What makes this trend so menacing for Democrats is that it threatens to block the party’s most plausible path to retaining federal power even if white working-class unionist Democrats in the Rust Belt go extinct. Hispanics are already the largest category of non-whites in the United States, comprising 19 percent of the U.S. population. Between 2008 and 2020, the Hispanic share of the electorate increased by about 30 percent. And the group is poised to grow considerably in the years to come.
Thus, if one assumed that Democrats would keep winning roughly 70 percent of the Hispanic vote — as they did in 2012 and 2016 — then the party’s medium-term prospects in the Sun Belt looked promising. Even if the post-industrial Midwest kept trending away from the party, Texas’s rising Hispanic population could eventually turn the Lone Star State blue and make the Electoral College biased toward Democrats in the process.
On the other hand, if Hispanic voters are in the process of emulating the political trajectory of the so-called “white ethnics” — which is to say, growing more conservative as a portion of the population assimilates into whiteness and moves up the socioeconomic ladder — then Democrats would be in profound trouble.
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