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Latino voters were a key part of the coalition that helped deliver President Biden to the White House in 2020, but a number of polls heading into this year’s election showed the president’s support among Latinos slipping.
Now, though, Biden is out, and Vice President Harris has taken his place atop the Democratic ticket. With Harris, the party has an opportunity to win many of those voters back.
In the last several election cycles, Democrats nationally have won anywhere from about 60% to more than 70% of the Latino vote. Surveys this year showed Biden below that level.
“I've never seen a candidate shed so many Latino voters like Biden was losing,” said Daniel Garza, president of the Libre Initiative, a group working to mobilize Latinos to support conservative policies and candidates.
“A lot of that has to do with the kind of policies that have been advanced by the Biden administration, referred to as Bidenomics, that are not offering Latinos a square deal,” he said. “I mean, a lot of Latinos are scraping their knees in prayer that they'll make it from one week to the next because their wages haven't caught up to inflation.”
While inflation has slowed in recent months, many Americans still report unease at the cost of basic necessities. Garza said those economic realities create an opening for Republicans to appeal to Latino voters who would have otherwise voted for Democrats.
But Clarissa Martinez, a Latino vote expert with the advocacy group UnidosUS, said that's an overly simplistic view of the shift that has been happening among Latino voters ahead of this election.
“What was happening on the Democratic side is that an increasing number of people — which we have seen that trend with young voters in particular, and Latinos are a young electorate — choosing more independent,” she said. “[That] took away support from the traditional 60% level that Democrats have enjoyed, but it wasn't translating directly as support on the Republican side.”
This is something that Maria Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino, says her organization found in its research, too.
Voto Latino held focus groups with Latino voters in battleground states earlier this year and the group found that about 17% of voters ages 18-40 said they were going to vote for a third party.
“And what was super interesting to me, having done this for 20 years, a full 62% of women, 18 to 40, were the ones that were thinking of voting for a third party,” Kumar said. “The No. 1 reason that they were not interested in voting for Trump was that he was too racist. And the No. 1 reason they were not interested in voting for Biden was that he was too old.”
Martinez said there has been this assumption that older Latino men have been the main reason Democrats have seen waning support in the polls until recently. But that “churn” in the party, she said, was actually being driven by newer voters.
“Those are going to tend to be younger voters almost by definition, but not completely,” Martinez said. “And so I think that this is an opportunity to energize those voters on the Democratic side, to try to bring them over to the Democratic side.”
Kumar said that work is getting easier now that Biden is no longer running for president.
Her group just so happened to schedule focus groups for the day after Harris announced her candidacy, and Kumar said the energy shift was palpable.
“It was overwhelming the enthusiasm of the focus groups that we saw,” she said.
Voto Latino also experienced a 221% increase in voter registrations in the days after Harris announced.
“We were registering 60 to 100 voters a day from January until the Friday before Biden stepped down,” Kumar said. “On Monday with Kamala Harris as the potential nominee, we were registering 3,000 folks a day. By Friday, we were up to 8,100.”
Kumar said we just don’t know what the Latino electorate is going to look like anymore. But from her vantage point, a lot of these younger voters are looking at the Democratic Party again. And younger Latino voters in general are becoming more politically engaged ahead of the election.
However, Garza, of the conservative Libre Initiative, said he doesn’t think things have changed that substantially now that Harris is set to be the nominee.
“I mean, the race has been shaken up, but the candidates may have changed, but the policies did not change,” he said. “I mean, Vice President Harris has promoted every policy that created the highest inflation in four decades, which has wreaked havoc on working Latino families.”
Garza said it’s also important to remember that about 25% of Latino voters this year will be voting for the first time. So, he said, a huge chunk of Latino voters don’t have loyalty to any particular party.
Martinez points out, though, that both parties have historically not done the best job of registering and engaging Latino voters. Although, she said, they have been getting better recently.
Still, it’s estimated that about 13 million Latinos are eligible to vote but aren’t registered in the U.S. And Martinez said surveys have shown that Latino voters have also been historically less likely to hear from presidential campaigns, compared with other voters.
“Which frankly baffles the mind, because if you just look at the math, it is absolutely, positively clear that the winning equation for the White House — Latinos are a critical factor,” she said.
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