The Latinx Culture War
Feb 27, 2025 8:37 pm
Last week I wrote about some things left unsaid about the recent Pew report showing how much the nonreligious Latinx population has grown in recent years. I did not write about some of the political data points mentioned in the report on purpose. This entry covers that territory and is, in a way, a continuation of pieces I have written since the 2020 elections.
Previously in The Latinx Culture War…
The first piece, published in The Humanist on November 12, 2020, just ten days after Election Day, tried to explain that Trump seemed to gain Latinx support in his reelection bid. Because of the limitations of the data available, I focused on some regional and national-origin differences. But I had this little nugget that, if I were not an atheist, would sound prophetic:
We also should not forget the religious diversity of Latinxs. Catholic Latinxs tend to prefer Democratic Party candidates. Nonreligious Latinxs are the most Democratic-leaning, while Latinx Protestants lean toward the Republican Party. Though Latinx vote data by religion is not currently available, it will not be surprising if the differences between these groups increased with Catholic and secular Latinxs heavily favoring Biden and Protestants voting even stronger for Trump.
In essence, I was hinting that the bump in Trump support among Latinxs had much to do with the radicalization of evangélicos (aka Latinx evangelicals). Eight days later, I followed that idea in Religion Dispatches. With little data available about the Latinx nones’ vote in 2020, I used some historical data projections and suggested that:
What’s surprising about the Latinx vote in 2020 isn’t the apparent bump in support for Trump, since the percentage of Republican voters simply matched historical trends. Especially when we consider that this is the first time Republican voters are voting for a Republican incumbent since 2004. Instead, the most surprising aspect of the Latinx vote is how Protestants and Latinx nones continue to diverge, pulling politically in opposite directions.
Then, last year in my first column for Interfaith America, I addressed the hard right turn of evangélicos noting that:
This group shifted from an eight percentage point Democratic advantage in identification in 2014 (46-38) to a 20 percentage point Republican advantage in 2021 (60-40).
I must add that the base of those numbers are Latinxs who identify with or lean toward a political party, meaning that I wasn’t counting independents.
What the Pew Report Shows…
I’m going to focus on the Big Three religion cohorts in the Latinx community: Catholics (43%), nones (30%), and evangélicos (15%). Compared to the last Pew Religious Landscape Survey in 2014, Catholics (48%) and evangélicos (19%) have lost ground. Meanwhile, the nones (20%) have gained from both of them in just eight years.
Among Latinxs who identify as or lean toward Democrats, Catholics are slightly overrepresented compared to the adult Latinx population (48% vs. 43%), while evangélicos are underrepresented (10% vs. 15%). The nones are roughly equally represented among Democrats (31%) and adult Latinxs (30%).
When we look at Republican-identifying and Republican-leaning Latinxs, we see the opposite. Evangélicos are overrepresented by a nearly two-to-one margin (28% vs. 15%) compared to the adult population. Catholics are very underrepresented, accounting for just one-third (33%) of Republicans and leaners while representing 43% of the Latinx population. The nones are slightly underrepresented among Republicans and leaners, accounting for more than one-quarter (27%), though three in ten Latinxs are nones.
In another section of the report, the Pew authors mention the partisan distribution of the Big Three cohorts in the text, not a chart. This is important because we don’t know the size of the Democratic and Republican coalitions from the data provided in the chart. We don’t know what percentage of Latinxs are Republican or Democrats. But we can get an idea from the information we have so far.
According to the report, Catholics are not just the largest cohort among Latinxs but also the most Democratic-leaning. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of Catholics identify as or lean toward the Democratic Party, and about one in five (21%) identify as or lean toward the Republican Party. This means that seven percent of Latinx Catholics have no preferred political affiliation.
Evangélicos is the most Republican-leaning cohort. Half (50%) identify as or lean Republican, and 44% as Democrats; an additional six percent have no lean or partisan identity.
The nones are also overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning, though not as much as Catholics. About two-thirds (66%) of Latinx nones are Democrats or leaners; about one-quarter (24%) are Republicans or leaners; ten percent have no partisan identity or lean.
How has it changed?
I went back to the 2014 Religious Landscape Survey to check how the partisan identities of Latinxs have shifted. A few things have changed in the eight years since the Religious Landscape Survey and the 2022 survey the latest report is based on.
Latinxs are more likely to take sides.
In 2014 roughly three in ten members of the Big Three claimed no partisan identity nor leaned toward a party. Twenty-eight percent of Latinx Catholics and evangélicos we non-partisan in 2014. The nones’ share was slightly larger (31%).
The latest survey shows that those numbers have drastically shrunk. In 2022, six percent of evangélicos (-78%), seven percent of Catholics (-75%), and ten percent of nones (-67%) claimed no partisanship. This shift likely reflects the polarization of American politics, especially since 2015.
As the portion of non-partisan Latinxs shrank, the share of people identifying with or leaning toward the two major parties increased. Though we don’t have numbers for those who say they are registered voters, nor do we have the voting preferences of these respondents, these data are still useful to make sense of what has happened during the last two Presidential Election cycles.
The GOP has gained ground…
The increased Latinx support for Donald Trump between 2016 and 2020 surprised many (non-Latinx) observers, who started conjuring a GOP Latinx boost (see here and here…not that there’s no mention of religion in either of these pieces). but I was not. There has always been a strong Republican presence in Latinx politics. While GOP support cratered during the Obama era, Latinx Republicans still existed and were, during that time, some of the most prominent members of the party (see: Cruz, Edward; Rubio, Marco).
The peak of Latinx Republican support for Republicans was during the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004. According to the exit polls, Bush captured four in ten Latinx voters.
My theory of the events is that Bush’s Latinx support occurred when Latinx evangélicos peaked in numbers. In 2007, Pew published a report about Latinx religion that estimated the evangélico cohort at 15%. Evangélicos have always been the most Republican-leaning and less lopsided cohort, with the proportions of Democrats and Republicans closer to each other. They are the real swing vote.
Bush was a darling of evangélicos, likely bringing many of the independent Republican leaders and some conservative Democrats and leaners to the fold. These types were probably not interested in supporting the likes of John McCain or Mitt Romney. Thus, aside from the core partisans in the community, Republicans weren’t able to get enthusiastic support among evangélicos. This pattern extended to the first Trump run in 2016. He got similar support to what Mitt Romney received in 2012.
Then, in 2020 Trump surpassed McCain’s Latinx support by a hair. It is notable, given the context, but still not surprising. Though Trump’s results were similar to McCain’s, his context was closest to Bush’s. Here was a Republican incumbent running for office for the first time in nearly two decades and getting support similar to the one received by a Republican candidate who got pummelled in his bid.
Probably, Trump got his boost from evangélico support. This cohort is the most socially conservative, and he delivered. He probably also got support from nativist Latinxs.
Between 2014 and 2022, GOP identification only increased among evangélicos and the nones. Evangélicos became primarily Republican (50%) from a Republican plurality in 2014 (41%). The nones increased from about one in five (17%) to one in four (24%).
But Democrats gained even more.
However, while evangélicos and nones became more Republican, they became even more Democratic. Only three in ten evangélicos were Democrats in 2014, but more than four in ten (44%) identified with or leaned toward Democrats in 2022. As for the nones, just a bare majority (52%) identified with the Democrats in 2014 but by 2022, that had increased to two-thirds (66%). Among Catholics, the GOP gained nothing while they went from a simple majority (51%) Democrat or leaners to nearly three-quarters (72%) Democrat.
These results are consistent with an election where many Latinxs voted for the first time and where the electorate was so expanded that Trump ended up losing the election after getting more votes than the last time he ran because Biden racked up even more votes than Hillary Clinton (who won the popular vote in 2016). It is a world where Latino conservatives can be excited about the prospects of a second Trump term and go out in droves, and non-conservative Latinxs are motivated enough not to let that happen.
Next week, I’ll get a little more in the weeds with these numbers to explain the current state of Latinx politics and make some predictions.
