Some people promote the vote in Phoenix, Arizona, on October 31.EDGARD GARRIDO / Reuters
Donald Trump didn't win Florida in 2016 thanks to Miami.
Clinton doubled the vote.
Four years later, the county has held the key to bringing the most unpredictable state in the Union back to the Republican side: Trump has cut more than 200,000 votes in the metropolis, practically covering his margin of victory across the state.
This is not what Biden's campaign expected, which practically took its Miami-Dade lead for granted: Several pre-election polls on the Democratic side anticipated a 15-20-point margin among Hispanic voters.
The CBS exit poll closed at just 8 (53-45).
Outside of the typical narrative that assigns responsibility for the conservative victories in Florida to its northern counties, which are more white and rural than the urban and Latino south, it seems that in 2020 the decisive vote to revalidate Trump's victory has come precisely from that other part of the State.
The Republican campaign has been able to read and press fears, rejections, aspirations among Cuban-Americans, Venezuelan-Americans (and perhaps also voters of Colombian origin), something that has earned it a valuable victory necessary if it wants to continue to aspire to a presidency not yet decided .
But at the other end of the Union, Arizona has joined the growing club of southern states turning blue thanks to an alliance between metropolitan areas and diverse populations (on the border, but also in the urban areas themselves), particularly Latinas.
No one doubts the progressive profile of California, Colorado and New Mexico anymore.
Nevada has consolidated this year a trajectory that it had previously started in that same direction.
Texas remains Republican, but with increasingly smaller margins (7 points yesterday, 9 four years ago).
For now, Phoenix and its suburban crown have turned Arizona upside down, the only major state that has so far rotated from one party to the other.
Biden's margin among Hispanic voters in Arizona is four times that of Florida: +30 according to the exit poll.
It's the same advantage as in 2016. The voting pattern of college-educated whites has changed much more in the State: from +27 for Trump in 2016 to +11 for Biden in 2020, a spectacular turnaround that, in reality, only it brings the metropolitan middle-class and well-to-do voter closer to where the Latino-origin (of any socioeconomic status) already was, in effect shaping the new alliance.
Meanwhile, Florida walks in the opposite direction.
The Democratic margin among Latinos was much more similar here and in Arizona in 2016. The change has been concentrated in the last four years of the Donald Trump administration.
In some way, polarization has penetrated ethnic borders, probably aligning itself with the dimension of national origin: just as Cuba and Venezuela dominate families in Miami or Palm Beach, Mexico and their Central American neighbors are the most common ancestors in Arizona, approaching its concerns to policies in which the current Administration cannot sell itself as well as in its (supposed) firm position vis-à-vis the leftist regimes of Latin America: migration, border, health and justice, fronts on which the Democratic Party is notably more competitive.
The tension between the results in Florida and in the Southwest blue bloc that Arizona now joins well exemplifies not only the many facets of the Hispanic vote, but the way in which these are conforming to the pre-existing structure in American politics.
Latino politics fits into the mold of polarization, an inevitable consequence of the gradual cultural assimilation to which the American nation subjects all the migrants who settle on its soil.
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