Among the many signs that Joe Biden would lose to Donald Trump in November was his flagging support among Latinos. In past elections, Democrats had been accustomed to winning an average of about two-thirds of the Latino vote, but in 2020 Biden fell short of that, winning fifty-nine per cent. This year, polls showed that, at best, Biden was beating Trump among Latinos by a slightly narrower margin than last time and, at worst, that the two candidates were tied or even that Biden was running behind Trump. Kamala Harris now looks like she has a chance to change that trajectory. The day after Biden dropped out, Carlos Odio, a researcher of Latino public opinion, cited polls in Nevada, a critical swing state, showing that Harris “wins back some Latinos who had slipped away from Biden.” Matt Barreto, who was Biden’s and is now Harris’s Latino pollster, pointed to Harris’s greater favorability among young Latinos, undecided Latinos, and other key segments of the Latino voting population.
Harris, however, not only represents the Biden Administration; she has inherited Biden’s campaign infrastructure—which raises the question of whether she will keep a Latino campaign strategy that was looking increasingly like a failure, spending millions without gaining ground among voters. Before Biden stepped down from the ticket, his campaign had done almost everything that liberal Latino advocates said they wanted to see: it committed significant resources to grassroots outreach and Spanish-language advertising, opened multiple field offices in Latino communities, and promised that it wouldn’t let up before the election. Biden’s and Harris’s campaign manager is Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a granddaughter of Cesar Chávez, who served in the Obama and Biden Administrations and worked for Harris in her Senate office. Biden was a guest on popular Spanish-language radio shows, and Harris appeared on Univision and Telemundo.
Meanwhile, Maca Casado, the Hispanic-media director for the Democratic campaign, noted that the Republican National Committee has shuttered most of the “Hispanic Community Centers” that it opened during the 2020 election, and that Trump’s campaign is recycling the same ads they used to target Latinos four years ago. But Democrats could be mistaking a different Latino strategy for no Latino strategy. Abraham Enriquez, the founder of Bienvenido US, an advocacy group focussed on recruiting Latino youth to the Republican Party, told me that the campaign made a decision to not rely as much on Latino surrogates this year, because Trump is his own best surrogate. In November, Trump gave a nationally televised speech in Hialeah, Florida, which is heavily Latino, and he sat for an interview with Univision that prompted a backlash from liberal Latinos who said it was a sign of the network’s capture by the right. After a courtroom appearance in Miami, last June, Trump visited the famous Cuban restaurant Versailles. When he was on trial in New York, he visited a bodega in Harlem. Early this year, he spoke alongside the president of the Border Patrol union during a visit to South Texas, where immigration and border control are pressing issues, and almost everyone is Latino.
Democrats have long seen Latinos as key members of an emerging multiracial coalition, which they projected would make the Party dominant for years to come. And, for much of the past decade, they have not wanted to believe that this vision could be slipping away. Democrats have been able to mask their struggles with Latino voters because they’ve eked out victories in some elections, and because the picture isn’t as dire in some places, or among some demographics, as others. Also, as the Democratic consultant Simon Rosenberg has noted, even a slight decrease in the Democrats’ share of the Latino vote yields a greater number of total votes because of how quickly the Latino population is growing. (Sixty-five per cent of two hundred thousand votes is greater than seventy per cent of a hundred and fifty thousand, for example.) The loss of Latino voters will only become a problem for Democrats if Republicans start to win close to a majority, and, until recently, that possibility appeared to be far off on the horizon.
Democrats have also had polling suggesting that the decline in Latino support isn’t as bad as it seems. Barreto’s polls have always shown lower support for Republicans than many others, even if he and his partners acknowledge that there has been some slippage. After the 2016 election, when he worked for Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, he refuted the consensus view that Trump had won a greater share of the Latino vote than Mitt Romney won four years earlier. After the 2020 election, when he worked for the Biden campaign, and the Latino rightward-shift narrative really took root, he sought to refocus attention on how increased Latino turnout had helped Biden win close contests in Arizona and Nevada. After Biden’s awful June debate, Barreto wrote a memo to the campaign acknowledging that “among Latinos President Biden is below his 2020 support levels.” Yet “the Latino vote remains stable,” he continued, and “gives majority support to President Biden.”
To be clear, if a Democrat were ever to win less than a majority of Latino support nationally, it would be a disaster, because high levels of support for Republicans from other groups would overtake Latino support for Democrats. Winning a bare majority of Latino support would be only slightly less of a disaster. Barreto told me that, in his view, there isn’t a “magic number” for the percentage of Latino support a Democratic candidate needs to win an election, because “we do not have national popular-vote elections.” That’s why he tends to think of the Latino vote as a “critical segment in key states,” namely Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Still, forty-per-cent Latino support for Republicans has been a threshold Democrats haven’t wanted to cross, in part because that level of support nationally generally means that Latino support for Republicans is high in the battlegrounds as well.
In recent weeks, I’ve spoken with more than a dozen Republican and Democratic pollsters, consultants, strategists, and party leaders. From those conversations, it is clear to me that neither party has a firm grasp of the ways in which Latino communities are evolving. Republicans argue that Democrats pander to Latinos, casting them as an aggrieved racial minority in an effort to bind them together as members of a group, and focus too much on immigration, whereas their side delivers an aspirational message of upward economic mobility, and affirms Latinos’ desire for security and religious liberty. Democrats, for their part, cannot figure out why any Latino would be drawn to a party that promises to round up immigrants, and argue that Republicans fight only for the rich.
The Republican strategy of folding Latinos into a new working-class coalition has yet to be proved. But, if that approach—with its harsh rhetoric about the threat posed by immigrants—succeeds, it could supplant decades of thinking about Latino-voter outreach and mobilization. George W. Bush promised comprehensive immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship, but after 9/11 many Republicans tacked back to the right. Many leading Latino advocates began their political careers around the time of the immigrant-rights marches of 2006, when Democrats and moderate Republicans reached a consensus that fighting for immigration reform—including a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented people—was the best way to win Latino support. At the time, immigration was a gateway issue for Latino voters, as Barreto put it, meaning that a candidate’s position on immigration “shows Latinos how they feel about the community.” More Latinos now support strict control, he acknowledged, including President Biden’s executive order that curbed asylum requests. But, “when we’re talking about status for long-term immigrants, nothing has changed,” he said. “It is still a heartstring issue. It’s something people can relate to. It comes up in our focus groups when people say, ‘My mother, my brother, my uncle has been waiting for their green card. When are they going to get it?’ ”
Such distinctions are necessary, but they don’t change the fact that Democrats no longer have the advantage on immigration that they once did. A survey conducted by Equis Research in June found that forty-one per cent of Latino voters trust Trump on immigration, compared with thirty-eight per cent who trust Biden. The Trump campaign has already begun to hammer Harris on the issue, falsely claiming that she was the Biden Administration’s “border czar.”
More broadly, many Latino voters have indicated that they want to hear less about immigration. Last year, Kristian Ramos, a Democratic strategist, helped organize focus groups and surveys of Latinos in Nevada and Arizona. They have consistently told him that Latinos think Democrats care more about Ukraine, racial justice, and immigration than about the “economic well-being of Latinos.” When asked if there was “any specific thing that President Biden and the Democratic majority in Congress have done in the past two years that has directly helped you in your life,” seventy-eight per cent responded no.
Ramos has a good analogy for Latino Democrats who continue to emphasize immigration or other issues instead of the economy. “Say a guy works for a Fortune 500 company. Let’s say it’s McDonald’s,” he said. “And they’re like, ‘Hey, let’s do some polling to see how we can boost our products with Latinos. So, the guy goes into the field and finds that people really like hamburgers with cheese, pickles, and bacon. And then the guy goes back to his boss and says, ‘We should really be talking more about chicken nuggets.’ ” Democrats, he said, keep making the same mistake: “Voters are very clear: ‘Hey, I like the cheeseburger with pickles and bacon, and, wouldn’t you know it, these guys keep trying to feed me fucking chicken nuggets.’ ”
However ineffective Democrats have been at stemming their losses with Latinos, Republican optimism may also be misplaced. Enriquez, the Bienvenido US founder, praised the Trump campaign’s strategy of putting Trump himself before Latino audiences instead of surrogates, but he noted that the campaign has had to quell the concerns of local and statewide Party officials, who’ve wondered whether there should be more organization. Republicans also still have at the top of the ticket a candidate who has said that immigrants poison the blood of America, and even if Latinos don’t prioritize immigration as much as Democrats think they do, they don’t support blatant discrimination. At the Republican National Convention, signs were passed out that said “Mass Deportations Now.” When I spoke to Latinos in attendance about them, the best they could say to defend the signs (after telling me that they themselves would never wave them) was that indiscriminate deportations won’t really happen; the slogan gets applause, they claim, but Trump doesn’t mean it.
As the Republican consultant Mike Madrid argues in his book “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy,” Trump could, in fact, be suppressing Latino support for Republicans. He notes that in the 2018 or 2022 midterms, the former Arizona governor Doug Ducey; the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis; and the California state senator Brian Dahle all did better with Latinos than Trump did in 2020, which, he told me, is “strong evidence that Trump isn’t bringing Latinos to the fold as much as he’s holding back a bigger shift.”
Perhaps the best thing Democrats and Republicans can say for the moment is that they’re reaching enough of their Latino supporters to position themselves to win close elections. Democrats continue to reach Latinos who are newer arrivals and who primarily speak Spanish, whereas Republicans do better with Latinos whose families have been in the United States for a long time and those who primarily speak English. But, historically, when campaigns and their staffers talk about Latinos, they describe them in universal terms. To many Democrats, Latinos are progressive. Conservatives, meanwhile, say that Latinos’ traditional family values, entrepreneurial spirit, and fears of left-wing dictators make them naturally conservative.
It is increasingly the case that “Latino” may be too big of a category to hold everyone who identifies as Latino within it. There are some sixty-five million of us living in the United States. We make up almost twenty per cent of the U.S. population, and that percentage will continue to grow. Almost certainly, Latinos will make up a plurality of the country some day. Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, is almost all Latino, but we’re also a plurality in New Mexico, California, and Texas. We’re a near-majority in cities such as Albuquerque, Dallas, Hartford, Houston, North Las Vegas, Providence, and Tucson, and are already a majority in East Los Angeles, Miami, and San Antonio. When have so many people, spread all across the country, who are native- and foreign-born, rich and poor, speak different languages, and come from many racial backgrounds, all believed the same thing?
It’s not simply that Latinos are not a monolith—which must be one of the most tired expressions uttered about us. I’m saying that, even though there are millions of people for whom Latino identity matters a great deal, thinking of us as an identifiable group may be unsustainable. Even as liberals argue that progressive immigration reform is the best way to reach young Latino voters, thousands of young Latinos participate in high-school programs that train them for jobs in law enforcement, including as Border Patrol officers. Some of them immigrated to the United States, but many did not. Native-born Latinos vastly outnumber Latin American immigrants, and third-generation Latinos are the fastest-growing segment of the Latino population as a whole. They’re more acculturated, and a focus on immigration reform probably isn’t the best way to seek their support. For all of the angst that may cause among Democrats, it’s also an opportunity to learn something new about millions of Americans who are much discussed but still misrepresented and misunderstood. ♦
