(invigorating music)
- [Shelby] Across the United States,
a political shift is rocking the two major political parties
and promising to play a pivotal role
in this year's midterm elections.
- [Aaron] The shift is among Latino voters.
We're gonna show you a WSJ analysis
of where this shift happened in 2020.
- And zoom in on three key areas
to watch as the midterms approach in 2022.
You ready?
- I think I'm ready.
- So Aaron, you're a WSJ editor
focused on polling and political data.
Tell us big picture first.
Why are shifts in this demographic so significant?
- This shift among Latino voters
is one of the most important things
that's happened recently in American politics.
And everyone's watching to see if it's durable.
Latino voters are one of the biggest
and fastest growing parts of the electorate
and they swung a lot away from the Democratic party
and toward the Republican party in 2020.
- [Shelby] To better understand
political shifts across America,
WSJ created this map that brought together
electoral, demographic, and economic data
at the neighborhood level.
By doing this, we found something striking.
- [Aaron] In the last presidential election,
3,730 predominantly Latino census tracks
shifted to the right,
compared to just 352 that shifted left.
- Census tracks are boundaries set by the US Census Bureau
that average about 4,000 residents per track.
So Aaron, what do these shifts tell you?
- Well, they tell us that something
is changing in the electorate.
The shift was pervasive, but it wasn't uniform.
It happened to different extents and different places,
but it happened among all kinds of Latino voters.
- Okay, so let's zoom into some of these key communities.
First, we'll go to Texas
to these neighborhoods along the Southern border.
So what are we seeing here?
- [Aaron] What we're seeing is a map of the vote.
Not county by county, but neighborhood by neighborhood.
Technically, these are census tracks and in 2016,
these shades of blue indicate
that the vote was pretty firmly Democratic
in most neighborhoods.
That's that rich, dark blue that you see.
- [Shelby] All right, so then in 2020,
you can see those shades of blue got lighter.
- [Aaron] That's right.
That signals that the Democratic candidate, Joe Biden,
still won those neighborhoods,
but he got a smaller share of the vote
than Democrats got in 2016.
- [Shelby] All right, so if you take a look at the shift,
here's what that looks like.
Almost all of these neighborhoods shifted right.
Correct?
- [Aaron] That's right.
This whole region is now dark red on the map,
showing that there was a big shift,
about 20 points or more in many places toward Donald Trump.
- What do we know about the shift?
What motivated it?
- We're still studying it.
A lot of people are studying it,
but it looks like the most important thing that happened
is that the issue mix changed.
In 2016, there was a lot of talk about immigration,
but in 2020, it was all about the economy and COVID.
And when COVID struck, it hit the Rio Grande valley
very hard, but voters hold the kind of jobs
that you can't do from home.
And so when businesses were shut down,
they lost work and they favored the Republican point of view
on keeping businesses open during COVID,
rather than the Democratic impulse
to shut things down in order to protect public health.
- This shift is really significant,
but this part of Texas is not as populated
as some of those huge cities,
Austin, Dallas, Houston.
Why is this area so politically significant?
- If you want a signal of how important this area is,
consider that both the candidates running for governor
the current governor, Greg Abbott
and his reelection campaign,
and his Democratic challenger, Beto O'Rourke,
both started their campaigns
either along the Rio Grande Valley
or elsewhere along the border with Mexico.
And Republicans are very excited
about the prospect of flipping three US house seats
in the Rio Grande Valley that are now held by Democrats.
- [Shelby] So these are the kind of voters
that could be responsible
for the balance of power in the house?
- [Aaron] Absolutely.
- Okay, now let's go to another state.
Where do you wanna zoom in?
- Shelby, let's go to Pennsylvania
and look at the city of Reading.
These census tracks lie
about 50 miles Northwest of Philadelphia.
In the 2016 presidential election, they were dark blue,
indicating that between 80% and 90% of the vote there
was Democratic.
- But in 2020, again,
we see those shades of blue get a little lighter.
And if you look at the tracks in terms of the shift,
they all go red.
And you traveled to Reading recently.
- It's very different than the Rio Grande Valley.
That's rural. Reading of course is urban.
And a lot of people moved there
from Philadelphia and New York.
- And what issues are resonating
with these voters in Reading?
- Well, the economy was still number one
and the economy under Trump gave the Republican party
a lot of credibility with these voters.
Another thing I found was that immigration
is important as an issue here,
but I found that voters were disillusioned
with both political parties.
They might want tough border security,
but for those who are already here in the country,
they want to see a pathway to citizenship.
- Are there any Democratic policies
that are turning these voters off?
- That's a big debate among Democratic strategists
and some Democratic strategists are very worried
that the party has become too identified
with liberal policy positions on crime
and policing and on racial preferences
and affirmative action.
And I did hear from a number of voters
that they thought that the Democratic party
was just not focusing on the issues
that were important to them.
- So what is at stake in Pennsylvania in 2022?
- Well, Pennsylvania has both an important race
for the Senate and a governor's race.
You have a Republican legislature in Pennsylvania
that wants to change the rules around voting.
Having a Democratic governor would make sure
that the Democrats have a say in the rules around voting
and who leads the state can matter
in the campaigning for the next presidential election.
- All right, now let's go somewhere else
where there's a different mix of voters
from the ones in Pennsylvania.
- Shelby, let's go to south Florida
and it really is a different kind of place.
Look at all these census tracks
where more than 70% of the residents are Latino.
We're particularly interested
in the densely populated neighborhoods around Miami.
- [Shelby] Wow, so there are a lot
of these little census tracks.
So at first glance, it's pretty hard to tell
how much things changed between 2016 and 2020.
- [Aaron] But here's where things get super clarifying.
Look at the shift between 2016 and 2020.
All of these red census tracks
show that voters there shifted to the right.
- So in a state where population centers
are pivotal, this is a big shift.
- Yeah, it is a big shift.
And it's one reason, important reason,
that Donald Trump won the state of Florida in 2020.
And it's also a reason, the shift in the Latino vote,
that Republicans picked up two house seats
in south Florida that had been held by Democrats.
- When you think about Miami,
you often think about Cuban Americans,
but the Latino vote there is quite diverse, right?
- It is.
But the large presence in south Florida
of Latino voters who come from countries
that are dictatorships, Cuba and Venezuela,
noticeably meant that one issue had particular salience
in south Florida,
and that is the Republican criticism that Democrats
are gonna turn the United States into a socialist country.
- So what's at stake in the midterms?
- Well Florida has both a governor's race
and a Senate race this year.
And then when you come to house districts
like the two in south Florida
that flip to the Republican party,
this year,
it's unlikely that Democrats can win those seats back.
The analysts now rate them as solidly Republican
in part because of the shift in the Latino vote.
- So zooming back out,
these maps we're looking at
show a shift between presidential elections.
Do analysts think that will matter
in terms of the Latino vote?
- Well, what we have now is polling
and we have focus groups
and they suggest that, yes, what we're seeing in 2020,
this shift toward the Republican party is continuing.
- Can we see how issues are shaping the midterms already?
- You can see how the two parties
are trying to shape the issue landscape.
- We're gonna be the most prosperous state in the nation.
We're gonna open up our energy sector
like you'd never seen it before.
- We're gonna work at the local state and federal level
to continue to support a woman's right to choose.
- We are making sure that we are going
after the criminal element that's coming across the border.
- The time for us to stop the next mass shooting
in this country is right now, right here, today.
- People might have opinions about abortion,
they might have opinions about the economy,
they might have opinions about immigration,
but that doesn't mean that that issue
is the one that's gonna make them come out and vote
and is gonna determine their choice of candidates.
Which issues are most salient is still an open question.
- Why does this kind of shift
matter for the political parties?
- If this shift is durable,
it marks a big change for the two political parties.
If Latino voters are shifting away
from the Democratic party
and becoming more of a swing group,
that means that one of the pillars
of the Democratic coalition is getting shaky.
Republicans on the other hand,
they've become in large part,
the party of America's white working class,
but they wanna be a party of a working class
across all racial groups.
This movement among Latino voters,
if it continues,
suggests that this is in fact happening
and the Republican party can become
the party of America's future
by building across different races,
a party of America's working class.
(invigorating music)