Last fall marked the twentieth anniversary of the influential book The Emerging Democratic Majority — a work that, at least as some liberals saw it, gestured toward a future in which demographic trends would give the Democratic Party a lasting edge in an increasingly diverse America. Though authors John Judis and Ruy Teixeira were in practice less deterministic than many of those who seized on their thesis, some version of the premise “demographics is destiny” became a complacent nostrum of Obama-era liberalism and has periodically reappeared ever since. As is very often the case with overly tidy political narratives, the rosiest of such predictions have not actually been borne out — and some recent developments may even suggest a trend in the opposite direction.

When it comes to Hispanic voters in particular, the stakes for Democrats and Republicans alike are incredibly high. As the fastest-growing voting bloc in the United States, Hispanics already play a decisive role in swinging key races and, as 2020 made all too clear, the Democratic Party’s longtime grip on them may well be slackening. However Donald Trump’s various xenophobic statements might have factored into the election, they did not stop him from achieving an 8 percent swing overall among Hispanics compared to 2016. The Democratic advantage among Hispanic voters, meanwhile, dropped by some 28 points in Florida, 18 points in both Texas and Wisconsin, 16 points in Nevada, 12 points in Pennsylvania, and 10 in Arizona. In certain parts of the country, the trend was even more stark. Right on the Mexican border, in Texas’s (94 percent Hispanic) Zapata County, Trump gained a dramatic 20 points. He also secured a 28 percent swing in neighboring Starr County.

However you square them, data points like these represent a clear rebuke to the long-standing belief that the Democratic Party enjoys a lock on certain voters in perpetuity — and to the related idea that vast demographic blocs can be neatly mapped onto partisan alignments or ideological convictions. The truth is that heterogenous blocs are never politically monolithic. Those who are officially identified as “Hispanic” by the US Census Bureau, then, fittingly hail from a wide spectrum of backgrounds and political commitments — from left-leaning Mexican Americans in Texas to right-wing voters of Cuban descent in Florida.