“Latinos are Republicans. They just don’t know it yet,” Ronald Reagan is supposed to have said.

Latino voters and family values

Carolyn Moynihan

The growing electoral power of the Latino community in the US

concerns more than immigration policy.

On Thursday Americans begin their Thanksgiving holiday, a celebration with its roots in the country’s founding story of the British Puritans who came to the Northeast coast in the Mayflower in search of freedom to raise their families in a Biblical faith. There were other founding traditions, of course: Spanish, French, Dutch, Catholic as well as Protestant. However, it is not the earliest arrivals and their traditions but the latest ones who have been exercising the minds of some Americans lately.

As the Pew Hispanic Center notes, “The United States is more than four decades into what has been, in absolute numbers, the biggest immigration wave in its history–more than 40 million arrivals. Unlike previous waves that were almost entirely from Europe, the modern influx has been dominated by Hispanic and Asian immigrants.” Of these two groups the Hispanic is by far the largest and it contributed significantly to President Obama’s re-election. As family-minded America sits down to Thanksgiving dinner it might well spare a thought for what this means for its own tradition, and not just the next election.

The majority of Latinos have always voted Democrat in presidential elections. The largest share of their vote for a Republican candidate from 1980 to 2012 was 40 percent for George W. Bush in 2004. In 2008 that dropped to 31 percent, and in 2012 to a mere 27 percent for Mitt Romney -- while Obama won no less than 71 percent of the Latino vote. That proportion assumed greater significance for two reasons: the growth of the Latino population, and the failure of nearly 7 million white voters to turn out on election day.

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