Who voted for Glenn Youngkin: Hispanics went strongly for Youngkin

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting breakdown of who voted for Youngkin over McAuliffe. The breakdown raises questions about how the media is describing the win. Given the higher percentage of the vote that Youngkin received among Hispanics.

Progressive cable TV voices blamed defeat on citizens’ bigotry, saying the GOP won because of appeals to “white nationalism” and “dog-whistle racism.” Some strategists now advise Democrats to base their 2022 campaigns on this assumption by telling voters that “powerful elites and special interests use race as a tool of division to distract hard-working people of all races while they get robbed blind.”

Compare the breakdown in 2021 with 2017. In 2021, Youngkin won the Hispanic vote by 55% to 43%. In 2017, the Democrat candidate, Ralph Northam, won it by 67% to 32%. Who won different age or gender groups was the same in both races, though with the groups going Republican did so by smaller margins for Gillespie.

 

Should we threat the exit polls on how Hispanics voted with skepticism?

Exit polls show that Obama got 71 percent of the Hispanic vote.  But there is a big potential problem with that claim.  Namely a very conservative state with a Republican Hispanic running for the US Senate not being included in the exit polling.

Although there was a clear budgetary rationale for omitting Texas from exit polling, it is a far more serious omission. Texas has one of the nation's largest Hispanic populations. It is one of the few states where Republicans have had some success in courting Hispanics, winning as much as 49 percent of their votes in 2004. Have all of those efforts fallen apart in the Obama era? Were Texas Hispanics as sour on Mitt Romney this time as Hispanics in other states? Did they swing further in Obama's direction, as they did in Colorado, or a bit away from him, as they did in Nevada and California? And how did these voters -- mostly Mexican by ancestry -- feel about Cruz, a Cuban-American who speaks with a Texas twang? . . .

Let me give you an example of the problem here.  The 19 states that were left out of the exit polling were states that tended to very strong Republican states, not just Texas.  One of the questions included in these exit polls every eight years is whether people own guns (1988, 1996, 2004 and now it should have been in there for 2012).  If you tend to leave out heavily Republican states, do you think that it might bias you poll on the rate that people own guns?  Sure, Democrats do own guns, but at a lower rate than Republicans and where Democrats own guns at the highest rates tend to be in heavily Republican states.

Gallup: Hispanic Voters Drifting Back to GOP

Hispanics care about results on jobs and the economy, just as the rest of the country does.

Hispanic voters’ support for Democratic candidates waned in August and September. As a result, Hispanics in September favored Democrats by a 13-point margin (51% to 38%), compared with 32-point margins in June and July. …

I have to say though that I am somewhat dubious of the Gallup survey results because they have been all over the map on the generic congressional vote. The weekly swings have been much larger than for other polls.

More than half of Texas Hispanics identify themselves as conservatives

I guess the issue of why people oppose illegal immigrants needs to be explained better. The poll is from the Dallas Morning News.

more than half of Texas Hispanics call themselves conservative, and a surprising 23 percent say they might participate in Tuesday's GOP primary. Among those, Perry leads Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison by 2 to 1, according to the poll, commissioned by an Austin consultant for a national group of Hispanic legislative leaders. . . .

The poll found that only 18 percent of Texas Hispanics say they're liberal or progressive, while 54 percent say they're conservative, moderate conservative or religiously conservative.

But Camarillo said many Hispanics who identify themselves as conservative aren't talking about "less taxes, less government," the way white conservatives would.

"When a Latino says that he or she is conservative, they're thinking about how they are raising the kids and ... the family," she said. "It's more about work ethic, and that when you give your word, you give your word. Those kinds of things are what they're thinking of. It's a different frame of mind, and pollsters have yet to define it." . . .