Some are, some aren’t. “Latino” is a pretty broad category.

By Steve Phillips, The Nation

In Texas, unapologetically progressive Latinx candidates saw victories across the state, contradicting the claims of an exodus from the Democratic Party.

After Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives in the 2020 elections, many were quick to conclude that the party had moved too far to the left, driving away Latino voters in the process. Exhibit A: Trump’s stronger than expected showing in heavily Latino parts of Texas, which quickly became an article of faith among journalists and operatives alike. Last week’s results in the Texas primary elections, however, shattered that conventional wisdom, as Latino voters flocked to unapologetically progressive candidates. It turns out that Latinos aren’t turned off by progressive politics after all.

In July, data analyst David Shor, one of the most prominent proponents of the idea that left politics repelled Latinos in 2020, spoke to NPR in an interview titled, “Latino Voters Are Leaving The Democratic Party.” Others piled on, with Eric Levitz writing in New York magazine, “No political development worries blue America’s operatives more than Hispanic voters’ rightward drift.” A central data point they cite is the declining Democratic margin in places like Hidalgo County, on the Mexican border, where Barack Obama won by 42 percent in 2012, but Biden bested Trump by only 1.9 percent. The shrinking margins, they say, reflect an exodus of Latinos out of the Democratic Party and over to the Republican ranks, spelling potential doom for the party’s prospects. Shor assigns blame for the smaller margin to “the increased salience of socialism in 2020—with the rise of AOC and the prominence of anti-socialist messaging from the GOP.”

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