By David Hoffman

A half century ago, almost no one at all was thinking — out loud at least — about the “Brown” vote — or how pivotal the Hispanic/Latino vote would later become, in the widening and de-Whitening color shifts leading up to 2025. 

Today, we’re just three short weeks away from getting possibly definitive answers to a crucial question — about whether the Hispanic/Latino vote will continue its realignment away from Democrats and towards Repubicans, a trend line notably beginning with the shocking election surprise of Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and accelerating in 2020 and again last year, 2024.  

For the remainder of this analysis, the term will be shortened to simply “Hispanic” because the correct demographic term of definitional art — that is, the ethnic nomenclature capable of spanning such wide ethnic diversity ranging from New York Puerto Ricans to Miami Cubans to Texas Mexicans, and of course many more examples — is tricky indeed today.  Whether any terms at all can adequately capture — without first stirring rumbles of dissent from the salad bowl of this remarkably fecund diversity and wide range of heterogeneity– is as yet unknown.  Even to successfully loop together the many significant  differences among cultures as different as those which speak Spanish versus Portuguese simply today remains unresolved at best and actively contested at worst. 

On Wednesday November 5th the statewide results of the 2025 off-year elections will be clear as a bell in Virginia and New Jersey.  Of course, three weeks out, these results are yet unknowable. But reading tea leaves or chicken entrails may be not be the only thing we can do. For example, there are straws already aloft in the political wind, like the recent Washington Post poll showing Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger easily sailing to a 10 percent + landslide win. Accordingly, here’s my personal best shot as to accurate prognostication about Election Night results.

Prediction Number One transcends White and Black, where little divergence may emerge that breaks from already established trends. In fact, in the post-election headlines it’s most apt to be the startling emergence of the Brown voting results stemming from the still expanding demographic rainbow and surging population changes of the 21st century. In other words, fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be an exciting night for the Hispanic vote!

But first, a short recent history lesson. 50 years ago, all eyes then were on the so-called “counter-culture” of Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll. It was the explosive changes ushered in with the Pill and the Joint that most caught the watchful eye at the time, as youthful drug experimentation became ubiquitous and as the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18.

So it was in the “feeling groovy” 1970s that a Yale law school professor named Charles Reich, in his best selling book “The Greening of America”, famously predicted that the voting changes ahead would likely favor the cultural and political Left, namely (granted that it’s a broad brush) Democrats.

While that forecast was initially and perhaps superficially fulfilled in the 1974 and 1976 elections  — those held in the immediate wake of Watergate — Reagan Republicans made huge tidal gains in a comeback string of victories beginning in 1980.  And there followed a generation (at least) of GOP victories lasting all the way to 1992 and the redefining election of Bill Clinton.

So here it is. Yes Virginia, for Democrats this year there is a Santa Claus!  You can take this to the bank in fact.  Count on an election bonanza riding a tidal wave driven at the polls by thronging Hispanic voters, and a big victory awaits you on November 4. And the linchpin will be this: Hispanic voters will reverse direction as they throw on the brakes from their recent flirtation with voting Republican.  In the coming election results look to the Brown vote, Democrats and stand up and cheer.