At a recent election results party for Miami-Dade County mayoral candidate Alex Otaola, Santiago Machado wore custom shirts that he and his wife had designed for the right-wing, Cuban-born influencer’s campaign.
Otaola lost the race that night. But Machado, a 41-year-old healthcare worker, still plans to cast his vote for former President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election. He donned a baseball cap supporting the GOP nominee at the watch party.
“He’s a man who is not political, who brings an economic agenda, and that’s what I want. I read his book… He respects my rights, my liberties,” Machado told the Miami Herald.
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, seizing largely on anti-immigrant sentiments and the idea that he, alone, can fix the country’s problems, the former president has built a sizable following among Hispanic men.
Exit polling in the 2020 presidential election found that 36% of Hispanic men voted for Trump compared to 30% of Hispanic women. Recent polls suggest that gap is poised to grow even wider this year; one survey from Univision and YouGov released earlier this month found Trump’s support among Hispanic men at 44%, while another poll from the Pew Research Center released last month showed 38% of those voters backing Trump.
To be sure, the gender gap exists among nearly every demographic, with a majority of men supporting Republicans and a majority of women backing Democrats. Vice President Kamala Harris also leads Trump with Hispanic voters overall, according to multiple polls. Yet Trump’s support among Hispanic men, in particular, has proved to be a confounding issue for experts and consultants that challenges years of political data and assumptions.
“We’re trying to figure out whether it’s generational differences or whether it’s something more recent or whether it’s cultural,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who recently wrote a book on Latino voters.
Madrid said that there’s not a lot of long-term data to explain the gender divide among Hispanic voters, given how quickly the electorate is growing. Roughly 1 in 4 Hispanic voters will cast their ballot for the first time in a presidential election in November, according to the nonprofit UnidosUS.
Madrid said the divide is most pronounced among younger, U.S.-born Hispanic men, who tend to be less attached to their Latino heritage and more likely to share the political priorities of non-Hispanic, white working-class voters.
“For first-generation or even for second-generation voters, Latino ethnic identity was the predominant lens that these people were voting through. They were voting as Latinos, they were voting as non-whites,” Madrid said. “What’s created this rightward shift, as we’re calling it, is a function of U.S. born Hispanic males increasingly voting Republican.”
Educational levels matterMadrid dismissed the notion that young Hispanic men are drawn to Trump’s perceived ties to machismo culture, arguing that the gender divide among Latinos is more closely tied to education. Hispanic men are less likely than Hispanic women to have a college degree.
“If you go to college, you’re much more likely to be a Democrat, and if you don’t, you’re more likely to be a Republican,” Madrid said. “It’s this new voter under 30 – our men have not gone to college and our women have and it has manifested itself in our politics now.”
Eduardo Gamarra, a political science professor at Florida International University, has also found that more-educated Hispanic women tend to identify as Democratic rather than Republican.
“In general terms, women are much more likely to favor a much more liberal view of the world,” he said, adding that more educated women tend to identify as Democratic.
The gap between Latino men and women is not large, he said, but it is important. According to polling he conducted in early July – before President Joe Biden bowed out of the race – nearly 62% of women polled had a “very unfavorable” or “somewhat unfavorable” opinion of Donald Trump; 27% said they would vote for him, compared to 39% of men.
Gamarra emphasized that gender divide was most pronounced on abortion. Fifty-seven percent of women said it was a “very important” issue to them, compared to 45% of men.
Gamarra acknowledged that his most current data is from before Biden dropped out, and that support levels could change once fresh numbers come in. In his survey, 47% of women said that Harris would be the best replacement for Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee.
“That gender gap might grow as the election advances and Trump attacks Kamala in a personal way, and in great measure through the lens of gender,” he said. “Many people are perceiving an attack towards gender, and that’s something that could be exacerbated in the coming months.”
Matt Barreto, who led Latino polling for Biden’s campaign and is now doing the same for Harris, noted that the political gender divide – where men tend to vote for Republicans and women tend to vote for Democrats – isn’t unique among Hispanic voters; it exists across every racial and ethnic group in the U.S.
While Trump was able to make inroads among Latino men during his unsuccessful 2020 reelection bid, Barreto said the former president’s support among those voters has leveled out.
“The question is whether the gap is growing or shrinking,” Barreto said. “Some people make the argument that Trump was maybe able to convince more Latino men to vote for him in 2020 due to sort of personality attributes. We haven’t really seen that being sustained.”
Barreto also argued that Harris has an opportunity to close the gender gap among Hispanic voters. By talking about workers’ rights, he said, Harris can broaden her appeal to working-class voters across the board. He also said that there’s a growing interest among men in safeguarding abortion rights – an issue that Democrats are betting heavily on to propel them to victory in November.
“I think Latino men are going to say, ‘I support that – I support that for my sister, my girlfriend, my wife, my daughter,’”Barreto said. “That’s going to be a way that Democrats are going to make progress on the abortion issue with men.”
Some Democrats argue that at least part of Trump’s appeal among Latinos is cultural, playing off the idea of the strongman – the “caudillo” – that has its roots in Latin American politics.
“That’s the culture we are coming from and even though we are running away from that, sadly we have the idea that a messiah is going to save us. And that’s not true.” said Adelys Ferro, the executive director of the Venezuelan American Caucus and a co-chair of Venezolanos con Kamala.
Ferro said that, since Harris launched her presidential campaign last month, she believes things are starting to change. She said she’s seen a surge in enthusiasm for Harris’ candidacy among both Hispanic men and women in recent weeks.
“There’s something that’s telling me that something is changing, among women of course, but among men too,” Ferro said. “We don’t need a strongman. What we need is a democratic president.”
This story was originally published September 3, 2024, 12:23 PM.
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