How Will The Hispanic Vote Impact This Coming Election?

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Teresa Schuster / Asst. News Director

Hispanic voters may play a pivotal role in the upcoming presidential election, as both the Republican and Democratic parties compete for their support.

But while much attention is paid to Hispanic voters, FIU political science professor Eduardo Gamarra said they are typically treated as a single voting bloc, but that this is not the case. Media usually do not distinguish between voters from different countries, according to Gamarra.

Gamarra also said the number and influence of Hispanic voters from various countries are typically overestimated in the media, using the example of Miami’s Venezuelan population.

“We might assume..[they] are just a huge, huge population. And while there may be a large wave of Venezuelans that would come in, they make a small proportion of the actual voters,” he said.

Gamarra gave the example of Doral, which has around 45,000 residents and 29,000 voters. He recently conducted a poll of Hispanic voters in Doral, asking what percentage were Venezuelan, Colombian, and Cuban.

“What I found is that 20% of the sample was [Venezuelan],” he said. “20% of [29,000 is less than] 6,000. However you look at it, there isn’t a very large number of voters, even though there might be, you know, a huge number of percent as well as moving in Doral.”

This is for several reasons.

“You have to discount children, you have to discount those who are in the process of seeking asylum, you have to discount illegal immigrants who are not citizens yet. And then you have to discount all of the undocumented aliens who are there. And so you have really a very small number of Venezuelans,” Gamarra explained.

The same criteria can be applied to Colombian American voters.

“There are about 1.2 million Colombians in the United States [and the] Census Bureau estimates that 33% live in Florida, that would mean that roughly 400,000 live in Florida,” said Gamarra. “If you subtract children and all the other categories I mentioned, let us say that we’re down to 200,000. So Colombians are much larger than the Venezuelans.”

Furthermore, Hispanic voter turnout is also lower overall, averaging between 46 and 49 percent in the United States, according to Gamarra.

“We come from countries where voter participation is very low,” Gamarra said. “American turnout is much higher, it has been as high as 80+ percent. Cubans even outperform whites in terms of voting. But it’s the only group that’s an anomaly. The other groups don’t, they underperform.”

And these groups’ voter behavior has not been studied in depth. 

“We really don’t have significant studies that determine what their voter behavior has been, because nobody has done it,” said Gamarra. “So we assume, historically, that Colombians have voted largely Democratic. And we also, based on studies that I did in 2016, we assumed that as well.”

Other groups tend to vote Democratic as well, according to Gamarra.

“We also assume that Puerto Ricans are about 70% Democrats, and we assume that Cubans now are about 60% Republicans,” said Gamarra.

Cubans’ voter behavior is somewhat unique, according to FIU’s annual Cuba Poll.

“Historically, non-Cubans have been Democrats, and the Cubans have been primarily Republicans,” Gamarra said.

But while this has been the trend in the past, Gamarra said Hispanic voters have recently turned more to the Republican party, especially Cuban-Americans.

“What we’re seeing now is a trend back to the Republican Party. And what we’ve also seen is, especially since the end of the Obama administration, that there’s been a trend back to the Republican Party. That’s something that we’re seeing in polls.”

This is reflected in Gamarra’s own polling data.

“In the polls that I do…we have found that the trend is roughly 55% to 60% of Cuban Americans say they will vote for Trump. So that’s higher than what we found at the end of the Obama period, when about 49% of Cuban Americans said they would vote for Trump in 2016. It could be as high as 10%, it could be perhaps even higher of a shift back to the Republicans.”

The reasons for this shift are complex.

Gamarra said policy, prominent Cuban-American republican politicians, and Republican outreach have all played a role in it.

“I think it has to do with basically the way in which the Republicans have targeted Cuban Americans,” said Gamarra, adding that they’ve done “a fairly good job.”

“[Republicans] have paid attention to them,” Gamarra said. “And by paying attention to them, it means everything from [appointing] Cuban Americans to prominent posts in the administration…[having] a very strong relationship with somebody like Senator Rubio, and it also means coming into town a lot. Trump has been here a lot, so has Pence, and so has other functionaries and the government, like they paid attention to this community.”

Republicans have also been more effective in their message to Hispanic voters, according to Gamarra.

“They have been transmitting a very significant message down here,” said Gamarra. I think the umbrella message is socialism. And the socialism message has worked extraordinarily well.”

This transcends generational divides, although there are also substantial differences among older and younger generations of hispanic voters.

At FIU, Gamarra said he sees hispanic students from a variety of political persuasions.

“I think there’s a very normal political distribution,” he said. “There are conservatives. There are liberals. There are very, very liberal students. There are students on the right, on the extreme right.”

Gamarra said younger Cuban-Americans tend to support Democrats more than their elders do, but that they are still influenced by the Republicans’ message.

“Even younger Cubans who never have been even on the island, their grandparents may have been the ones who actually [immigrated], even they have become very swayed by the message of communism, and the linking, especially the Democratic Party, to communism,” he said. “In my view, of course, it’s not true, but in a campaign, if your message works, then you go with it.”

Unlike Republicans, Democrats have “not been very good” at reaching out to Hispanic voters, said Gamarra, and would do well to change their message.

“It’s hard telling the truth when the other side has essentially painted you into a corner, essentially, not just painted you into a corner, but already painted you too, to that label. And so it’s very difficult to fight against that message,” he said. “But the Democrats have not been very good at reaching out to Hispanics in general. And they have also, in some measure, been shy about approaching Cubans with an alternative message.”

This, Gamarra says, is important.

“Don’t get me wrong, if there are 60% of Cuban Americans who say they’re Republicans, that means there’s 40% who say they’re not. But that also doesn’t mean that they’re Democrats,” he said. “That remaining 40%, most are Democrats, but there’s also a very large number of Cuban Americans who [are] not party affiliates who could sway either way.”

So far, Democrats have focused on resisting the Republicans’ message to Hispanic voters, instead of developing their own.

“The message of I’m not a communist doesn’t really work,” said Gamarra. “First of all, because it’s a very defensive message. And the message that Democrats, you know, are putting out and, you know, I think it’s the right way to go, it’s basically, you know, Vice President Biden won the nomination by defeating Social Democrats within the Democratic Party.”

Instead, Gamarra believes they should focus on policy issues.

“There has to be some real effort in trying to bring home the message of what the policy that the Democrats are putting forth,” Gamarra said, mentioning healthcare as an example.

While the 2020 election is only days away, Florida remains a swing state.

It has 29 electoral votes, and uses the first past the post system. This means the party or candidate that wins the election, even by one vote, receives all the electoral votes and the loser receives none.

“We’re gonna have a situation where Democrats will probably win in [parts of] Florida fairly easily,” said Gamarra. “Miami-Dade will be Democratic. Palm Beach, Broward, Orange [county]. The rural parts of Florida are going to be solidly red.”

Hispanic Americans could effectively decide the election, said Gamarra, mentioning that any other group could as well.

“If you have a shift to 10% of Cuban Americans who voted Democratic in 2016, and then are voting Republican, or if you have a shift in that magnitude of any of the other groups, you’re essentially summing to the Republican margin [of victory],” said Gamarra.“Don’t forget that Trump won by only 120,000 votes in November of 2016.”

This presidential victory could be achieved in a variety of ways.

“How you get to that victory margin, you can look at it a number of different ways,” Gamarra said. “It could be the vote of Arab Americans in Florida. It could be the vote of white educated women, which voted with Trump in 2016, but which now appear to be shifting back to the Democratic Party…It could also be the vote of the African American[s], turnout has to be huge. Because if we don’t have a huge African American turnout, then the Republicans are going to win.”

Any of these groups could claim to determine the election’s outcome, Gamarra explained.

“We want to, as Latinos, [think] we’re going to determine the outcome. [But] everybody could claim to determine the outcome because every vote counts in the end in such a close electoral scenario,” he said. 

“The reality is, everybody’s going to be able to claim whether it’s Venezuelan Republicans or Cuban Republicans or what have or for that matter, we might be able to place it with Cuban Democrats who put Biden over the top. But the reality [is], it’s within the margin [of error in] surveys including ours, [in which] the margin of error of 4%”

This margin of error in the polls is large enough to be “risky”, according to Gamarra.

“If you’re looking at the difference between Trump and Biden it’s by 2%…It’s fairly risky for anybody to say that Trump is gonna win. And it’s gonna be a battle until the very end,” he said