The 2024 presidential election confirmed a political phenomenon that has been building for years: Hispanics are no longer a reliable Democratic constituency. Donald Trump won 48 percent of the Hispanic vote, just three points shy of Kamala Harris’s share. Perhaps even more striking, he carried 51 percent of foreign-born, naturalized Hispanic immigrants {snip}

{snip} Hispanics are assimilating into America’s mainstream and, over generations, becoming white, in both culture and identification. {snip}

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Further, when analysts talk about the “Hispanic vote,” they overlook a key fact: not all people of Latin American ancestry identify as Hispanic. One analysis showed that by the third generation, about one in four descendants of Hispanic immigrants no longer identify as Hispanic. By the fourth generation, half of all descendants no longer do.

What explains this pattern? Hispanics intermarry at high rates with non-Hispanic whites. As of 2016, over 40 percent of all interracial marriages in the U.S. involved one Hispanic and one non-Hispanic white spouse. The number of these couples climbed from 1.4 million in 2000 to 2.4 million by the 2010s and is almost certainly higher today. Children of these marriages often stop identifying as Hispanic, especially if Spanish is not spoken at home, which is often the case by the second and later generations. Moreover, nearly one in five Latin American immigrant married women are married to a native-born American, suggesting quick assimilation.

The ethnic attrition of Hispanics has real political consequences. Hispanics who intermarry and assimilate most quickly are often those who speak English fluently and are better educated. Their children are more inclined to identify as white and to join the cultural mainstream. Hispanics who graduate college are between eight and ten times more likely to marry a non-Hispanic white person than a Hispanic who didn’t complete high school. As Hispanics have gotten better educated, they also have mixed with whites at a higher rate.

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More Hispanics are identifying as white in part because a substantial share of them already report European ancestry. This share is larger among more recent Latin American immigrants.  Today, third- and fourth-generation Hispanics are following the same path. Many also have substantial European ancestry. In Argentina, for example, a majority of the population descends from Italian and Spanish immigrants, and tens of thousands still hold EU citizenship through family lineage. For their American-born children and grandchildren, blending into the white mainstream is not a major leap.

Many immigrants identify as white on their arrival. One in four immigrants from Latin America identify as white. Among some groups, such as Cubans and Venezuelans, that rate exceeds one in three.

English proficiency is another measure of Hispanic assimilation. New immigrants from Latin America are much more proficient in English than they were decades ago. {snip}

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