Why are Latinos the most misunderstood voters in California?

Thirty years ago, Californians passed a ballot measure that galvanized a generation of Latino voters. Proposition 187 aimed to deny nearly all public services to undocumented people and their children. The measure, written in response to the transformative demographic change taking place in California at the time, sparked a seismic shift in racial politics and galvanized Latino activists, some of whom eventually occupied the state’s most powerful political positions. The plight of undocumented and recent immigrants became an indelible part of the political narrative for a generation of Latinos and their leaders.

In 1994, the year of the Proposition 187 campaign, something remarkable and unprecedented happened. Nearly two-thirds of Latinos voted against the measure as a group across parties, genders, generations, and national origins. They joined a racial political coalition built on a narrative of the undocumented and migrant experience.

However, as Latino politicians grew in power and numbers in the ensuing decades, a peculiar phenomenon emerged: Latino voter participation began to drop dramatically. To this day, Latinos in California vote at a lower rate than any other race or ethnicity.

At the same time, nearly every high-quality survey of Latino voters identifies jobs and the economy as their top concerns. Latinos suffer disproportionately from California’s economic challenges, from housing affordability to high poverty and educational barriers. And they are pushing for an ambitious economic agenda from Sacramento, especially given its growing number of Latino politicians. And yet no campaign or party has developed a working-class economic agenda to respond to Latinos’ concerns.

Instead, Latinos are still widely misunderstood as an oppressed racial minority driven by immigration, farm labor, and border issues. It’s one of the most striking blind spots in American politics: The fastest-growing group of voters in the country is telling political leaders quantifiable what they need and want to hear, and yet both parties persist in the belief that they understand Latinos better than they understand themselves.

The fastest growth in Latino participation is occurring among third- and fourth-generation, U.S.-born voters. And even in California, the latest evidence shows that the catalytic immigration politics of the last century no longer resonate in this century. Latino voting behavior is undergoing a generational shift.

In Los Angeles County, which is home to more Latinos than any other county in the country, the share of registered overseas voters has fallen by 10% to 15%, California political data expert Paul Mitchell noted recently in Capital Weekly. 55% to less than 9% over the past two decades. This is an extraordinary transformation of the Latino electorate. Furthermore, nearly 40% of Latino voters were not even alive during the early political events of the Proposition 187 era.

California has long been a Latino exception. For one thing, California has a higher proportion of its population composed of immigrants than any other state: Our 10.4 million immigrants represent 30% of California’s population. 27% of California’s population And 23% of the entire country’s population is foreign-born.

However, despite this rich immigrant base, California’s Latinos are predominantly U.S.-born, and that number is growing. California has not seen the measurable rightward shift of Latino voters that was evident in other states until recently, but it is now visible. This has been made harder to see by the state’s large number of older immigrants and left-leaning voters.

Economic desperation may be a major reason for this change. A recent study suggests that only 9% Fewer than 10 percent of Latino households can afford the state’s median home price. Fifty-five percent of California households in the bottom 10 percent of incomes are Latino or black. By nearly every economic metric, Latinos are not doing well in a state that has more Latino elected officials than most.

Housing affordability and other economic issues are pushing Latinos off the edge and out of their traditional pattern of supporting Democrats in large numbers, so much so that even the Golden State is no longer an outlier. California Target Book’s Rob Korinke (a partner at my firm, GrassrootsLab) found that there has been a measurable shift in Latino voter registration away from Democrats in every competitive congressional district in California since the midterm elections. At the same time, the performance gap between Republicans and Democrats has narrowed significantly in Latino-dense state legislative districts.

Are we seeing a shift in the Latino vote? Registration, turnout, and other data point strongly in this direction. It is time for policymakers, many of whom grew up with the narrative that defined the end of the last century, to recognize that we are on the verge of a new Latino political identity in a new Latino century.

Mike Madrid is a political consultant and the author of the forthcoming book “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Changing Democracy,” from which this book is adapted.