Latino voters will reshape American politics as we know it — and here’s the proof
*The problem isn’t the proof in an article, it’s the proof of past performance. This past election solidified the idea that Latinos don’t vote. VL
By Sean McElwee and Spencer Piston, Salon (7.5 minute read) 
Twenty years ago, neither Democrats nor Republicans saw Latinos as a voting bloc worth wooing. Instead, they often pursued policies that actively played into xenophobia. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which according to a recent Human Rights Watch report, set into motion today’s mass deportation. In that same year, future Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel wrote a memo urging Clinton to “claim and achieve record deportation of criminal aliens.”
Over the last decade, the Democratic Party has changed its tune, and started trying desperately to woo Latinos. Today, leading Democrats overwhelmingly support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and are using executive orders to halt deportations, while Republicans, led by Donald Trump, continue to demonize Latinos and promise harsh countermeasures to stop undocumented immigrants from entering the country.
By now, it’s a cliché in American politics that Latinos are a political force to be reckoned with, and that the nation’s rising Latino population will reshape the country’s politics for decades to come.
But we wanted to study how Latinos are changing American politics. So we explored multiple datasets which collectively include thousands of Latino respondents. We found that Latinos are more supportive of Barack Obama’s progressive agenda than non-Hispanic whites, and that Latinos are more supportive of action on climate change and immigration. Even on social issues, where the popular conception is that Latinos are relatively conservative, Latinos are actually quite a bit more liberal than non-Hispanic whites.
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Latinos already reside in many key swing states: In Arizona, Latino voters were central to the electoral defeat of staunchly anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio. In Nevada, voters this year elected both the first Latina U.S. senator and the state’s first Latino congressman. Similar events will be seen in many other states. As Latinos rise as a share of population and the electorate, they will increasingly reshape the political system.
[Photo by Michael R/Flickr]
