Hispanic Americans are no longer "minority voters"

Hispanics appear to be transitioning from an insecure new group to a more assertive part of the mainstream. In so doing, their trajectory is looking more like that of aspirational and upwardly-mobile ‘white ethnics’ like Italian-Americans and less like that of African-Americans, who have historically been more receptive to Democrats’ framing of them as a marginalised group in need of protection…

The trajectory of Hispanic and Asian voters looks a lot like that of white Catholic voters after 1960. Between 1850 and 1960, about 7 in 10 white Catholics voted Democratic. But the election of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, on the back of almost 9 in 10 Catholic votes, proved the beginning of the end of this love affair. As figure 2 shows, the share of white Catholics identifying as Democratic in the gold-standard American National Election Study (ANES) fell steadily, from 73% in 1960 to 38% in 2016. These were the relatively blue-collar ‘Reagan Democrats’ who shifted Right each election by a few points.

Now consider the minority vote in figure 3. In 2008, the US experienced another JFK moment when Obama became the first nonwhite president. As with Kennedy’s victory, there was a surge of enthusiasm from his ethnic category, with 75% of nonwhites identifying as Democrats that year.

However, by 2019, the last year available in the ANES, just 50% of nonwhites identified as Democrats.