Hello and welcome to the 538 Politics podcast.

I'm Gailan Drake.

When Donald Trump came onto the scene in 2015, he was talking about how Mexico was in

his estimation, sending drug dealers and rapists across the border.

Some analysts assume his rhetoric would be poison for Latino voters.

But in 2016, Trump did no worse than Mitt Romney with that group and possibly better,

depending on the data that you look at.

And in 2020, Trump improved on his 2016 margin with Latino voters by 5 percentage points

according to the exit polls.

Now Joe Biden won Latino voters on the whole and easily, 65% to 32%.

But as people who watch elections know, trends and margins matter.

While Trump won the 2016 election, his erosion of support amongst college educated white

voters was a harbinger of what was to come for Republicans in 2018 and 2020.

There are also examples of these kinds of ships being one-off events, like when George

W. Bush made big gains with Latinos in 2004 only to have them very much reversed

biobama in 2008.

Whether Republican gains amongst Latino voters become a trend or a singular event will

depend on the underlying reasons for these shifts and what the parties do about them.

And that's what we're going to talk about today.

The political research firm, Eki's Research, which focuses on Latino political engagement,

recently published a post-mortem, looking at how the Latino vote changed in 2020 and

some of the possible reasons why.

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