Consider the Kennedy-Trump Voter
Some GOP gains among Latinos may have been foreshadowed in the 2020 Massachusetts Senate primary
I’m in Maryland for the week visiting my grandparents, and I wanted to write about one of my pet theories about the 2020 election: that some Hispanic voters in Massachusetts voted for Joe Kennedy III in the Democratic Senate primary and then for Donald Trump in the presidential election.
Maps, maps, maps
Below is a map of the results for the 2020 Massachusetts Senate primary:
As you can see, it’s quite similar to the 2020 presidential results for Massachusetts, with a good number of municipalities in central and southern Massachusetts that voted for Kennedy in the primary going for Trump in the general. It’s worth noting that Trump had a much lower vote share (32%) than Kennedy did (44%), and therefore many municipalities that voted for Kennedy went for Biden.
The question I want to ask here is not “why did some Kennedy towns go for Trump” — the answer to that is most likely that these towns lean conservative — but “why did some solidly blue Kennedy towns experience a shift towards Trump?” And I think the answer to that question is the national trend among Latino voters.
A bit of background
The Senate primary between Rep. Joe Kennedy III and incumbent Sen. Ed Markey was framed as a fight between an outsider progressive (Markey) and an establishment moderate (Kennedy). In reality, both candidates had nearly identical policy positions and both claimed to be progressive outsiders, despite Markey having been in politics for decades and having voted for the Iraq War and the 1994 crime bill and Kennedy being, well, a Kennedy (and having a somewhat more moderate voting record).
The upshot of these progressive Olympics is that the Markey campaign and its supporters spent a lot of time attempting to portray Kennedy as the more moderate/conservative candidate in order to appeal to liberal Democratic primary voters.
Kennedy also tended to have stronger support among working-class and Hispanic voters. This can partly be chalked up to his last name, but the perception that Markey was more liberal may also have been a factor here — many nonwhite voters vote Democratic and are conservatives, while most white conservatives are Republicans, which leaves the remaining white Democrats more liberal than many nonwhite Democrats. As such, the perception of Kennedy as the more moderate candidate may have increased his appeal to more moderate/conservative working-class and Hispanic primary voters.
Even more maps
Here is a map of the proportion of Latinos in Massachusetts towns:
Just looking at this map and the primary results, we can see Kennedy doing well in the regions around Haverhill, Springfield, and Fall River that have large Hispanic populations.
Trump’s gains among Hispanic voters in Miami and the Rio Grande Valley were widely reported on, but the phenomenon was not unique to Florida and Texas — Trump made gains among Hispanic voters nationwide1, including in Massachusetts. As you can see from the map below, (or in this NYT interactive), while most of the state shifted blue, many heavily Hispanic towns shifted towards Trump.
We can also see that several of the towns with high Latino populations that shifted towards Trump also voted for Kennedy in the primary, including Fall River, New Bedford, Lawrence, Holyoke, Springfield, Southfield, Worcester, and Fitchburg.
Now, there are some towns in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts that went for Kennedy and then shifted towards Trump despite not having high Hispanic populations, and there are other towns with large Hispanic populations just outside of greater Boston that actually shifted towards Biden.
So it doesn’t look like there was a pro-Trump shift among all heavily Hispanic towns that voted for Kennedy, while other towns with very small Hispanic populations that went for Kennedy did experience a pro-Trump shift. Nonetheless, the data seem to indicate that a significant number of Hispanic voters, especially in the Gateway Cities, voted for Kennedy and then for Trump.
What motivates Kennedy-Trump voters?
I see a couple of possible reasons for voting Kennedy-Trump:
Tactical voting: Some of these voters may have already switched to the GOP and were simply choosing the more conservative candidate in the Democratic primary because they knew the GOP Senate candidate was going to lose.
The family name: Kennedy may have had a unique appeal to these more conservative voters despite a fairly liberal record, perhaps because of his last name, ties to the Hispanic community, or charisma.
Delayed realignment: Perhaps Kennedy-Trump voters still identified as Democrats in September, and then moved towards the GOP after the Senate primary for various reasons.
The real answer is probably some mix of these three explanations and likely varies for each individual voter. A combination of (1) and (2) seems like the most plausible explanation to me, with the pro-Trump shift among Hispanics occurring before the Senate primary. These soon-to-be new Trump voters then chose Kennedy in the primary because of his charisma, the appeal of fresher face, and because he was perceived as the most conservative/moderate candidate with a real chance of winning the Senate seat.
See this David Shor interview for a good explanation of why Trump made gains with nonwhite voters in 2020 (the short answer is increasing education polarization).