It was one of those statistics that, on the night of the 2016 election, jumped out of the haze of shock and fear on the major networks.

No one who has lived in South Florida was all that surprised that National Election Pool numbers showed Donald Trump winning slightly more than half of Florida’s Cuban voters. However, I was stunned that — after all of his rhetoric on immigration issues — he was backed by 35% of the Latino voters in that life-or-death swing state. Yes, that’s lower, as the Pew Research Center team noted, than Mitt Romney’s 39% of the 2012 vote. But it was still stunning.

Then I watched as some commentators noted that Trump was running stronger than expected in the Interstate highway corridors in and around Orlando. If you follow religion in Florida, that’s prime megachurch territory — including churches packed with Latino evangelicals and Pentecostal believers.

I thought to myself: Did Latino evangelicals and Pentecostal Christians put Trump in the White House? In a race that close, that had to be a factor in Trump getting 35% of Florida’s Latino votes. And Trump had to have Florida.

Every since then, I have been watching to see if mainstream newsrooms would connect the dots between the growth of Latino evangelical churches and this trend’s potential impact in state and national elections. Now we have a few headlines to consider.

If you want a political-desk story that is mostly tone deaf on matters of religion, then check out the recent Washington Post piece with this paint-by-numbers headline: “Despite Trump’s actions against immigrants, these Latino voters want four more years.”

Instead of lingering there, I would point GetReligion readers to the New York Times piece that ran under this expansive double-decker headline:

Latino, Evangelical and Politically Homeless

Hispanic evangelicals identify as religious first and foremost. That’s why, despite his harsh rhetoric on immigration, many back President Trump.

This is one of those stories in which people of one congregation are allowed to speak for various groups inside a larger flock. The most important thing is that readers get to hear from believers who do not fit into the cookie-cutter world of America’s major political parties. It’s a must-read piece.

The overture is long, but essential:

PHOENIX — At the Church of God of Prophecy, hundreds come each Sunday for two hours of worship in Spanish. They share passages from the Bible, sing and embrace each other tightly. The evangelical congregation, led for nearly 25 years by Pastor Jose Rivera, is nearly all Latino, the vast majority with roots in Mexico.

They are not unlike the people President Trump attempted to demonize from the outset of his first campaign, or all that different from those he is trying to keep out with his border wall and hard-line immigration policies.

But they do not agree on Mr. Trump — some see him as a savior, others as a predator. By Mr. Rivera’s estimate, somewhere between a quarter and a third of his congregants support Mr. Trump, a rate that is echoed in national polls.

As it turns out, matters of doctrine and religious freedom are at the heart of this tense standoff, along with strong Latino support for small businesses and local community values. That leads to this summary:

When Pastor Rivera looks at his congregation of 200 families he sees a microcosm of the Latino vote in the United States: how complex it is, and how each party’s attempt to solidify crucial support can fall short. There are not clear ideological lines here between liberals and conservatives. People care about immigration, but are equally concerned about religious liberty and abortion. …

To explain his own partisan affiliation, Mr. Rivera says he is “politically homeless.”

That’s fascinating for this simple reason: That sounds just like the laments I have heard from all kinds of reluctant Trump voters — Catholic, Orthodox, evangelicals, etc. — who define themselves in terms of their religious convictions, more than loyalty to a political party. They feel stuck, but shoved toward the GOP because of an overwhelming sense of fear caused by Democrats (and mass media professionals) who now put “religious liberty” inside scare quotes.

Later in the piece, there is another summary that — to the credit of reporter Jennifer Medina — reaches past mere political information and sees the bigger cultural picture.

Hispanic evangelicals are one of the fastest growing religious groups in the country, booming in states that could decide the presidential election, including Arizona, North Carolina and Colorado. Republicans have long sought to attract them dating back to the Reagan era and most aggressively by George W. Bush, who had the support of more than 40 percent of Latino voters, the highest level recorded.

This is not a question of assimilation — on the contrary, many Hispanic evangelicals primarily speak Spanish and see themselves as outside of any kind of mainstream, set apart by their religious views as much as their ethnicity. In conversations about politics, they say they believe that economic success essentially insulates against racism, and failure to achieve such success should be blamed on an individual rather than any kind of systemic problem.

Note that Big Idea: These are Americans who are “set apart by their religious views as much as their ethnicity.”

Image that, and allow it to sink into your thinking about the news hooks summed up in that second chart prepared by — who else — political scientist Ryan Burge of the Religion in Public blog (and GetReligion, as well). Click here for his must-follow Twitter feed.

Stay tuned.

This is a very important religion story (ask Catholic bishops about that), as well as a trend that leaders in the major parties had better study, if they know what’s good for them.