Commentary: Forget Ohio as a bellwether. Look to Latinos to understand how Americans vote

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Set us as preferred America’s obsession with the Latino vote has become a ritual as slippery and messy as a grunion run.But who could be blamed for caring too much about how we crushed it in the midterms?Latinos helped Democrats take back the House and Senate by casting our ballots in record numbers.We flipped red districts blue, including those in the Rio Grande Valley that the Texas GOP gerrymandered last year to take out Latino Democrats.Speaking of Texas, the state elected a Latino as governor for the first time with Gina Hinajosa’s victory, while Xavier Becerra will be California’s first Latino governor in 151 years.

Latino voters helped elect a record number of their own kind to Congress, from Republicans who have denounced President Trump to moderate Democrats to Latin Grammy winner Bobby Pulido to democratic socialists.Three of the six DSA members elected to the House for the first time are Latinas, including Angela Gonzales-Torres here in Los Angeles.

Politics In Texas, voters in majority-Latino districts near San Antonio and along the border helped Democrats break Republicans’ longstanding grip on the state to win the races for governor, lieutenant governor and senator.The narrative this time is that Latinos helped pull American democracy back from the jaws of MAGA, which I guess is better than the charges of self-defeating treason thrown at us two years ago.That’s when 48% of Latinos voted for Trump — a record for a Republican presidential candidate — and the GOP gained in even the bluest of Latino-heavy precincts, a shift that conservatives predicted would become larger, and permanent.

Well, New York Times data showed a 29-point shift to the Dems for Latino voters nationwide in the midterms, compared to two years ago — by far the largest of any ethnic group.The stereotype for decades was that Lati...