Latino Electorate Will Nearly Double In 20 Years
By Janell Ross, Huffington Post Latino Voices
If last week’s election outcome stunned Mitt Romney’s campaign and converted some Republicans to the orthodoxy of urgent and comprehensive immigration reform, then a Pew Hispanic Center report released Wednesday may spin the political world off its axis.
In the next two decades, a convergence of social and demographic trends will nearly double the number of Latinos who are eligible to vote, from 23.7 million today to about 40 million by 2032, according to the Pew report. In 2012, Latinos comprised 11 percent of the electorate. They will make up 16 percent of eligible voters by 2032, the report said.
Latino voters already are the fastest-growing portion of the electorate and cast 10 percent of all the ballots in the presidential election. The Pew report shows Latinos will be an indisputable key to the White House, several state capitols and thousands of local councils and school boards. Such a dramatic shift in the American electorate -– the adults who are eligible to register and vote -– could force new political alliances, policy priorities and alter who wins public office.
“I think the growing size of this population and the dispersement of this population around the country may not be fully understood,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research center based in Washington. “But it should be.
“Just look at what happened this year,” said Lopez. “Latino voters proved to be pivotal in battleground states where people expected like Nevada, Colorado and Florida, places with a large Latino vote. And then in places like Virginia and Iowa, places with small Latino populations, their votes proved decisive.”
In Iowa, Obama won by just under six percentage points. Latinos make up nearly 3 percent of the state’s voters and all but a quarter of these individuals cast ballots for President Barack Obama. In Virginia, the race was even tighter. Obama beat Romney by just three points. Latinos make up 2.3 percent of that state’s voters and all but about 23 percent voted for Obama.
A few weeks before the election, Sylvia Manzano, a senior analyst at Latino Decisions, an independent polling firm, projected that Romney would not be able to win unless he somehow swept the table of battleground states. Instead, Romney lost every swing state except North Carolina.
This article was first published in Huffington Post Latino Voices.
Janell Ross is a reporter who covers political and economic issues at the Huffington Post, based in New York. Previously she worked as a business reporter at The Huffington Post and covered business, immigration, race and social issues at The Tennessean in Nashville. Janell also covered covered local politics, labor and higher education at The News & Observer in Raleigh and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Janell earned a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and a master’s degree from the Columbia University School of Journalism.
[Photo by Una Voz Unida of Odessa]