look like the future of their
party to be running for every single office. That will eventually lead
to a belief among the voters that the party actually cares about them.
If you look up and every year you just have more white candidates
running, it creates an idea that the party doesn’t care much about you.”
In
fact, the last two Democratic Party nominees for governor were
white—former Houston Mayor Bill White in 2010 and former state Senator
Wendy Davis of Fort Worth. Barreto said Davis never fully connected with
Latino voters and in some San Antonio precincts that are heavily
Hispanic, Davis was out voted by Democratic Lieutenant Governor
candidate Leticia Van de Putte, a Latina.
A
test that may be brewing involves Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who
will stand for re-election next year. Cruz appears vulnerable after his
failed 2016 presidential campaign and reluctance to endorse Trump for
president. He’s mostly vulnerable to a Republican primary challenge.
However, he likely will also face a challenge in the general election
from either Joaquin Castro of San Antonio or Beto O’Rourke, with a base in heavily Hispanic El Paso. Both are current members of the U.S. House. Cruz is of Cuban heritage, while Castro is Mexican-American.
The greater likelihood is that the growing Hispanic vote will affect local elections first, as they did in Houston last year.
Harris
County had the biggest spike in Hispanic voter turnout in 2016. The
county saw 73,000 more Hispanic voters than in 2012, and the percentage
of the vote grew from 16 percent to almost 20 percent. (For comparison,
the number of Spanish surname voters in Bexar County increased by 45,500
over 2012; Dallas County, 33,000 votes; and Travis, about 17,000; even
very Republican Tarrant county had an increase of 20,000 Spanish surname
voters.)
University
of Houston political scientist Richard Murray said the impact of
Hispanic voting in Harris County could be seen in how poorly Trump
performed there. He received 40,000 fewer votes than 2012 GOP
presidential nominee Mitt Romney, while Clinton gathered 120,000 more
votes in the county than Obama. “Trump’s weakness with urban
Hispanics hurt the Republican ticket badly as one can see from precinct
level data from Harris County,” Murray said. “That wiped out all down
ballot Republicans, despite the fact that the most reliable Democratic
voters in Harris County, African Americans, turned out at only about 90
percent of their 2012 vote.”
OK,
now, every time journalists write about the growing Hispanic vote and
the Democratic Party, the instant response is that not all Latinos vote
Democratic. And that’s very true. Latinos who live in predominantly
Anglo neighborhoods tend to vote like their neighbors. Wealthier
Hispanics are more likely to vote Republican. But Latinos predominantly
vote Democratic. How much so is often a point of dispute, and one reason
is that exit polls get it wrong.
The
first time I really encountered the exit poll problem was 1998, when
George W. Bush won re-election as governor, claiming an exit poll showed
him receiving half the Hispanic vote. The television networks’ Voter
News Service said Bush had won 49 percent of the Texas Hispanic vote.
However, exit polls by the William Velasquez Institute set Bush’s margin
at 39 percent. In effort to settle the question, I used the Texas
Legislative Council’s redistricting computer to look at 180,000 votes
cast in 426 urban precincts that had a Hispanic voting age population of
more than 70 percent. The result was that Bush received 39 percent of
the vote. The big difference, my study was based on tens of thousands of
actual votes while the television network’s exit poll was based on
interviews with a mere 201 Hispanic voters.
Barreto
told me the big problem with using exit polls to tell you much of
anything about Hispanic voting in Texas is that the exit surveys usually
are set up in swing precincts because the networks are more interested
in calling a race than giving an accurate demographic picture of an
election. Barreto said in 2014 there were no exit polls south of San
Antonio and the surveys were only done in English.
That prompted me to take another look at the 2014 exit polls that showed Governor Greg Abbott receiving 44 percent of the Latino vote over Davis, and U.S. Senator John Cornyn capturing 48 percent.
Looking at mostly Hispanic counties of South Texas, it appears that
Abbott’s real Latino vote probably was somewhere between 25 and 35
percent. (If anyone knows of a more accurate precinct level study,
please let me know.)
A pair of political scientist, Francisco Pedraza and Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta,
in a recent Washington Post article challenged the notion that Trump
received 34 percent of the Latino vote in Texas. In a study of 4,372
precincts across Texas covering 75 percent of the state’s Hispanic
population, they determined that Clinton had won 77 percent of the
Hispanic vote to Trump’s 18 percent—very different from the exit polls
that showed the results at 61/34 percent.
(For those who want to challenge my analysis or explore further, click here for the 2012/2016 spreadsheet.
SSTO means Spanish Surname Turnout. TO is Total turnout of all voters.
The Spanish surnames are compiled by the Secretary of State’s office
from a list of common surnames in the United States. And, of course, it
is possible for someone to be Hispanic and not have a Spanish surname.)
The
bottom line is that Democrats will continue to benefit
disproportionately from increases in Hispanic turnout, but barring a
major change in current trends, it won’t be enough to turn Texas blue
for years into the future.
