Florida Latinos catapulted Republicans in the 2022 election. Are they the outliers?

Inside a packed section of La Carreta, the iconic Cuban restaurant in Little Havana, trays were packed with croquetas and guava pastelitos, while a DJ blasted music for people wearing María Elvira Salazar T-shirts.

The election night party was for the freshman Miami Congresswoman of Florida’s Congressional District 27 — a district with the largest share of Hispanic residents anywhere in the state — who danced her way past the treats, onto the makeshift stage to declare victory for a second term.

“This election proves what Ronald Reagan famously said, that Latinos are Republicans, they just don’t know it,” Salazar said Tuesday at her victory party, declaring an early night win over her Colombian-American opponent, Democrat Annette Taddeo.

“Until tonight, because 2022 has been the year of the Hispanic Republicans,” she added.

Salazar’s statement is true for Florida, where Hispanic support for Republicans in the 2022 election — and for Gov. Ron DeSantis in particular — was crucial to a decisive and crushing victory over Democrats, according to a Miami Herald analysis of precinct-level results. The margin of victory for DeSantis — a nearly 20-percentage-point difference — has catapulted him onto the national political stage and into a potential 2024 presidential run.

But nationwide, the story of Hispanic voters is more nuanced. While some pollsters and analysts say there is so far no indication of a wave of Latinos fleeing to the Republican Party, and evidence that they reject MAGA extremism, Republicans point to some Hispanic-majority districts that show historic gains for the Republican Party.

“I do think Florida is an outlier in the context of 2022,” said Carlos Odio, co-founder of the Latino-focused research firm Equis Labs. “And not just on the Latino front. The shifts towards Republicans were deeper in Florida. Outside of Florida, you have somewhat of a mixed picture, but a relatively short shift.”

Florida breakdown

In 2020, former President Donald Trump’s gains among Hispanic voters drew a lot of attention from media and political observers, who predicted the rightward shift from voters in parts of South Texas and South Florida could be replicated in other parts of the country into the 2022 election. Trump, for example, led a political shift in Miami-Dade County in 2020, from losing it by 29 percentage points in 2016 to losing by seven percentage points in 2020.

DeSantis, meanwhile, won the majority-Hispanic county by 11 points this year. According to the Herald’s analysis, DeSantis won about 77% of the vote in the top 10 most Hispanic precincts — where about 90% of the voters identified as Hispanic. In total, DeSantis won in 280 of the 283 precincts where the share of registered Hispanic voters was greater than 70%.

While the margins were not as pronounced, DeSantis led wins among Hispanic voters in other parts of the state. In Hillsborough County, DeSantis won 54% of votes in majority-Hispanic precincts. And in Broward County, a deeply Democratic area where the Hispanic population has grown quickly in recent years, DeSantis won slightly more than half the votes in majority-Hispanic precincts, the Herald analysis showed.

The only notable exception are Puerto Ricans. Despite gains among those voters, Central Florida Hispanics continue to support Democrats in higher numbers. In Orange and Osceola Counties, an area with a large population of Puerto Rican voters, DeSantis’ Democratic challenger Charlie Crist still edged out a win. In Orange, Crist received 56% of the votes while DeSantis received 43% support in majority-Hispanic precincts. And in Osceola, Crist also outperformed DeSantis 53% to 46% in majority-Hispanic precincts.

But even in Central Florida precincts, there is some evidence to suggest that support for Democratic candidates has eroded in the past four years. According to Odio, former Democratic candidate Andrew Gillum won in majority Hispanic precincts in Osceola with 74% of the vote, nearly a 20-point difference from Crist’s advantage in 2022. Gillum lost to DeSantis in 2018 by about 30,000 votes.

“It took a great deal of money and effort to get the kind of stability you see in a state like Arizona. The lesson we have to see is that the Democratic Party cannot take the Latino vote for granted,” Odio said. “Florida is for Democrats the cautionary tale of what happens when you take your foot off the gas.”

The National Picture

Still, analysis that Florida’s results were indicative of a national shift got quick push-back by some Latino political groups, who stressed that Florida was the clear exception to Democratic outreach. Organizations including UnidosUS, Mi Familia Vota and America’s Voice unveiled on Thursday a sweeping pre-election poll of 5,400 Hispanic voters across the country, which showed that Hispanic voters overwhelmingly sided with Democratic candidates and policy issues.

“I think that where we run into trouble is when assumptions about the electorate as a whole are made on the outliers as opposed to the other way around,” said Clarissa Martinez de Castro, vice president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS. “We are seeing similar kind of outreach in places like South Texas, so we’re talking about a very small geography and a very small number of Latino voters compared to the overall Latino voting population in the rest of the state, but very high intensity and outreach there.”

Among the findings of their survey, which was conducted from Oct. 26 and Nov. 7, Florida Latinos received the lowest engagement from Democrats and the highest from Republicans out of the 11 states pollsters broke out. About 63% of Florida Latinos said they had been contacted by the Democratic Party and 59% said they had been contacted by the Republican Party.

“We know outreach matters,” said Gabe Sanchez, vice president of research at BSP Research, formerly known as Latino Decisions, which did polling for President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.

“Probably for Democrats, Arizona’s the state that I would pick as an example of how that sustained outreach to Latino community has paid off for them. So in both examples, Florida for Republicans, or Arizona for Democrats, we know investing in a Latino community, just like any other community, has benefits,” he said.

Giancarlo Sopo, a national GOP adviser who was the Trump campaign’s director of rapid response for Spanish-language media, said the argument that Florida is an outlier undermines the slow chipping-away that Republicans have made in areas that have historically leaned for Democrats.

“No one is arguing that Republicans do just as well with Hispanics in Texas as they do in Florida but there were significant gains with Hispanics around the country,” said Sopo, a Miami native who runs the political consulting firm Visto Media. “The notion that this was limited to Florida or Georgia is not supported by the data.”

As an example, Sopo said that in some majority-Hispanic Congressional districts in South Texas, conservative Latinos ran in races with historically tight margins of victory. In Texas’ 34th Congressional District, where U.S. Rep. Mayra Flores lost to Democrat Vicente Gonzalez on Tuesday, Democrats have gone from a 25-point advantage to an 8-point margin of victory, according to Sopo’s analysis of historical results.

“Mayra Flores lost by 8 in a district that Biden won by 16,” said Sopo, who advised two other Texas Republican candidates, Monica de la Cruz and Cassy Garcia, who was challenging Democratic incumbent U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar.

Back in Florida, Latino Democrats are grappling with the reality of a state that saw systemic divestment from national Democratic political committees this midterm cycle. The Florida Democratic Party said that while political committees spent close to $59 million in 2018, the same groups allocated less than $1.4 million in 2022.

“I think the Democratic Party did the usual things,” said Prof. Eduardo Gamarra, politics professor at Florida International University. “They started late. They took this community for granted. You’ve heard me say this a lot of times, they didn’t do the the necessary research.”

McClatchy DC staff writers Sheridan Wall, Ben Wieder and Miami Herald staff writer Joey Flechas contributed to this story.

Florida Latinos catapulted Republicans in the 2022 election. Are they the outliers?