Thanks to extraordinary registration efforts and incredibly high turnout among younger and U.S.-born Hispanics, a new study conducted at the City University of New York has found that voting rates for Latinx men and women reached a new record high during the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.
Suzanne Gamboa of NBC News has reported that CUNY researchers who studied voting data from the 2020 election found “a dramatic rise in registration and voting by some 18.7 million Latinos.” According to those numbers, approximately 1 out of every 10 ballots cast in the election came from a Latinx individual.
“The big forces behind what the CUNY researchers described as the ‘extraordinary’ Latino participation were record registration and turnout by younger Latinos ages 18 to 44, and a jump in the registration and voting by U.S.-born Latinos,” Gamboa reported.
Luis Miranda, the co-author of the study and board chair of CUNY’s Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies, told NBC that the findings are part of a larger trend — one that isn’t going away anytime soon.
Among the key findings of the report:
- The percentage of Latinx individuals who were eligible to vote and actually voted hit 53.7% in 2020. It was the first time that number had ever exceeded 50%.
- In 2020, 61.1% of all Latinx individuals 18 and older registered to vote, up from 57.3% in 2016, hitting another record.
- 88% of individuals who registered to vote showed up, beating 2016’s benchmark of 83.1%.
- The number of Latinx individuals between 18 and 24 who voted grew from 38.4% in 2016 to 44.1% in 2020.
Perhaps most significantly, according to Gamboa, “for the first time in the history of U.S. presidential elections, voting by Latinos born in the United States was at about the same rate as Latinos who are naturalized U.S. citizens.”
“More than 71% of all Latino eligible voters were born in the U.S,” she reported. “Their registration rates went up from 56.4% in 2016 to 61.5% in 2020 and their voting rose from 45.5% to 53.5% last year.”
CUNY researchers believe these surging numbers are significant because it suggests an accelerating momentum of civic engagement within the Latinx community. According to their report, “these increases among Latinos born in the U.S. were the principal statistical cause of the overall surge in registration and voting rates in the 2020 presidential election.”
“For the first time, there are more Latinos registered than African Americans and we know that trend is going to continue,” Miranda said.
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