Could Hispanic Americans, Protestants Especially, Shape The ’22 And ’24 Elections?
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(OPINION) Something is afoot when two New York Times columnists, Charles Blow on the left and Ross Douthat on the right, both make the identical observation in Monday’s edition.
Blow, who fears a “Biden blood bath” in the November midterms, underscored that Quinnipiac polling shows President Joe Biden’s approval rating is even lower among Hispanics than Whites, partly because “Hispanics hew conservative on some social issues.” Douthat wrote that to win, Democrats need to do better with two groups from the coalition of former President Barack Obama that have drifted rightward since: culturally conservative Latinos and working-class Whites.
The 2020 election was a landmark for this community with an estimated 16.6 million voters, a record proportion of the electorate. There are a number of good analyses of the 2020 Hispanic vote online to consider. A Bloomberg piece reminds us that “the Latinos of the United States have no single identity, no shared world view.”
This article notes that former President Donald Trump won 53.5% in majority Hispanic precincts in Miami-Dade County on the way to carrying all-important Florida with its 29 electoral votes. Understandable aversion to any hint of “socialism” by those from Cuba, as well as Nicaragua and Venezuela, no doubt helped. In Arizona’s populous Maricopa County, Trump improved his showing over 2016 in 61% of Hispanic-majority precincts. Exit polling said Trump improved over 2016 in Nevada by 8%. Other reports cited similar shifts in southern border areas of Texas. In 2004, former President George W. Bush proved Republicans can obtain a handsome number of Hispanic American votes.
GetReligion’s own Terry Mattingly has more than once proposed that the news media have neglected the religion aspect of recent Republican inroads and, in particular, the growth of Hispanic Protestant churches. This is a big religion beat story in its own right. Or it could provide a strategic political analysis leading up to Nov. 8, focusing either on politics nationally or on a specific regional audience.
The essential starting point for background is religion data from Pew Research Center’s major survey of 5,103 U.S. Hispanic adults in a report compiled in 2014. (Pew’s religion research director is Alan Cooperman, an Associated Press and Washington Post alumnus. The Pew media office is at 202-419-4372.)
There we learn that while Hispanics were once overwhelmingly Catholic, the Catholic share had dropped from 67% to 55% in just the prior four years. The gainers were those with no religious affiliation, at 18%, and Protestants, at 22%. Some 16% of Hispanics were evangelical, including Pentecostal and charismatic believers. Among those raised Catholic, 24% had left that faith.
Picking up on the Blow and Douthat columns, 53% of Hispanics said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, along with a commanding 70% of the evangelicals, 54% of Catholics and 35% of the religiously unaffiliated. On legalized same-sex marriage, Hispanics overall were in favor, compared with 65% of evangelicals opposed. Republicans or Republican leaners were 30% of the evangelicals, 21% of Catholics and 16% of the unaffiliated.
As Pew observed, the broad trend of Catholic decline and Protestant and nonreligious increase reflects the pattern seen across Latin American homelands. In recent weeks, several news articles have reported numbers from Latinobarometro, a Chile-based private nonprofit that regularly polls 20,000 respondents in 18 Latin American nations.
Though the region has over a third of the world’s Catholics, and the church is led by the first Latin American pope, there is relative decline, as in the U.S. In 1995, 80% of the region’s population identified as Catholic, compared with only 56% in the latest survey. In the same time frame, Protestants grew from 3.5% to 19%, and those adhering to no faith quadrupled, to 16% — reaching a notable 40% in Uruguay.
Stay tuned, and see this recent Religion Guy Memo on Catholic numbers globally: “What do the latest statistics really tell us about the worldwide Catholic Church?”
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.