(Daily Caller News Foundation) — Republicans made substantial gains with young black and Hispanic voters during the midterm elections, according to an exit poll by the Associated Press.
Young Hispanic voters shifted 18% toward Republicans and young black voters shifted 22% toward Republicans, according to the AP exit poll. A late October poll by USA TODAY/Suffolk University showed that at least 40% percent of Hispanic voters and 21% of black voters would support a Republican candidate in the midterm elections, citing rising inflation and the economy as key issues that will shift their vote.
A positive view of the American economy fell by 44% in 2022, while abortion shifted upwards by 7% to 8%, compared to 2018, according to the AP exit poll. Abortion as a voter issue shifted upward in June, after the U.S. Supreme Court decided to strike down Roe v. Wade.
The shift in voters toward the Republican Party shows a significant boost over 2020, when then-candidate Donald Trump received 12% of black and 32% of Hispanic votes. The shift in the exit poll signals that the economy is a key concern in 2022 for black and Hispanic voters who have seen food prices reach a 40-year high, gas prices skyrocket and mortgage rates continue to climb.
“There’s a trend that … all Latinos when they come here, they need to be Democrats in that … everybody’s so racist and all that,” Victor Jimenez, a Republican voter who immigrated from the Dominican Republic in 2008, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “But, I can tell you that I’ve never experienced anything that I would consider racist in my years in this country, like ever.”
“The Democratic Party … prides itself to be so accepting and open, and blah, blah, blah, blah, until you are … you are a conservative,” Jimenez said.
Hispanics have been hit particularly hard by rising inflation as 44% said the economy was their top issue, the poll reported. Despite ever growing inflation, President Joe Biden believes “we’re starting to see some of the good news on the economy.”
The shift in black and Hispanic voters seemed to puzzle many Democrats on Election Day with NBC’s national political reporter Marc Caputo stating that hispanics were “behaving like working class whites.”
“It’s a story that you are seeing nationwide. One, outside of Miami-Dade, white voters, working class voters are increasingly shifting Republican. Hispanic voters are increasingly behaving like working class whites, and that accounts for a great amount of shift in Miami-Dade,” Caputo said. “We’re talking hundreds of thousands of votes.”
