R.I. 2020 Election in Review: Providence/Central Falls
This article is the first installment in a series examining Rhode Island precinct level data from the 2020 election, both on its own and compared to 2016. The New York Times published its famous detailed election map back in February, but despite claiming to have complete data from all 50 states, Rhode Island is one of the few states with municipal-level data only. So I took it upon myself to do the precinct comparison by hand, using all data from the R.I. Board of Elections. I hope you enjoy!
I will start this off plain and simple: I believe that the performance of Donald Trump among Hispanic voters in Rhode Island is the single most interesting local angle from the 2020 election. Because Rhode Island is not a competitive state now or slated to be one anytime soon, there isn’t much attention given to the shifts in presidential vote from year to year. But the shift we are discussing here could have major implications in future elections, more-so than other changes discussed in this series. More on that to come in this post and future ones as well.
If you take away one thing from this analysis, make it this eyebrow-raising bit of R.I. political trivia: Providence and Central Falls were the only 2 municipalities to swing toward Donald Trump in 2020:
Central Falls
Clinton 80% Trump 16%
Biden 72% Trump 26%
Swing R+18
Providence
Clinton 81% Trump 14%
Biden 80% Trump 18%
Swing: R+4.5%
Now, both cities are still overwhelmingly Democratic. Some of the swing to Trump appears, on paper, to come from the drop-off in third party vote from 2016 to 2020. But it cannot be denied that there was a tangible and meaningful shift in the most heavily Hispanic areas of these cities that contributed to the overall swing. Below are the 10 most heavily Hispanic precincts in the state, which all happen to fall within these 2 cities, per ACS 2019 data. The Providence precincts are concentrated in the Silver Lake/Olneyville area of the West Side and the South Side.
These data points are truly striking, especially against a backdrop of a 5 point shift to Biden statewide. Not a single one of these precincts swung to Trump by fewer than 10 points in 2020, and the mean swing was 21.1 points. Central Falls, being smaller and having a higher Hispanic population overall, swung right due to this shift and this shift only. Providence, which is 43% Hispanic, swung right in the Hispanic neighborhoods by enough to more than cancel out further leftward swings in the affluent and vote-heavy East Side.
So how can this shift be explained, and does it mean anything going forward?
The first question has been debated quite a bit nationally, as Rhode Island was far from the only place to see a rightward swing from Hispanic voters — Pew, which is the gold standard over election day exit polls, calculates the shift nationally at R+17 in 2020.
At least locally, the issue of turnout has to be considered, but such significant shifts cannot be explained this way alone. Among the 10 precincts above, turnout was a mixed bag, with 5 precincts staying roughly flat, 4 decreasing and 1 increasing.
Of course, campaign and policy decisions play must play a role at the most basic level. The idea that politicians are “entitled” to certain blocs of voters is something that always must be resisted. Lose touch with the voters, lose hold of the vote. In what I think is still the only article on the growth of Hispanic support for Trump in Rhode Island from the “mainstream” local media, Ted Nesi of WPRI interviewed former Central Falls mayor James Diossa about the large shifts among his constituents at the time:
First, Biden’s strong support for abortion rights did not resonate well in Central Falls, where voters are strongly religious, he said.
“The issue I heard most about was abortion,” Diossa said. “Trump said he was going to stick by and make sure he would do everything possible to stay consistent with abortion and pro-life issues.”
Secondly, Diossa said Trump’s relentless attempts to label Biden’s Democratic Party as socialist resonated with voters in a city where 66% of the population is Hispanic or Latino, and many have either fled socialist regimes or are afraid of what’s happening in socialist countries.
“Republicans were very loud about painting the Democrats as socialists and that scared folks because of what they’re seeing in Venezuela, where droves of people are migrating to other countries for survival,” Diossa said.
The second point has given cover for Dem partisans to say that the change in the Hispanic vote was due to “misinformation” or “propaganda” targeted in communities like Central Falls. But again, it just won’t do to deny these voters their agency by assuming they were tricked into voting the way they did. Both parties are entitled to do Spanish-language advertising in Hispanic communities. For Trump’s part, he actually put out some quite effective ads in the state of Florida, where rightward swings among Hispanic voters kept the state red and helped to oust incumbent Democratic members of Congress. Trump also dropped talk of rapists and murders pouring across the border, and switched from claiming that he would build a big, beautiful wall to saying, falsely of course, that one had been completed. Democrats, including but not exclusively Joe Biden, carry the blame for losing these voters too, especially for the reasons that Diossa explains above.
A second explanation for the shifts here that I find plausible are COVID-19 lockdowns and their effect on the economy. Notwithstanding his buffonish way of talking about it, Trump really did oversee the lowest unemployment rates ever for Black and Hispanic Americans, in the backdrop of a strong overall economy. Of course, it does not matter that Presidents often have much less control over economic trends than voters imagine, because, well, we know that voters actually see it this way. And this is a story about voters. Trump carved out a pretty clear anti-lockdown, anti-mask, anti-mitigation strategy on COVID-19. He repeatedly warned voters that a Biden presidency would mean more lockdowns and further economic destruction. It seems plausible that a segment of the voting population that enjoyed greater economic gains under Trump than any time in their lives, and then saw it implode in an instant due to COVID-19, took this message to heart and voted accordingly.
Historically speaking, this is out of step with presidential elections in modern times. In purely economic terms, people who step into the voting booth believing themselves to be worse off now than they were 4 years ago tend to strongly oppose the incumbent. But as Scott Sumner writes, on the simultaneous swings to the left in suburbs and to the right in the inner cities: “This might be the first election where the voters who did well under a president turned against him while those that suffered economically turned toward him.” This is just one way in which the circumstances of a raging pandemic threw typical election assumptions out the window in 2020.
A final and somewhat under-discussed theory is the rejection by many Hispanic voters of the racial politics of the Democratic Party. Studies now show that the white progressives who hold a disproportionate sway on the messaging in the Democratic party are further to the left, including on race, than many minority voters. The economic issues discussed above tend to rank as higher priorities for Hispanic voters than the woke issues occupying the attention of wealthier, white progressives. LA Times Columnist Gustavo Arellano went as far as theorizing that the rightward Hispanic shifts were in part a direct backlash against the Democrats full-throated embrace of Black Lives Matter in the wake of the George Floyd Killing:
“What was the big message of 2020? One of the main things was Black Lives Matter … And I would see a lot of this on Instagram: ‘Oh Black Lives Matter?’ Well what about Mexican lives? Don’t All Lives Matter?’ And they’re sounding like Fox News. I’m like, oh man, I need to talk to these people and try to explain to them the thinking behind that.
For what it’s worth, we see some leftward shifts among Providence precincts with a higher number of Black voters than Hispanics, such in the Wanskuck and Charles neighborhoods. Precinct 20 in Wanskuck (54% Black, 19% Hispanic) swung to the left by double digits in 2020.
So what does all this mean for the future of politics in R.I. and Providence? For the former, I’ll be writing more soon about what a Republican victory in the 2022 Governor’s race would look like. Because it is a dominant metro, Providence is highly problematic for R.I. Republicans in this day in age. Holding down margins in Providence wherever possible will be crucial to a winning electoral strategy. Winning rural areas and hanging close in South County simply won’t be enough if Providence is a wash-out. It would be wise for the RIGOP to start thinking now about a Spanish-language outreach program to, at the very least, demonstrate to these voters that they haven’t written them off.
As for Providence, the potential dynamics of the ’22 mayoral race come to mind. Unlike a race for Governor, the next mayor will assuredly be decided in the Democratic primary next September. The declared candidates haven’t really begun jockeying for a “lane” just yet, but there will be plenty of calculating to come about just how far left to go. As we saw with New York City’s mayoral race this summer, progressives were seriously vulnerable on their right from a candidate like Eric Adams, who built a Joe Biden-like coalition of older, moderate voters who were concerned about crime and bread-and-butter issues. Providence and New York have different problems, but it is an interesting test case for the modern Democratic party nonetheless.
Other quick hits about the Providence data:
- Biggest Swing Right (2016–2020): Precinct 47 (Olneyville/Manton) R+31
- Biggest Swing Left (2016–2020): Precinct 72 (South Elmwood) D+20
- Best Trump precinct: Precinct 77 (Silver Lake) Biden +31
- Best Biden precinct: Precinct 2804 (College Hill/Brown) and Precinct 2880 (College Hill/Mt. Hope) Biden +83
- Most total votes: Precinct 2817 (Blackstone) 2234 votes
- Most Biden votes: Precinct 2817 (Blackstone) 1970 votes
- Most Trump votes: Precinct 2854 (Smith Hill/Mt. Pleasant) 430 votes
