One key outcome of Tuesday’s primaries in Indiana: House Republican leaders will have even more implacable crazies to contend with next year, and we’re surveying the damage on this week’s episode of “The Downballot.” Marlin Stutzman, a tea party OG who helped push out John Boehner, narrowly won the Republican nod to reclaim his old seat while the erratic Victoria Spartz (who voted to oust Mike Johnson while we were recording) successfully managed to “un-retire” more than a year after saying she wouldn’t seek another term. Expect even more “GOP in Disarray” headlines come 2025!
We also have an in-depth discussion with Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center, about his studies of Latinos in America. Whereas the fastest-growing Latino group was once Mexicans, now it’s Venezuelans. And while two-thirds of Latinos identified as Catholic not long ago, now less than half do—while the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated are soaring. Lopez zeroes in on the drop in support for Joe Biden among young Latino voters in particular but observes that it’s still early: Just 25% of Latino adults tell Pew they’re paying attention to the election. The show notes cannot do this conversation justice!
Subscribe to “The Downballot” wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode. New episodes come out every Thursday morning!
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
David Beard: Hello and welcome. I’m David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir: And I’m David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. “The Downballot” is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. You can subscribe to “The Downballot” wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you never miss an episode.
Beard: What are we diving into this week?
Nir: Well, we had some primaries in Indiana on Tuesday night that we are recapping and Republican leaders are probably going to be kind of sad about some of those outcomes. Then we move down to Georgia where a state panel is trying to get a Democratic candidate for Supreme Court to shut up about abortion. And then we move down to south Texas where a conservative Democratic congressman just got indicted on bribery charges. What does it mean for his election?
Then in our deep dive, we are talking to Mark Hugo Lopez of the Pew Research Center about a new study of Latino views on the election, including a wide variety of issues: immigration, the border, abortion, the economy, and more. There is so much to unpack. We have a jam-packed episode, so let’s get rolling.
Nir: Well, we kicked off the May primary season on Tuesday night with the Hoosier State. Beard, let’s get started on recapping Indiana primaries.
Beard: Yes, Indiana of course is pretty red nowadays. It’s been mostly a Republican primary exercise when races are competitive. So we had a number of Republican primaries and we want to start up at the top of the ticket with the governor’s race where there wasn’t really much of a surprise. This is an open seat, but one of the US senators was running for it, and that’s a pretty big name to move from Senate to governor. Though it mostly happens the other way. You see a lot more governors run for Senate than vice versa. But Mike Braun, an incumbent Indiana senator, decided to run for governor. He easily defeated the Lieutenant Governor, Suzanne Crouch, 40-22.
So he does have a Democratic opponent. That’s former state school superintendent Jennifer McCormick. She’s an ex-Republican. She left the party several years ago after the GOP started curtailing the powers of her office. Dems haven’t won a race for governor in Indiana since the year 2000, so this isn’t really looking like a particularly competitive race — but it’s good that we have a real candidate to go up against Braun and hopefully try to hold him accountable — but he’s widely expected to be the next governor of Indiana.
Nir: So there were several other primaries on the docket that I think were a little bit more interesting and Beard, like you were mentioning before, they were all on the Republican side for the US House. And I have to say that whoever replaces Mike Johnson as GOP leader … because come hell or high water, I would be shocked if he’s still the House GOP leader in 2025 … whoever replaces him is just not going to be happy about the results out of Indiana on Tuesday night. But first I want to mention one legit piece of good news that was out of Indiana’s 8th district. And all of these districts are very conservative; whoever wins the primary in each of these is almost certainly going to win the general election. So in the 8th district, which is in southwestern Indiana, state Senator Mark Messmer crushed former Congressman, John Hostettler, 39-20. Hostettler was making a very unexpected comeback after badly losing in 2006 in the general election back when this seat was competitive.
In fact, it was so competitive that it used to be known as the Bloody Eighth. Now it’s really a very red seat, so bloody red. The reason why I’m calling this good news is not because I have anything good to say about Mark Messmer, but because John Hostettler was just an old-school antisemite and I’m relieved to see him lose. This is a guy who embraced all kinds of conspiracy theories. He even wrote a book that claimed that a couple of Jews pushed America into the Iraq War. Twenty years ago this was definitely something you heard on the fringes of society. But here was a US congressman, a member of the Republican Party, actually pushing this conspiracy theory. Totally gross. Jewish groups and other organizations spent heavily to prevent his comeback. So I am just glad that he won’t be around next year.
Beard: And presumably Messmer will just go and be another anonymous Republican congressman, of which there are many, which is better than the alternative.
Nir: Well, two of the other candidates who won on Tuesday night definitely will not be anonymous. One prominent member of what I like to call the pain in the ass caucus will be returning to Congress next year and she’ll be joined by a former member who is now on track to represent a neighboring district. So in the 5th district, which is in the central part of the state, we’ve talked a lot about Congresswoman Victoria Spartz who announced her retirement early in 2023, then spent the next year waffling back and forth about whether she really wanted to retire, and supposedly was even considering resigning early, and then she jumped back in right at the filing deadline. Except wealthy state Representative Chuck Goodrich had been running for pretty much that whole time while Spartz was going back and forth and dithering and he wasn’t interested in deferring to her. He stayed in the race and spent a lot of money.
Spartz wound up winning, but it was not really a triumphant win. She beat him 39-33, and for an incumbent, 39% is a really abysmal showing in a primary. It looks like Spartz was saved by the fact that there were seven other candidates in the race not counting Goodrich. So this was a nine-candidate field and that big batch of challengers seemed to split the anti-incumbent vote. We often refer to this as the clown car effect, and this time it really delivered for a true clown.
Beard: And I will say I think Goodrich’s showing is good enough to put him in a decent position looking forward. This got to be sort of a nasty race. So I’m sure their favorables aren’t the best at the moment, but I think he’s probably pretty well known from all the advertising now. Losing to an incumbent 39-33, even one as strange as Spartz, is pretty respectable.
And I could very much imagine Spartz resigning early, not running in two years, running for president, or who knows what Victoria Spartz is going to do. But I would not be surprised if Goodrich wasn’t the Republican nominee in say two years or four years from now. So we may not have seen the last of him.
Nir: I think that is probably right, but right next door in the 3rd district, in the northeastern corner of the state, we are hearing from someone who I have to admit I did not ever expect to hear from again. Former Congressman Marlin Stutzman fared a lot better than John Hostettler. He narrowly squeaked past businessman Tim Smith by a 24 -23 margin. Now Stutzman, if you’re an old head like us, that name might be familiar to you. He was a Tea Party original who represented the same district from 2011 until 2017. He waged a very unsuccessful bid for Senate in 2016 and we figured that was the last we would ever see of Marlin Stutzman.
When he was in Congress, he was a member of the Freedom Caucus and like any good member of the Freedom Caucus, he viewed his chief job not as representing his constituents, but as causing trouble for GOP leadership. He was a major participant in the 2015 push to oust John Boehner as speaker, and it didn’t exactly work in any parliamentary sense like we saw with Kevin McCarthy, but Boehner did wind up resigning later that year. So I guess you kind of have to say the Freedom Caucus did ultimately kind of sort succeed in pushing John Boehner around. I don’t know. What’s your take?
Beard: Yeah, well, that led to him being pushed out. So I think it’s fair to say that if they didn’t exist, he probably wouldn’t have bailed because they were making his life so frustrating. So I think that’s fair to say.
Nir: Well, that’s the kind of guy whoever is the next GOP leader is going to have to deal with. But the most notorious thing that Stutzman did, and I just love this, so in 2013, he was a big-time supporter of the federal government shutdown, and this lasted two and a half weeks. At the time, it was the second-longest shutdown ever. It is still the third-longest shutdown of all time. And while Republicans the next year wound up doing very well in the 2014 elections, in that fall of 2013 when this shutdown was going on, Republicans were getting hammered in the polls and it was just not a good move and not a good look for them.
And in the end, a deal was struck, the shutdown was averted, and guys like Stutzman were super fucking pissed and he said, this is a quote, “We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.” Well, he’s had more than a decade to think about it. I hope he’s figured something out.
Beard: Yeah, you often see these Tea Party folks or MAGA folks as they now are sort of be like, “We have to get something out of this,” because they’re not really policy people. They have a lot of slogans about the border or whatever, and then they’re like, we have to get a victory, but they don’t really have any concept of what changes in policy they want to see. So it just becomes this giant PR exercise.
I do want to go back and flag his extremely low victory number; Stutzman won with 24% of the vote by one percentage point. I call this the Ted Budd special. I don’t know if Ted Bud is the lowest ever. It’s just the one that I remember. In Budd’s original run for Congress back in 2016, he won the Republican primary with 20% of the vote in his congressional district in North Carolina. At that point, they didn’t have runoffs in North Carolina, so he just went straight to the general and won easily there — and, of course, now is a US Senator. But it’s wild how low you can get some of these percentages when you get a multi-candidate field like this where not even a quarter of the voters supported Stutzman, but now he’s going to be a congressman.
Nir: Well, we’ve got another extremely different race coming up in less than two weeks where I can guarantee you that the winner will not prevail with a small plurality because there are only two candidates running. So we mentioned the upcoming race for Georgia Supreme Court on last week’s show, but there have been some new developments since then. So it’s worth a deeper dive. And again, as a reminder, it’s taking place simultaneously with Georgia’s primaries on May 21; if there had been three or more candidates and one candidate failed to win a majority, then there would be a November runoff. But since we only have two candidates, obviously someone has to win a majority, so there can’t be a runoff.
So those two candidates, as we mentioned, are conservative Justice Andrew Pinson — who was appointed to the bench in 2022 by Republican governor Brian Kemp — and former Democratic Rep. John Barrow, a one-time Blue Dog who hung on long after most other conservative Southern Democrats, but he ultimately lost in the 2014 GOP wave. So despite a wobbly record on abortion back when he was in Congress, Barrow has loudly championed the issue on the campaign trail. He’s made abortion the centerpiece of his campaign, and he’s noted that the state Supreme Court will likely once again rule on a pending challenge to Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, which the Supreme Court allowed to take effect last year. And here is a TV ad that Barrow recently began running.
I’m John Barrow, and as a lawyer, I fought in Georgia courtrooms just like this one to hold big government and big companies accountable. Now I’m running for the Georgia Supreme Court to protect our personal freedoms, including the freedom of women to make their own medical decisions like abortion, fertility, and birth control. Politicians should not be making your private medical decisions. Remember to vote in the state Supreme Court race and I’ll protect your rights.
Beard: Now, you’ve heard us say this before, but, of course, this sounds a lot like the campaign that Janet Protasiewicz ran in Wisconsin last year to great success. And so of course it only makes sense that Barrow would embrace a similar approach. Now, if you remember, there was a lot of hand-wringing around that approach from Republicans who were like, “You’re talking about an issue that’s going to come before the courts; how dare you?” But of course, this was very successful. That’s what voters wanted. They wanted to hear and be assured about how Protasiewicz would address these issues.
But now down in Georgia, there’s a state watchdog agency trying to get Barrow to stop talking about these issues. And I want to note we only know all of this because of some really good reporting by Greg Bluestein at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. So as Bluestein explained this week, a panel called the Judicial Qualifications Commission recently sent Barrow a letter complaining about the way he’s discussed abortion, saying he’s violating state rules regarding judicial elections, and so if Barrow doesn’t stop and remove the remarks from his website and take down the TV ads and all of that, then he could face sanctions from this body, which could include disbarment.
Nir: So Barrow decided to fight back, and he is of course doing so in the courts. He filed a federal lawsuit saying that these rules of conduct regarding judicial elections violate his 1st Amendment rights. Now, the commission said in this letter, we’re not questioning your right to speak out about the issues, but the problem we do have is these very specific complaints such as Barrow supposedly making promises about highly sensitive cases that could come before the court. But some of these complaints are borderline silly. I read this letter; I kind of love this one. They say that Barrow “created the false impression that if elected your singular vote would or could result in a change in the law related to abortion in Georgia.” Talk about telling on yourself. Are they saying, is this commission saying that the state Supreme Court’s views on abortion are so baked in that Barrow wouldn’t be able to persuade four fellow justices to take his side? I mean, I’m sure that’s right, but they’re not supposed to admit that.
Beard: Yeah, presumably all of these justices currently on the court — who the commission has not criticized or sanctioned anyway — they are presumably neutral bodies who have no opinion on any cases that have not come before them yet. So it’s very possible that Barrow would be the deciding vote if these justices are truly so unbiased and neutral as the commission claims. So this is really all made up by the commission ultimately.
Nir: Yeah, it’s ridiculous because they are holding a challenger to a different standard than the incumbents because all of the incumbents have had the chance to express their views on abortion by writing opinions and ruling on the law, including, like I said, that ruling last year where they allowed this ban to go into effect. But the one person who isn’t allowed to express their opinions is John Barrow the challenger.
Bluestein also recently reported that no incumbent on the Georgia Supreme Court has lost a bid for reelection in more than a hundred years and crap like this is part of the reason why, and it’s good that Barrow is not taking this sitting down. In fact, I think this letter that he got from this commission is a godsend, and his campaign has handled it pretty brilliantly. It’s like they’re pulling a reverse Streisand here — the famous Streisand Effect that she didn’t want photos of her home appearing on the web, and so she sued about them and then, of course, everyone started paying attention to them, exactly the opposite of what she was hoping for.
Obviously, Barrow sued over this because he wanted it to get more attention, and it did. It’s been carried in outlets other than the AJC — obviously, Daily Kos wrote about it — but other national outlets have talked about it as well. And Republicans seem to want to help him. I couldn’t believe this. So I’m sure Downballot listeners remember former Senator Kelly Loeffler who was appointed to fill that Senate vacancy in 2020 and then lost to Raphael Warnock. She actually tweeted out a link to Bluestein’s piece.
Like, why are you doing this, whining that Democrats want to move everything out of voters’ hands and into the courts under liberal judges? I mean, that’s just so funny in Georgia of all places, which is just an arch-conservative state Supreme Court, but it’s like, please, please don’t throw John Barrow into that briar patch. Don’t talk about this.
Beard: Yeah, her complaint also makes no sense because if anything would happen through liberal judges, it would be as a result of voters in Georgia electing those liberal judges. So the voters didn’t actually ever lose anything. They decided, hey, we would want Barrow — and other Democratic judges who will rule more in line with what we believe should be the law — in office, and that’s the opposite of taking things out of voters’ hands. That is the voters express what they want, and then the people they elected respect that. So what they want is for voters to shut up and not get in the way of their anti-abortion agenda. That’s what they want.
Nir: A hundred percent. If voters happen to agree with Republicans, then voters are to be respected, and if they don’t, then they should be ignored.
Beard: One last story we want to cover in our weekly hits takes us down to south Texas where federal prosecutors announced on Friday that they’d indicted Democratic representative Henry Cuellar and his wife for allegedly accepting close to $600,000 in bribes from an oil company controlled by the government of Azerbaijan and from a bank based in Mexico. Now that all sounds like quite the story. We’re going to obviously focus on the electoral side of things here. The Texas congressman did respond to the report by proclaiming his innocence and insisting that he was going to remain on the ballot and intended to win in November. Now, this is a district that wasn’t getting a lot of play this cycle. It looks like it was going to be a pretty easy re-election for Cuellar, but now it is a pretty competitive on-the-numbers district. So I think the GOP is almost certainly going to take a fresh look at it.
Now, this is the 28th district. It runs from the eastern San Antonio suburbs down towards the border. It favored Joe Biden, but only 53 to 46 in 2020, and it’s definitely been trending to the right in recent years. So Cuellar won by a comfortable margin of 57-43 in 2022. And so in part for that reason, I think Republicans were less inclined to take a hard run at it. But with this indictment, there’s certainly a good chance that they’re going to change their minds on that front.
That’s not to say that Cuellar hasn’t had difficult races recently. Both in 2020 and 2022, he faced a progressive primary challenger as Cuellar is probably the most conservative Democrat left in the House Democratic caucus and the only anti-abortion House Democrat left in the House caucus. He faced attorney Jessica Cisneros in 2020 and 2022 who was running to his left. She ran very competitive races. She lost 52-48 in 2020, and then in 2022 she forced a runoff and lost extremely narrowly 50.3 to 49.7.
But after those two races, he didn’t have a progressive primary challenger for this cycle. So he comfortably got the nomination and then it was looking like he was on a glide path to reelection. But of course, this big indictment threw a wrench into that, and it remains to be seen what will come from this race for the rest of the year.
Nir: In that primary campaign in 2022, Cuellar’s home and campaign offices were raided by the FBI and it was very unclear exactly what was going on. There just wasn’t a ton of reporting around it. At that time, Cuellar’s attorney claimed that Cuellar had been told he was not a target of whatever the FBI was investigating. Obviously, with hindsight, that seems to have been impossible, and Cisneros supporters were making an argument at the time that if the other shoe dropped and Cuellar did get indicted, then he would be the more risky candidate on the general election ballot.
Obviously, he did hold on very narrowly in that primary, and he did win, like you said, comfortably, Beard, in the general election. But if there had been an indictment before November 2022, he might very well have lost.
What was interesting is that Cuellar actually ran further ahead of the presidential numbers than I think just about anyone else in the Democratic caucus in 2022. It’s really hard to see that happening again if he remains under indictment come this fall. On the other hand, trying to replace him on the ballot at this late date, it’s not really clear exactly how that might unfold or even whether it could unfold in a helpful way, but he also just does not seem like the kind of guy who is going to go anywhere. His response very much reminds me of Bob Menendez’s response to all of the bribery and corruption allegations thrown against him.
Beard: Yeah, I would be very surprised if Cuellar isn’t on the ballot because he’s not going to want to leave, he’s going to want to stay a congressman, and potentially we’ve seen in the past people have used leverage like resigning from office as part of a deal. I’m not saying that that’s something that could or would happen in this case, but that’s something we’ve seen in the past. I very much doubt Cuellar is going to voluntarily step aside and take his name off the ballot or anything like that.
I do think that 2022 outcome… I think the fact that he had this progressive challenger run so hard against him probably helped a little bit in the general election to make everybody feel like, oh, he’s so far to the right. So then the almost conservative Republicans who probably voted for Trump were like, “I can vote for Cuellar because all the Democrats think he’s super Republican.” So that was probably a factor there.
The other issue around the general election this year is that there are two really underfunded Republicans running. They’re in a runoff that is taking place later this month, so we don’t actually know who’s going to be his opponent yet. Neither of them had any money really to speak of. So if this does turn into a race, it’s going to be on the backs of the NRCC or outside GOP groups, which I think they will, but they’re going to have to do the lift. The candidate is not going to be the one raising money here.
Nir: Well, that does it for our weekly hits. Coming up on our deep dive, we have a totally fascinating in-depth conversation with Mark Hugo Lopez, who is the director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center. Mark is talking with us about the views of Latinos on a wide variety of issues and how they might affect the 2024 elections. We have so much to cover, so please stay with us after the break.
Nir: I am super excited about our guest this week. Joining us on ‘The Downballot’ is Mark Hugo Lopez, who is the Director of Race and Ethnicity Research at Pew Research Center. We rely on Pew data so frequently, both on the show and in our day-to-day writing. Mark, it is fantastic to have you on with us.
Mark Hugo Lopez: Thank you. It’s really great to be here and I’m really excited to get to talk to the two Davids.
Nir: David. Well, it’s our pleasure as well. So I wanted to just start off with the basics. Why don’t you tell our listeners what exactly it is that you do at Pew Research and how you came to this particular field of research on race and ethnicity?
Lopez: So I’m the director of a group called the Race and Ethnicity team at Pew Research, and our focus is to understand the nation’s changing demography. As you know, the nation has become more racially and ethically diverse, but we also want to understand what it means to be of the many different groups that make up the demographics of the country. So for example, how do Asian Americans see their identity? What about Latinos? What about Black Americans, multiracial Americans? A lot of our work has looked at the notions of identity, how people see themselves, and how they identify themselves, but also of course, there are a number of interesting policy questions that are oftentimes related to or tied to some of these groups.
So some of our focus on the story of immigration has been a big part of our Latino and our Asian American work, but also interestingly — I don’t know if you know this or not, but about one in 10 Black Americans today were born outside the United States. So the story of immigration kind of cuts across multiple groups, but the work that we do is really to tell the stories about much of the nation’s diversity and also how the country sees the progress with regards to racial equality, but also the importance of these groups for the upcoming election.
Nir: And so how did you yourself get involved in this field? What is your background in the topic of race and ethnicity research?
Lopez: So my work has primarily been in the area of particularly Latinos. I’ve long been the director of Hispanic work here at the Pew Research Center. My training is as an economist. My area of interest has long been around labor market gaps. For example, Hispanics versus non-Hispanic workers, but also the importance of language in shaping the experiences of Latinos, but other groups as well. I came to the Pew Research Center after 13 years of being a professor at the University of Maryland where I was a professor of economics, but also of public policy particularly, and have spent time teaching at places like Princeton as well, in the policy school there. So my work has oftentimes been about taking it to the data and trying to see what we can find from the data, and that’s really what’s been a big driver of my work. Here at Pew Research, that’s exactly what we do, is oftentimes design our own surveys and take it to the data.
Beard: So I’d love to start with some of the policy views that you found in some of your studies, and then we’ll move more into the electoral implications of all of that. So let’s first talk about immigration and the border. Obviously one of the big topics in politics, it comes up pretty regularly, and Pew conducted a study about this pretty big one earlier this year. So why don’t you take us through the main takeaways of that study?
Lopez: Yeah, so we took a look at the opinions of the US public with regards to the situation at the US-Mexico border. And some important context first, of course, is that if you remember back at the end of last year, we were hearing about record numbers of people presenting themselves at the US-Mexico border seeking asylum. You’ve probably heard stories about migrants coming all the way from places like Brazil or China or India or Africa and making their way through the Americas to the US-Mexico border, crossing the border, and then presenting themselves to border patrol agents and then asking for asylum. Those numbers reached record numbers. The country hadn’t seen the millions of people who were coming that we had seen in the last year or so. And so we did a survey to find out how the public felt about that. First, does the public think that there’s a crisis or a problem on the border?
The majority of the US public, more than 70%, say it’s at least a crisis or a major problem for the country that so many people are coming to the US-Mexico border. We also asked about whether or not how people assess the job the US government is doing, handling the situation at the border. And here too, we see over 70% of US adults tell us that they rate the job the government is doing at the border as a bad job.
And that’s something that you’ll see Democrats are more likely to rate the US government that way than was the case just a few years ago. So there have been some changes in the public’s view of what’s happening on the border, but the public is more likely to say it’s a crisis or a major problem for the country, and also to give the government a poor rating in how it’s handling the situation at the border.
Nir: So based on those observations, it’s pretty clear what people don’t want to see in our immigration system, or at the very least, they don’t want to see what they were perceiving to be this crisis at the border. But what exactly is it that people do want? What sort of immigration system would Americans prefer? Was this also included in your study?
Lopez: We did ask about a number of policy priorities around what should immigration policy be prioritized when it comes to US immigration policy, and it’s interesting to see what the US public has supported. So, for example, on some measures, you’ll find the public is in support of increasing the number of judges, for example, that could help process the growing number of asylum cases that were emerging as many people came, presented themselves as seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border, and you find that the US public is very much in support of having more judges.
But also you’ll find that about half of US adults say that those who are in the country illegally should be deported. And so there’s a little bit of a mix of supporting and providing more services for immigrants who are coming, but also being sure that the government is enforcing its laws that are already in place to deport those who shouldn’t be here, but also to make sure that the border is secure. That was one of the sets of findings that we had in this particular survey, which is a mix of findings about helping folks who are here, but also enforcing the laws that are in place.
Nir: I want to get some clarity, try to drill down on the issue here, and I think that’s the advantage of this podcast format that we really can go beyond these headlines. Of course, seeking asylum is legal. The American system allows folks to come and seek asylum at our borders. So when folks have a perception of migrants who “should not be here,” how does that play into the fact that seeking asylum is allowed under the law?
Lopez: Well, the US public in many ways has limited experience with the US immigration system. How much the US public knows about how the process works is actually an interesting question, something that we want to explore in a future survey to be honest. But it is also interesting that on the one hand, you do find that the US public is, for example, supportive of making it easier for asylum seekers to work here legally while they’re waiting for a decision about their application. About 47% of US adults say that would make the situation at the US-Mexico border better.
As I mentioned earlier, about 60% say the situation at the border would be better if we had more judges who could process those asylum application cases. But at the same time, as I mentioned, you’ll find that about half of US adults say things would be better at the border if we were deporting people who shouldn’t be in the country or who are in the country illegally.
Now, how does that fit with asylum seekers? Well, it takes time for the asylum application to be processed, but there are also many people whose asylum request was denied and who are still in the United States and therefore in the country without authorization. The public is thinking about some of those folks, or the folks who should be deported, as part of a potential way of making things at the border better, in other words, enforcing the laws I was talking about earlier.
Nir: So Mark, I want to once again be as granular as possible in asking my next question. It’s so easy for folks to talk about the views of Latinos, but of course, as we know and have talked with other folks who’ve been on ‘The Downballot’ in the past, Latinos are anything but a monolith, and you have so many different groups that fall under that header.
So I want to ask this question with that big caveat in mind, specifically for quite some time, there was a widespread belief that Latinos writ large were broadly pro-immigration and largely opposed to the stricter border policies that Republicans typically favor. But that has become, I think, less clear in recent years. So what does the polling say now about Latino views on immigration policy, and are there any interesting breakdowns that you’ve observed among different groups of Latinos?
Lopez: That’s a really great question because as you noted, the nation’s Latino population is diverse on a number of dimensions. So we oftentimes talk about the diversity when it comes to origin groups. So there are people who are Cuban, who are Mexican, who are Puerto Rican, who are Dominican, who are Salvadoran, who are Guatemalan. That’s an important dimension of diversity. But there are others as well.
On religious diversity, for example, about 15% of all Latino registered voters are evangelical Christians, about half are Catholics, and the remainder are people who have largely no religious affiliation. Another dimension is how far somebody is from the immigrant experience of their family. Some people are immigrants themselves. Some are the US born children of immigrant parents. Others were born in the United States to US born parents. I’m just touching on some of the big broad categories here that one might think of when one thinks about the diversity within the nation’s Latino population. But as you noted, the population or the group, and you notice that I’m saying population and not community to be specific here, to say Latino voters, for example, versus the Latino vote because this is a group with many different opinions.
However, all that said about one-third of Latino adults in our most recent survey, the same survey we’ve been talking about, say that increasing deportations of people who are in the country illegally is something that would make the situation of the US-Mexico better. That’s not new. We’ve seen in past surveys, for example, all the way back to 2010 with SB 1070, 15% of Latino adults then nationally were saying that those who were in the country illegally should be deported.
Nir: Sorry, I just want to pause you right there. You mentioned SB 1070, you’re talking about the 2010-era Arizona law that was often referred to as the “papers please law,” a very aggressive law in terms of cracking down on immigration?
Lopez: That’s right, yes. Thank you for that clarification. I appreciate it. It’s important for us to be clear about that timing. But we had done a survey back then around the time of Arizona’s, SB 1070, this “papers please law” as you described it, and we found that 15% of Latino adults then supported the deportation of people in the country illegally.
You’ll find that US-born Latinos are more likely to support something like this than those who were born in another country. You might find, for example, among origin groups, Cubans, who for a long time had a different pathway to citizenship, were perhaps more supportive of restrictive immigration policies than you see for say, Mexican and Mexican-Americans, many of whom are themselves, the children of undocumented parents. So there have been some distinct differences in the views of Latinos, depending on which group we’re talking about. But again, it highlights that even something like immigration is one of many issues that are of importance to the group, but also that Latinos have different views, particularly Latino voters.
Nir: And so have you seen shifts over time? I mean, I know you mentioned specifically SB 1070 compared to more general questions today. So I don’t know if that’s a directly comparable trend line, but obviously Pew, you’re in the field so often you do so much research. What kind of trends have you noticed, again among Latino populations to use the term that you said you preferred?
Lopez: So there are two things that we’ve noticed. On the one hand, for some policies, there hasn’t been a lot of change. So for example, a vast majority of Latino adults, 80% or more are in favor of providing a pathway to citizenship for those who are in the country illegally. You also find that more than 75%, more than three-quarters of Latino adults support a program like DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or the Dreamers program that’s been in place since the Obama years. Many Latinos, 75%, support a program like that, that even provided a pathway to citizenship for folks in that program or some sort of legal pathway.
On the other hand, though, we have found that the share who support the deportation of those from the country without authorization has gone up slightly. Now we’ve asked the question differently, but from 15% back in 2010 among Latino adults to about a third today among Latino adults. However, compared to the US population, Latinos are more likely to be supportive of policies that provide pathways to citizenship for those who are in the country without authorization. Maybe that’s no surprise given that about eight million or so of the nation’s 11 million unauthorized immigrants are people from Latin America.
Beard: So I want to take us now to more of the electoral side of things, but I do want to stay on this topic at first. As we’ve seen, obviously the border and immigration writ large has been a major topic, particularly of the right attacking the current administration. You guys have also done, of course, polling on the race between Biden and Trump. How have you seen the border and immigration affect the race, either broadly or within these specific groups that we’ve been talking about?
Lopez: This is another great question. And while at the center, we’ve only recently done a first head-to-head of Trump and Biden in a survey, and I’ll talk about the Latino voters’ results in just a little bit. One of the things that is interesting is all this that we have just talked about in immigration, while it is an important issue for many Americans, there are other issues that in our surveys, Americans have pointed to as being of greater importance for both the president and Congress, for example, to address.
The economy and inflation are things that you probably have heard, not only from surveys like Pew Research but other surveys as well, highlighting that the public is concerned about those issues. Unemployment, the job market for immigration, has oftentimes been a little farther down the list of issues behind things like healthcare and so forth, and particularly economic issues. And that’s no different than our surveys. About half of the US adults say that dealing with immigration should be a top priority for the Congress and President to address.
How about when it comes to where Latino voters stand though with regards to voting for one of the two presidential candidates? So when we did a survey in April, we found that 52% of Latino registered voters said that they would vote for Joe Biden if the election were held then, and 44% said the same with regard to Donald Trump if the election were held then in April. That suggests that there has been a shift in Latino voters’ support for particularly Donald Trump from 2016 to 2020 and from the survey that we did in April of 2024. Back in 2016, Trump won 28% of Latino voters support. In 2020, that number had gone up to 38%. And now our most recent poll shows 44%, which is, to be honest, it’s really interesting, not much different than how George W. Bush did in 2004, a Republican with Latino voters back then 20 years ago. But Bush is a very different presidential candidate than Donald Trump, particularly when it comes to issues that might be of interest and importance to Latino voters.
Beard: Now, one of my favorite sorts of graphs… I love it whenever Pew puts out a report, they have a whole written section, but they also have these great graphs, and you can just go through and look at the graphs that honestly get like 80 to 90% of the information off of the graphs because they’re so informative. But one of the ones I find really interesting looking at the 2024 race is, because this is a rematch from 2020, looking at it among 2020 Biden voters, and among 2020 Trump voters, and you have that broken down in one of the graphs by race and by age. And what you see is that the shifts in this poll that you guys put out is predominantly among Hispanic and Asian voters, and among 18 to 49 versus 50 and up. And so what you’ve got here is this shift among when you combine that these younger Hispanic voters and younger Asian voters that are marking the biggest chunk of this shift from four years ago from the Democratic candidate to the Republican candidate.
So what do we know about these voters? What do we know about what they care about and why we think they may be making this shift to the right over these past four years?
Lopez: That’s a really great question. So when you take a look at the findings, first off, I’m glad that you find our charts and this story that we tell clear in the charts and that the charts sometimes even just stand alone by themselves. I’ll share that with our digital folks, so they’re going to love that.
Nir: Oh, absolutely. I mean, you guys are a model of clarity. I have often tweeted out just the charts. Absolutely love those.
Lopez: Thank you. It is intentional on our part, but a lot of thought goes into them. But let’s talk about this finding of who’s changing their vote this time around compared to 2020. It’s a really interesting question. So how stable is the support for Biden, for example, among people who voted for him in 2020 versus today? And then, the same thing for Donald Trump. Younger Latino voters and younger Asian voters, may be reflecting some of the challenges that Biden is having more broadly with young people generally. While we didn’t quite do polling to find out exactly why they are feeling the way that they are, one of the things that comes to mind for me is I wonder how much this may be a reflection of dissatisfaction with Joe Biden and the Biden administration on a number of issues, not just around immigration, not just around the economy, but also other things as well, such as of course, the war in Gaza.
But one of the things here that I think is also interesting is that we’re way out from the election still. The campaign, while it’s getting going, hasn’t really taken off. We find that among the Latino public, for example, only about 25% of Latino adults tell us they’re paying attention to the news and to the election. So when it comes to the race that’s going to come in September, you’ll start to see in September, I think the public hasn’t quite focused on it. So I wonder to what extent some of the support that you see slipping for Biden may reflect a concern about or a view about dissatisfaction with the way the president is handling his job.
I will also add that one of the sharpest declines that we’ve seen since 2022 in the share of a group that has a favorable view of Biden has been among Hispanics who have seen their share drop from over 50% to about 31% from 2022 to today. And that’s the sharpest drop of any group of Americans.
Nir: You’re talking about favorability numbers there or vote intention?
Lopez: A favorability number, favorability number. Not a vote intention, but a favorability number. Do you have a favorable view of Joe Biden or not?
Nir: And so how does this same population feel about Donald Trump? Because of course, one thing that has been a popular topic, and I realize we’re getting a little bit astray from “The Downballot” here, but it has such great import for down ballot races — one popular topic has been these “double haters,” folks who are unhappy with both Biden and Donald Trump. A lot of data seems to suggest that they might actually pull the lever for Biden in the end, that the intensity of feeling might not be equal even if they say they both don’t like them. So I’m curious if you have any insight on that.
Lopez: Yeah, that’s a really great point. I think that intensity here may be more in Biden’s favor as you were just mentioning. One other thing that I would add though is that we did ask in the same April 2024 survey that if you had the opportunity, if you had the power to, would you remove Trump from the ballot, Biden from the ballot, or both candidates from the ballot and replace them with somebody else? And about half of the US registered voters say that they would replace both candidates if they could. And that was true of Latinos, true of Black voters, true of other voters as well. It’s really interesting to see that there’s dissatisfaction with both candidates having a substantial share, or as you put it, people who are haters of both.
Beard: So you mentioned right when we were getting into the more electoral conversation that immigration is often not necessarily the top issue that people are basing decisions around and caring about the most. Do you find that those top issues vary within the different demographic groups in terms of — are there certain issues that Hispanic voters care the most about, or Black voters or Asian voters, or something that they care less about than the average American?
Lopez: This again, is a really great question because yes, it does vary, and you’ll see this particularly for Black voters. So for example, for Black voters, issues like healthcare education or racial justice will be right behind the economy as top issues for them. Whereas for Latino voters, it’s all the economic issues which are at the top, the state of the economy, the job market, and inflation.
So that’s really interesting to see that depending on the group, there can be some differences. Another issue where you see some big differences is racial justice. And so racial justice oftentimes gets listed higher as an issue for Black Americans than it does for any other racial or ethnic group. And then immigration, even though we were talking earlier about Latinos, it’s not a top issue, it oftentimes rates higher as an issue than it does for white, Black, or sometimes Asian. It depends on the survey of voters as well.
So yes, there are different profiles of the issues that are most important to each group. We haven’t even talked about abortion, but abortion too can be an issue that is related to, in many ways the religious affiliations of groups. So you’ll see, for example, evangelical Latinos are more likely to say abortion is an important issue for them compared to say, Latinos who are Catholic or who are unaffiliated. Although interestingly, abortion has risen as an issue over the last two years or so for Latino voters as something that’s on their minds.
Nir: And when you say that abortion is of greater importance for evangelical Latinos, in which direction are we talking about here?
Lopez: That abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
Nir: And so those numbers have gone up in recent years, even though trends among most Americans definitely favor greater abortion access.
Lopez: And that’s one of the interesting things about Latinos. Yes, it has changed. So you’ve seen that Latinos have become, in some ways more like the general public. So overall Latinos are more like the general public in saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases, about 62% of Latino adults say that that’s the case. Ten or 15 years ago, fewer than half said that. But among Latinos, there are different stories. The issue of abortion as an issue in an election or an issue for the president and Congress to deal with has been rising for evangelical Hispanic voters.
Even though for evangelical Hispanic voters, the majority have long said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. So there’s a little bit of nuance in that story, but it is notable that Latinos have moved towards the general public over the course of the last decade or more in their views on abortion. And by the way, the same thing happened with same-sex marriage.
Nir: You make me want to ask another question, Mark. I feel like I could keep going forever. Which Latino populations from among the broader Latino umbrella are growing most quickly these days? We don’t tend to hear a lot about evangelical Latinos, for instance. I think it’s a very common conception that, oh, Latino and Catholic go hand in hand. So which groups in that much broader group should we really be paying more attention to as we go forward? Also, you talked about country of origin, religion, and immigration status in terms of newcomers to the country like first gen or second gen. So yeah, please tell us about that.
Lopez: So there are many different ways to think about the fastest-growing group among the nation’s Latino population. First, let’s talk about origin groups. When you look at the nation’s Latino population, we have folks who are from all parts of Latin America, represented among people of Latino origin or Hispanic origin limited in the country today. In the past, Mexicans had been the fastest-growing group. That was true in the ’80s and the ’90s. And today, they’re the majority of all Hispanic Americans.
Since 2010, the fastest-growing group has actually been Venezuelans. And if you’ve been following the news about who’s seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border, about who’s being bussed from Texas to places like New York or Washington D.C or other places, and who’s the fastest growing group in the state of Florida — Venezuelans are the group that is the fastest growing now, followed by Guatemalans and Dominicans.
And what’s interesting here is that these are not the usual groups that one thinks of when one thinks of Latinos. Most of the time when people think of Latinos, they’re thinking about Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban. But now the fastest growing groups are Venezuelans, Dominicans, and Guatemalans. And I could add Hondurans to that list, and Peruvians. It’s a different set of groups, which means the population’s becoming more diverse.
Nir: Well, I’m from New York City, and there’s of course a huge Dominican presence here. It always has been. So for me, that’s high on the list.
Lopez: And you’ll see that the Dominican population is growing fast in South Florida. You’ll see that it’s growing fast in other parts of the country, like for example, in the Boston area, not just New York City. And then the Puerto Rican population’s changing too. The island continues to see out-migration. In fact, the population of the island continues to decline. It’s now around 3.2 million, but about two decades ago it was 3.6, 3.7 million. So it’s been a steady decline with a couple of hurricane events like Hurricane Maria, for example, having a real impact on the population.
But where are folks going? Orlando is actually one of the fastest growing Puerto Rican populations in the United States, and it’s one that is bringing together people from the New York area and people from the island and so have different communities emerging within Orlando. This makes the Orlando area kind of interesting in terms of its politics because there’s a strong Puerto Rican evangelical presence as well in central Florida.
Now, there are other dimensions that we talked about earlier that are fast-growing. So here’s some other interesting things. The fastest growing immigrant generation is actually the third generation now, people born in the US to US-born parents. For many decades, in fact, it was the immigrant population that was the fastest growing. That was in the ’80s and ’90s. In the two 2000s and 2010s, it was the “second generation,” people born here to immigrant parents. But now it’s actually the more settled population, the third generation, which is fastest growing. It’s younger, and it really is sometimes even of mixed heritage. So people may be mixed race, for example.
Let’s talk about religion. In terms of religion, the Latino population is going through a lot of change, and in some ways, it reflects the US experience. But the share who are Catholic has fallen from 67% in 2010 to about 46% today. Think about that. Fewer than half of Latino adults in the United States today say they’re Catholic.
What’s been growing? Well, that evangelical share has stayed about the same at about 15 to 17%. But the group that’s been growing fastest, which has now 30% of all Latino adults are people who say they have no religious affiliation, many of them former Catholics. So that’s really young Latinos who are driving that particular change. But it reflects more broadly a national story of the rise of what we call at the Pew Research Center, the Nones, which are people who have no religious affiliation.
I would add that many of those young Latinos might have in their house, though, religious iconography like a candle to the Virgin de Guadalupe. So while they may say they don’t have any religious affiliation, the cultural touchstones or religion are a part of their lives still in some ways as well.
But those are just three big ways the population is changing. If you don’t mind, I want to add one more. This last one I think is something that, it might resonate with many folks around the country. Did you know that one in 10 restaurants in the United States are Mexican restaurants? Now, not all Mexican restaurants are owned by people who necessarily Latino or who are Mexican, but it speaks to is the dispersion of the nation’s Latino population.
Also, the fastest-growing Latino populations are in places like North Dakota and South Dakota. That’s really fascinating because it really shows that this population has dispersed to every corner of the country. So there is a Latino presence in every metro area in the United States that’s significant. But also that means there are Latino voters in every part of the United States. So as we talk about the Latino population, it’s not just a population that’s focused in California, Texas, and Florida. It’s a population that’s not really national in scope and having more than just electoral impacts and economic impacts, but also cultural impacts on what it means to be in America today.
Nir: Well, we have been having an incredibly illuminating conversation with Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of race and ethnicity Research at Pew Research Center. Mark, before we let you go, please let Downballot listeners know where they can find Pew’s work online and also where they can find you on social media.
Lopez: So you can find Pew’s work at www.pewresearch.org. And that’s spelled pewresearch.org. I always have to check myself to spell research correctly. Copy editors help a lot. And you can always find me on Twitter at the handle MHugoLopez.
Nir: Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming to “The Downballot” today.
Lopez: Thank you for the opportunity to be here. It’s a real pleasure.
Beard: That’s all from us this week. Thanks to Mark Hugo Lopez for joining us. “The Downballot” comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing [email protected]. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to “The Downballot” and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our editor Drew Roderick, and we’ll be back next week with a new episode.
