Latino Millennial Voter Growth Outpacing Other Groups. Does It Matter?

That’s partly because young people don’t vote as consistently as older people do, but also because Latino eligible voters are heavily concentrated in states – including California, Texas and NY – that are not prime election battlegrounds.

Florida is the battleground state – with both a presidential and U.S. Senate elections – where the rising number of Hispanic voters could make the most difference nationally, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.

According to the projections, around 3.2 million young Latinos who are US citizens will become eligible to vote between 2012 and 2016. Meanwhile, “47.5 percent of white millennials and 55 percent of black millennials voted in 2012. As a result, Puerto Rican migrants in Florida could have a large impact on Florida’s Latino vote”, the study reports.

The median age of U.S.-born Latinos is 19, Pew says.

It’s projected to be 40 percent higher in 2016 than in 2008, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.

However, Millennials constitute a greater percentage of Latinos – 44 percent – than non-Latinos, where they total 27 percent.

Mark Lopez, Pew’s director of Hispanic research, said the low turnout is largely driven by geography. Between 2012 and 2016, some 1.2 million will have done so, according to the report.

Latino voters are expected to make up about 12 percent of the electorate this presidential election. This makes the Latino millennials the most powerful among other racial or ethnic communities of the same age group. That’s also true in the early voting and influential states of Iowa (2.9 percent) and New Hampshire (2.1 percent), where Hispanic voters represent less than three percent of all voters. The voter turnout among millennial Latino voters was just 37.8 percent of those eligible, again much lower than white or black voters, and about the same as Asian voters. It noted that 50 percent of Hispanic millennial eligible voters said they were registered to vote in 2012, compared with 61 percent among white millennials and 64 percent among black millennials.

Still, voter eligibility is on the rise among Hispanics overall, especially those born in 1981 or later. The Asian electorate marked a low turnout rate as well at 46.9 percent.

As native-born young people make up a greater share of the Latino population, those eligible to vote in November will have higher levels of education than in any recent presidential election year, the report found. Compared to 2000, eligible Latinos will be almost twice as likely to have at least some college education.