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What does “Latino” mean? And is there still such a thing as the “Latino vote”?

At first glance, both questions are simple to answer. Latinos are any of the 65 million people of any race living in the United States with cultural or ancestral ties to Latin America (and Spain, if you consider the term “Hispanic”). Overwhelmingly of Mexican descent (about 60 percent), they live primarily in two states, California and Texas, and make up about a fifth of the American population.

The “Latino vote,” meanwhile, could simply be those Latino Americans who vote in elections. More than 30 million of these people living in the US are citizens who can, and more than 16 million turned out in the 2020 election — the Latino electorate. These voters have tended to vote for Democrats in national elections, and, since 2004, have given near super-majorities of support to the Democratic presidential candidate.

For a time, this vote remained pretty uniform in both its makeup and its support for one party. That stability fueled the idea that there was such a thing as a Latino voting bloc, leading parties to have “Latino strategies” aimed at winning these voters over. They could be reached with appeals to racial and ethnic solidarity, reminders of discrimination and inequality, and in turn, be expected to behave like Black voters — who, along with LGBTQ voters, have been Democrats’ most loyal cohort.

By 2024, this assumption has been called into question. To say that Latinos are not a monolith is now a cliche — the basic starting point for conversations about how these Americans vote. 

But is even the term “Latino” itself an oversimplification?

When it comes to politics, especially, it can flatten the political ideology, partisan loyalty, and changing vote preferences of millions of people across 50 states.

That idea is gaining momentum, but it’s not universal. There are those who think the term has value, pointing out that it’s still useful to have a broad and more visible descriptor for these people; its members are stronger together, and despite diversifying political views, still tend to behave in similar patterns.

The implications are big: For the last 40 years, political organizing, power building, and business interests have relied on there being such a thing as a Hispanic or Latino community to count, to mobilize, and to market to. In short: This quandary matters for anyone hoping to win the votes of tens of millions of people.

The best political example to stop thinking of Latinos as a bloc or collective is to see what has happened when campaigns have tried to appeal to them as a group. The outreach and persuasion operation that President Joe Biden’s 2020 primary and general election campaigns ran is a prime example.

In 2020, that was the focal point of criticism of Democrats’ Latino voter outreach. It was too generic, unsophisticated, and premised on outdated thinking about what matters to these voters: promises of immigration reform and humanitarian border policies for a community that was primarily native-born; reminders of Donald Trump’s racism when these voters didn’t necessarily think he was talking about them; and “Hispandering” with flourishes of Spanish and Latin celebrity endorsements when Spanish-language use rates were declining and those celebrities weren’t necessarily relevant.

As rates of college education rise, as incomes grow, as the share of foreign-born Latinos declines, and as they vote differently, perhaps “Latino” should give way for more specific reference points, like “Mexican American,” “Cuban American,” “Southwestern voters,” or “Florida Latinos” — at least for the purposes of electoral politics.

Since 2020, the conventional wisdom has settled on a more tailored, targeted approach — what some Democratic Latino strategists and aligned groups call “culturally competent” campaigning.  

On the ground, that looked like tailored ads and campaign contact for Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in Pennsylvania and Florida, for Mexican Americans in the Southwest, and for using different surrogates, accents, and vocabulary in different media markets. After all, the thinking goes, what might sound familiar and credible to a first-generation naturalized Mexican American voter in Las Vegas is different from what appeals to the third-generation Puerto Rican voter who did not have to go through the same immigrant experience, even if they both speak Spanish.

Republicans performed their own version of this new identity politics between the 2020 and 2024 cycles — but it looked very different.

They played up the specter of “socialism,” “communism,” and “Marxism” in both Trump’s and other down-ballot candidates’ appeals to Cuban and Venezuelan American voters in Florida. 

They paired this with talk of the threat that illegal immigration posed to Mexican Americans and their safety in border communities in the Southwest in order to reach Trump-friendly working-class voters in Arizona, Nevada, and Texas — a mirror image of the traditional Democratic appeal to working-class, first- or second-generation Latinos.

These varying, hyper-specific approaches all demonstrated two things: Campaigning to “Latinos” was falling out of vogue, and the Latino electorate was now large, complex, and varied enough to be examined and treated with the same degree of sophistication as white voters are.

If Biden’s 2020 run suggested it was a mistake to think of Latinos as a broad, workable category, Trump’s 2024 victory suggests that maybe you can.

Even if the Latino category is too diverse, and doesn’t function as a monolithic voting bloc, reality suggests they still behave as a group. That’s the conclusion of early analysis conducted by the Latino research firm Equis, which found that the rightward shifts of these voters in the 2024 cycle cut across geographical location, population size, and country of origin.

“Broad-based shifts like these challenge the use of provincial theories to explain them,” Equis co-founder Carlos Odio wrote in sharing those results.

 As a whole, a broader category of people united by similar experiences as a minority in the US, primarily nonwhite, and which continues to assimilate, still exists on the ground.

Those similar experiences, some shared language, and growth across the country do make this cohort of people distinct from non-Hispanic white, Asian, and Black people — and therefore it makes sense to organize, mobilize, and campaign for the votes of these communities.  

In practice, across race, age, and gender, this group is still also mostly motivated by a similar set of priorities and concerns. When asked about issues that might affect their vote in 2024, the overwhelming majority of these voters described economic anxiety. Immigration tended to follow — and for similar reasons: They were upset by the status quo of the post-pandemic migrant crisis. Though they may be becoming more of a swing voter group, by most metrics they are still siding with Democrats at higher rates than white voters. And above all, a majority of these people still conceive of themselves as distinctly either “Hispanic” or “Latino.”

In other words, we’re overcomplicating this question.

Whether “Latino” is still useful in the political realm reminds me of something the sociologist G. Cristina Mora, who has traced the history of the “Hispanic” and “Latino” labels,” told me back in 2021.

“Sometimes people want to [say] that somehow Latinos are so different, like, ‘Oh my god, they’re too diverse!’ Like, ‘Latinos are not a thing.’ How is white a thing? How is Black a thing? How is Asian a thing? Somehow people think that there’s something really uniquely diverse and special and in many ways we’re the same as others,” she told me then. “We’ve never just had one term that everyone was into, we’ve never had one term that everyone’s happy with.” 

Read the rest of this story here. 

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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