Yet for all the talk about Republicans making serious inroads with Latino voters, new data from Gallup suggests that Latinos’ lurch toward the GOP could be overstated, at least when it comes to how they identify with the two major parties. In Gallup’s survey data for 2021, the pollster found that 56 percent of Hispanic Americans identified as Democrats or as independents who leaned toward the Democratic Party, while 26 percent identified as Republican or as leaning toward the GOP. Those figures represent very little change from what Gallup found in 2020 and, as the chart below shows, largely fall in line with Hispanic party-identification data over the past decade…

Latinos are pretty swingy compared with other voting blocs, as they’re just not that attached to the two major parties. Case in point: In Gallup’s 2021 polling, 52 percent of Hispanic Americans identified as independent, which was 10 percentage points higher than the population as a whole (42 percent). And when asked if they leaned toward one party, Latino independents were more likely to identify with the Democratic Party. But since most Latino Americans first identified as independent, this means that of the 56 percent who identified as or leaned Democratic, around two in five were actually independent leaners. (Among Republicans, almost three in five were independent leaners.) And while studies show that voters leaning toward a party do tend to back that party, they are still more likely to vote for the other side than voters who strongly identify with a party.

And among Latinos, ties to the two parties may be particularly weak because they aren’t as likely as other Americans to form a strong partisan identity at a young age.