By NICHOLAS RICCARDI
LITTLETON, Colo. (AP) — Pedro Gonzalez has faith in
Donald Trump and his party.
The 55-year-old Colombian immigrant is a pastor at an
evangelical church in suburban Denver. Initially repelled by Trump in 2016,
he’s been heartened by the president’s steps to protect religious groups and
appoint judges who oppose abortion rights. More important, Gonzalez sees
Trump’s presidency as part of a divine plan.
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Gonzalez said of the
president. “He was put there.”
Though Latino voters are a key part of the Democratic
coalition, there is a larger bloc of reliable Republican Latinos than many
think. And the GOP’s position among Latinos has not weakened during the Trump
administration, despite the president’s rhetoric against immigrants and the
party’s shift to the right on immigration.
In November’s elections, 32 percent of Latinos voted for
Republicans, according to AP VoteCast data. The survey of more than 115,000
midterm voters — including 7,738 Latino voters — was conducted for The
Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago.
Other surveys also found roughly one-third of Latinos
supporting the GOP. Data from the Pew Research Center and from exit polls
suggests that a comparable share of about 3 in 10 Latino voters supported Trump
in 2016. That tracks the share of Latinos supporting Republicans for the last
decade.
The stability of Republicans’ share of the Latino vote
frustrates Democrats, who say actions like Trump’s family separation policy and
his demonization of an immigrant caravan should drive Latinos out of the GOP.
“The question is not are Democrats winning the Hispanic
vote — it’s why aren’t Democrats winning the Hispanic vote 80-20 or 90-10 the
way black voters are?” said Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic pollster.
He argues Democrats must invest more in winning Latino voters.
The VoteCast data shows that, like white voters, Latinos
are split by gender — 61 percent of men voted Democratic in November, while 69
percent of women did. And while Republican-leaning Latinos can be found
everywhere in the country, two groups stand out as especially likely to back
the GOP — evangelicals and veterans.
Evangelicals comprised about one-quarter of Latino
voters, and veterans were 13 percent. Both groups were about evenly split
between the two parties. Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist in California,
said those groups have reliably provided the GOP with many Latino votes for
years.
“They stick and they do not go away,” Madrid said. Much
as with Trump’s own core white voters, attacks on the president and other
Republicans for being anti-immigrant “just make them dig in even more,” he
added.
Sacramento-based Rev. Sam Rodriguez, one of Trump’s spiritual
advisers, said evangelical Latinos have a clear reason to vote Republican. “Why
do 30 percent of Latinos still support Trump? Because of the Democratic Party’s
obsession with abortion,” Rodriguez said. “It’s life and religious liberty and
everything else follows.”
Some conservative Latinos say their political leanings
make them feel more like a minority than their ethnicity does.
Irina Vilariño,
43, a Miami restauranteur and Cuban immigrant, said she had presidential bumper
stickers for Sen. John McCain, Mitt Romney and Trump scratched off her car. She
said she never suffered from discrimination growing up in a predominantly white
south Florida community, “but I remember during the McCain campaign being
discriminated against because I supported him.”
The 2018 election was good to Democrats, but Florida
disappointed them. They couldn’t convince enough of the state’s often
right-leaning Cuban-American voters to support Sen. Bill Nelson, who was ousted
by the GOP’s Spanish-speaking Gov. Rick Scott, or rally them behind Democrats’
gubernatorial candidate, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, who lost to
Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis.
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