That would work the other way—with non-college educated people becoming more democrat. Instead, you see the opposite: college educated people becoming more democrat after historically favoring republicans, and non-college educated people becoming more Republican after historically favoring democrats.
Also, on the issues you mention (abortion and taxes) the GOP is more moderate than before. Trump is the first GOP candidate ever to oppose total abortion bans. He also was the first to take entitlement reform off the table.
> Ah the old "people only disagree with my politics because they are tricked".
That's not really an accurate paraphrasing, but I guess the gist is close enough. Yes, I think many people vote the way they do because they are misled.
It also doesn’t make sense because the GOP has been messaging to Florida Hispanics on socialism for decades. But the group with the strongest anti-socialist beliefs, Cubans, are mostly second generation now and that messaging isn’t as powerful. Obama narrowly won Cubans in 2012, with 53%. A decade later, DeSantis won them with 68%.
The third reason your theory doesn’t make sense is that the most educated Hispanic groups most strongly favor republicans (at least in Florida, which has the most well developed GOP messaging to Hispanics). 40% of Cubans have a college degree, double the average for Hispanics. For Puerto Ricans it’s 30%.
The exact opposite is a likelier explanation. Prevailing academic theories of race—where Hispanics are lumped together with black people as oppressed “people of color”—are offensive to many Hispanics. Cubans came to America (mostly, to Reagan’s America) in poverty, and within a generation achieved parity with whites. Why would they respond positively to Democrats’ messaging on race?
Maybe not DeSantis, but plenty of GOP candidates do, and Florida is full of Cubans. In many hispanics minds, at least those who immigrated, democrats = socialism = bad.
> they don’t like messaging that portrays them as oppressed victims.
I would think that's very much a minor concern. It's rather petty to vote against the better party because you don't like their marketing, if you know they are the better party.
If you've seen government intervention in markets be absolutely destructive then it makes sense to vote for the party that is more pro-market.
Not to mention that national Dems are significantly to the left of the median Hispanic American in terms of social policy (especially on gender and race).
> Maybe not DeSantis, but plenty of GOP candidates do, and Florida is full of Cubans. In many hispanics minds, at least those who immigrated, democrats = socialism = bad.
Except the fraction of Florida’s Hispanic population that fits that profile has been shrinking for decades. Only 30% of Florida Hispanics are Cubans today, and many of those are now second generation. By 2012, Obama had even won the Cuban vote.
Your theory is that the GOP somehow reversed that long term trend by doing the same thing they’d been doing for decades? And then won Puerto Ricans, who never had any negative connotations about socialism to begin with. That makes no sense.
> I would think that's very much a minor concern. It's rather petty to vote against the better party because you don't like their marketing, if you know they are the better party.
The marketing reflects how Democrats conceptualize race, and that, in turn, drives their policies. For example, Democrats’ belief that minorities are the victims of systemic racism drives them to favor educational curricula that emphasize the structural barriers faced by undifferentiated “people of color.”
But what are the effects of such curricula on minority kids? Studies show that successful people have an internal locus of control: https://www.forbes.com/sites/melodywilding/2020/03/02/succes.... I.e. they believe their outcomes are the result of their own efforts, not external factors.
If you’re a Cuban, what do you want your kids to learn? That they’re “people of color” who will be held back by “systemic racism,” or that people from their cultural group went from poverty to prosperity in a single generation? Cultivating healthy and success-oriented attitudes in their kids is far more important to many parents than welfare benefits.
Also, we live in the age of identity politics. If you’re going to invoke the notion of Hispanics being oppressed victims of a white supremacist society as a reason to vote Democrat, then you can’t complain if many Hispanics reject the party because they don’t like that conception of Hispanic identity.
