Last month’s election was a mixed bag. Yes, Joe Biden got 12 million more votes than Hillary Clinton did. But Donald Trump added 9.5 million votes of his own. More than half of those new Trump voters — 4.6 million of them — came because he increased his share of nonwhite voters from 21 percent to 25 percent.

In some respects, these results are not entirely surprising. Trump’s better performance with nonwhite voters is due largely, though not exclusively, to higher support in Latino communities ranging from southern Florida, to Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, to the dense former mill towns of New England. Latinos are not a unified voting bloc, and prior Republicans outperformed expectations — the last Republican to perform similarly to Trump was George W. Bush in 2004.

Since most Latinos still voted for Joe Biden, some, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, conclude that Democratic strategists are using Latino voters as scapegoats for Biden’s narrower than expected victory. This deflects attention from the Democratic Party’s more disappointing, and significant, loss with rural white voters.