Hispanics and National Politics

How Latinos Are Transforming the Electoral Map

(Kevin Lamarque / Courtesy Reuters)

Since Election Day, pundits have broadly disagreed on why Mitt Romney lost. But they have largely agreed on why President Barack Obama won. Experts and strategists in the Republican Party had been predicting that the coalition that elected Obama in 2008 had splintered, was disenchanted, and would be unlikely to vote. They could not have been more wrong: black, young, and Latino voters came out in tremendous numbers, making up a big share of the president’s three-million-plus margin of victory.

In the election postmortems, Latinos have received a special level of attention, and for good reason. According to most estimates, Latino support for Obama was just a whisker short of the record 72 percent Bill Clinton got in 1992. Some reports even put it higher: The polling organization Latino Decisions gave Obama an eye-popping 75 percent of the vote, compared with 23 percent for Romney --a 3:1 margin.

“Almost everything you heard about the Latino vote in advan