… Nationally, overwhelming margins among Latino voters helped drive Democratic victories in states like California, Nevada and Arizona. But in Florida, older Cuban-Americans who mostly support Republicans voted in droves, while turnout for younger Cubans, Puerto Ricans and other non-Cuban Hispanics who skew Democratic lagged—and did not skew as Democratic as expected. Exit polls found Democrats won only 54 percent of the Hispanic vote, down from 62 percent in 2016 and 58 percent in 2014. Florida Democrats did replace two Cuban-American Republicans in majority-Hispanic congressional districts while electing several new Latino state legislators and local officials. But the top-of-the-ticket losses were brutal wake-up calls for Democrats who hope to flip Florida in 2020 and are counting on the state’s fastest-growing demographic to help them flip it. …
“This election was mostly a massive repudiation of Donald Trump, but something went extraordinarily wrong in Florida,” says Simon Rosenberg, the founder of the New Democrat Network and a party strategist on Latino politics. “Democrats should have done much better with Hispanics there, and instead we did much worse. We need to have a big conversation about why.” CONT.
Michael Grunwald & Marc Caputo, Politico Magazine