National Journal
By Emily Deruy
July 20, 2015
If
Republicans are to take the White House in 2016, they will need to win
over more Latino voters than strategists have typically estimated.
According
to an analysis by the polling firm Latino Decisions, the Republican
presidential candidate will need the backing of between 42 and 47
percent of Latino voters
to win the presidency. For the past several presidential elections, the
assumption has been that Republicans needed to reach 40 percent.
"The
40 percent figure is no longer reliable," said Matt Barreto, cofounder
of Latino Decisions and one of the authors of the new report.
That's because the size and makeup of the Latino electorate is shifting.
The
changing demographics of this country, specifically the growing share
of Latino voters, mean that the percentage of Hispanic voters the
candidates will need to win
over is also growing. While no one can predict exactly how many Latinos
will turn out to vote and who they will support—Latinos, after all, are
not a monolithic entity—Barreto estimates that they will make up about
10.4 percent of 2016 voters, a slight increase
from previous years.
Latino
voters have tended to vote for Democratic presidential candidates. That
trend is likely to continue. But as the Latino share of the vote
increases, Barreto noted,
there are less non-Latino votes to win, meaning Republicans will need
to pick up support from Latinos.
He
estimates that Republicans will pick up about the same share of white
voters as in 2012—just shy of 60 percent. But that could change, too.
Voter turnout among young
people increases during presidential elections and "the young people
who are coming into the electorate today ... are not nearly as
conservative as the older, silent generation who have been exiting," he
said.
It's
not just national figures that matter. The number of Latino voters who
turn out in individual states will be critical, and the number of Latino
voters is growing
in swing states like Colorado. Barreto calculates that the Republican
candidate would need 44 percent of Latino voters to cast GOP ballots in
Colorado, and 47 percent in Florida. Ohio and Virginia also have large
and growing Latino populations, Barreto said,
meaning Latino voters could be decisive in those states.
"Republicans
do seem to have quite a mountain to climb," said Frank Sharry,
executive director of America's Voice, a group that advocates on behalf
of immigration reform
and requested the Latino Decisions analysis.
While
Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has been "leaning in" on issues
that Latino voters tend to care about, such as immigration reform,
Sharry said, Republican
candidates have been slower to lend their support
Latino
Decisions has developed an interactive "threshold calculator" that
anyone can use to make their own predictions. "The bottom line is that
the Republican Party has
a brand problem with Latinos," Sharry said.
“The bottom line is that the Republican Party has a brand problem with Latinos.”—Frank Sharry, America’s Voice
Yet
he cautioned that Democrats do not have a lock on Latino voters either.
His group and others will have to run voter mobilization campaigns, he
said, to encourage people
to turn out. If they do, however, Republicans will have an uphill
battle when it comes to reclaiming the presidency.
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