Florida's Hispanic voters may not be what you think and someone is scared of Marco Rubio
05/14/2015
Democratic political operative Steve Schale has taken an interesting look at Florida's Hispanic voters and questions some of politics assumptions about this strategic group of voters.
Some excerpts shared with his permission:
Here are some key toplines:
- When the books closed on 2008, Hispanics added up to about 1.35 million registered voters. This was just over 12% of the electorate. Again, remember the caveat above – this under represents the total Hispanic vote in Florida, which I think was 14-15% of the total electorate in 2008.
- When the books closed on 2014, Hispanics had risen to 14.5% of the state’s registered voters, or just under 1.75 million voters.
- The total increase in active registered voters – that is all voters of all races and ethnicities --between 2008 and 2014 was just under 700,000 voters, from roughly 11.2 million voters to 11.9 million. Of the increase in the election pool, about 400,000, or 56% can be attributed to Hispanics.
- In 2008, Democrats held a 67,000 voter registration advantage over Republicans among Hispanics. Six years later, it had risen to over 191,000. If you go back to book closing 2006, the GOP in those days held a 40,000 voter advantage over Democrats. Any way you cut it, that is a remarkable shift among a group that makes up less than 15% of the total registered voters.
Two other noteworthy things happened over that same time:
- Self-identified Hispanics now outnumber self-identified Black voters (African American and Caribbean American) by over 120,000 voters. In 2008, Black voters had a 100,000 vote edge over Hispanics.
- Further, non-Hispanic white voters only made up 13.5% of the change in voter registration between 2008 and 2014. Put it another way, 86.5% of the change in voter registration can be attributed to racial and ethnic minority groups. Granted, a lot of this was due to the global economic meltdown which significantly slowed the migration of whites to Florida from other states, however, this trend lines up with what we are seeing in census numbers too. The population growth in Florida is being driven by racial and ethnic minorities.
If you are Democrat, this next bit should worry you and if you are a Republican you should love it:
Marco Rubio scares me.
I’ve been pretty consistent on this one. If you are a Democrat, he should be the one you don’t want to face, because I do think, if he is the nominee, he is the one who could significantly change the Hispanic math in Florida and the Latino math out west.
Why?
I truly believe he will benefit from the same identity politics that galvanized African American voters behind Obama. And before you tell me this won’t happen, I would remind folks that in 2007, there were a lot of skeptics that African Americans would really embrace Obama, a notion that frankly I found insane and one that got flipped on its head the minute he walked into South Carolina.
If a Rubio wins Hispanics in Florida by 8-10 points, the white win number for Democrats starts moving towards the mid-40s, and while I do think a Hillary Clinton candidacy will excite higher support among white women, it is still a pretty big hill to climb.
Anyone who cares about Florida in 2016 should read Schale's report which can be found here.
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