Last Call For Not A Monolith And Never Was

Just like the black vote, the Hispanic vote isn't a monolithic thing.  There are plenty of issues and reasons why people vote, ranging from economics to terrorism to schools to immigration, and a new Gallup poll that breaks down Hispanic voters into immigrants and US-born finds a big difference in how they vote and why.  Aaron Blake at the Washington Post crunches the numbers and finds some surprising results.

A Gallup poll shows that Hillary Clinton maintains a very big advantage among Hispanic voters — just as you might expect. Democrats, after all, have won this group by increasing margins in presidential elections, and that's a major GOP sore spot, givenhow quickly the U.S. Hispanic population is rising.

But the poll also shows that there is a significant split in the Hispanic community between Hispanic immigrants and U.S.-born Hispanics.

If you focus just on Hispanics born outside the United States, 87 percent have a favorable view of Clinton, while just 13 percent have a favorable view of Trump.

If you focus just on Hispanics born in the United States, though, it is much, much closer. Clinton's favorable rating drops to 43 percent, while Trump's jumps to 29 percent.

That second group, US-born Hispanic voters, have a view of the candidates much closer to that of the rest of the country.   Pew Research made a similar distinction between Spanish-speaking/bilingual and English-speaking Hispanic voters and found similar results.

The Pew Research Center last month broke this down in a slightly different — but equally telling — way. It compared Clinton's lead on Trump among Hispanics who are English-dominant with those who aren't.

While bilingual and Spanish speakers preferred Clinton in a head-to-head matchup by a massive 80 percent to 11 percent margin, English-dominant Hispanics were actually relatively evenly split, with 48 percent picking Clinton and 41 percent picking Trump.

The latter group's seven-point margin for Clinton looked, again, a lot like the rest of the country, which favored Clinton by a nine-point margin — 51 percent to 42 percent — in the same poll.

Indeed, if you look at these numbers, there doesn't seem to be a distinguishable "Hispanic vote" at all. The real difference-makers are Hispanic immigrants and those who don't speak English as their first language.

The issue of course is that in 2016, the group of Spanish-speaking or bilingual Hispanic folks are nearly 60% of Hispanic population in total, and they strongly favor Clinton.  The rest though look like America's population as a whole.

So which group will turn out in greater numbers in November?

We'll see.