If Democrats are the party of well-educated liberals in coastal cities and college towns, they will lose.
There aren't enough of them.
Democrats lost the White working class. Now they are losing the Hispanic working class. Trump increased his vote among Hispanic voters by 16% between 2016 and 2020. Democratic strategist Ruy Tiexiera has been looking at this demographic for over 20 years. He writes that they don't like what Democrats appear to stand for.
Democrats misunderstood and misplayed the Hispanic vote. Tiexiera helped lead the misunderstanding. In 2002 he co-wrote with John Judis The Emerging Democratic Majority, describing how immigration and demographic change would create FDR-level majorities for Democrats. Blacks supported Democrats in overwhelming numbers. He wrote that the growing number of Hispanic Americans would as well.
That didn't work out. Democratic policy and branding changed. Politicians in blue enclaves decided Bill-Clinton-style "triangulation" was too little, too conservative, a sell-out. They shaped a new Democratic message with help from policy advocates in universities and nonprofit advocacy groups representing abortion rights, climate, opposition to fossil fuels, gun control, #MeToo, racial equity, homosexual rights, and gender. Their positions seemed reasonable and virtuous to well-educated people in coastal cities -- but not to rural and working class Americans.
Ruy Tiexiera now warns that Hispanic Americans aren't voting like "People of Color." They are voting like other non-college working people. The issues that shape the Democratic brand seem weird, wrong, and extreme to many Hispanic voters. He says that this includes their use of the invented word cultural liberals use for their group, "Latinx." The term is used about them, not by them.
Tiexiera says Democrats make these mistakes:
1. Democrats presumed Hispanics were strongly in favor of wide-open immigration. Not so. People who can vote are citizens. Some are citizens of many generations. Others are new, via a citizenship route that may have been long and complicated. Many of them see "open borders" as line-skipping. They resent the cheapening of their own legal process.
2. Abortion. Many Hispanics are social conservatives and Catholic. They are uncomfortable with abortion. Abortion rights advocates define the issue as a rights issue: Who decides, not when abortion is OK. That lets abortion opponents characterize Democrats as extremists who defend very late term abortions.
3. Homosexual rights. Again, as with abortion, social conservatives are uncomfortable.
4. Gender transition. Biden is silent on this, so the Democratic position is defined by policy advocates arguing the strong form of the gender issue, that gender is a social construct, not biological. Language like "birthing parent" rather than "women" seems foreign and weird to many Americans. Same with boys and men who transition to participate in female athletic competitions. The notion of men and women, of male spaces and female spaces, goes back to the beginning of time. The leading edge position on this issue appears to deny biology, reality, and common sense. It is a hard sell.
5. Fossil fuels. Working class Americans are more likely opposed to high gasoline prices than to fossil fuels. Few working class Americans can afford electric vehicles. They feel pushed into a direction that isn't practical for them. They are accustomed to natural gas and it is available and inexpensive.
6. Race. Liberal Americans made great progress in race relations in the 1950s and 1960s with a message that race should not matter -- that we are all the same. Now the leading-edge Democratic message is the opposite, that racial identity is central to our lives. Race matters -- a lot. Biden publicly announced that the vacant Supreme Court seat would be filled by a Black woman. Some Hispanic voters consider themselves White, some consider themselves non-White, some mixed, and some want it not considered, thinking it should be irrelevant. Hispanics prefer the Martin Luther King understanding of race relations.
7. Patriotism. The leading-edge thinking by Democrats is that America has always been deeply, profoundly, systematically racist, and still is. Hispanics, who often live in communities with many newcomers, have an opposite view. America is the destination, the land of greater opportunity, the good place. The Democratic message is a turnoff. Hispanics are OK with patriotic displays.
Joe Biden is not a leading-edge cultural warrior. Theoretically, centrist old-school Biden could soften the Democratic brand, but policy advocates on climate, race, women, gender, guns, and abortion consider these issues matters of fundamental principles with the highest of stakes. They enforce orthodoxy. They set the message.
Ruy Tiexiera says Hispanic voters do not think the January 6 insurrection is the big issue. They think Democrats are unrealistic and out of touch, and that's the issue.
Further listening: Podcast, a conversation with Sarah Longwell, The Focus Group
Seeing any ethnic/racial group (or any demographic group for that matter) as a monolith voting in lockstep with one another is truly simplistic, stereotypical, and frankly, rather insulting. In my family alone there are so many differing views, each of the conclusions made in this “survey” are completely debunked. (One example. The generalization that all Hispanics are Catholic is so dated and out of touch. I can’t take that seriously.)
The Democrats treat all Hispanics as having a common identity and set of issues. In the critical state of Florida, the majority of Hispanics are from families that fled “socialist” regimes in Cuba or Venezuela. These voters will be damned if they will vote for a party that accommodates a socialist wing. Thank you Bernie Sanders.