The Latino Voting Surge That Never Happened
*A couple of things to note. This article is from the National Review, a decidedly and unapologetically conservative publication. But it begins to spread a narrative that isn’t surprising. After so much bravado about the awakening Latino vote against Donald Trump in this past presidential election, a surge in Latino voting that didn’t materialize (it remains at 11 percent fo the total) the new narrative, to quote the 4th paragraph in the article, is now “candidates can win a national election with very little Latino support.” We’ll be hearing more of this line of storytelling. We need to counter that narrative. VL
By John O’Sullivan, National Review (13 minute read) 
If you type “Hispanic turnout 2016,” Google will churn out a series of buoyant links, all along the lines of “Latino Voting Surge Rattles the Trump Campaign” and “Trump Awakens a Sleeping Giant: Record Turnout for Latino Voters.” Should you do the same exercise about Latino support for the two candidates, you will get “Clinton Trounces Trump in New Poll” and the like.
In addition to their topic, these stories have something else in common: Almost all of them were published before the 8th of November. After the election result, which was itself the biggest story, the second biggest story was that Latino turnout had remained the same as the 2012 Latino turnout, at 11 percent of all voters. And the third biggest story was that within the Latino electorate, support for Clinton had fallen slightly from Obama’s two highs (71 percent in 2008 and 69 percent in 2012) to a respectable but not election-winning 65 percent. In line with that, Trump’s share of the Latino vote rose two points above Romney’s, to 29 percent.
These figures come from the national exit polls. Those for the share of the vote have been challenged by other pollsters, who found Trump getting a low of 18 percent of Latinos. It may be that the exit-poll figures will be corrected, as sometimes happens. Bush’s 44 percent share of the Hispanic vote in 2004 was reduced to 40 percent when the pollsters examined their data in tranquility. But other pollsters doubt that will happen in this case.
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And even if it were to do so, that would have the secondary result of suggesting that candidates can win a national election with very little Latino support — the opposite conclusion of all those “surging turnout” and “awakening giant” stories that dominated the campaign coverage. So there’s an interesting story here, even if not the story that reporters and analysts wanted to write.
John O’Sullivan is an editor-at-large of National Review and a senior fellow of the National Review Institute.
[Photo courtesy of West Side Republicans]