If Kamala Harris loses the election next month, one big reason will be the steady drift of Latino voters away from the Democrats. In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, Harris led Donald Trump by 18 points among Latinos, 57 to 39.
Only four years ago, those voters favored Joe Biden over Trump by 33 points.
There’s a clear explanation for this shift: As Latinos become more integrated into the country’s culture and economy, they focus less on their ethnic identity, and increasingly resemble their fellow Americans, with the same problems and priorities.
Pew found that 85% of Latino voters describe the economy as “very important to their vote,” and among Trump supporters, that jumps to 93%. Trump runs almost even with Harris among Latino voters who rate the economy as “fair” or “poor.”
“Polls show that Latino communities care primarily about the same things that all other Americans do — jobs, health care access, affordability and the rising cost of living,” Rafael Collazo, director of UnidosUS Action Fund, told Newsweek. “They may see Trump as stronger in some of those areas.”
Democrats have made a major mistake in stamping and stereotyping Latinos as “people of color” and assuming they would be loyal leftist voters. But in fact, reports Pew, 32% say they’re liberal, 37% identify as moderate and 29% as conservative — a profile that closely resembles the rest of the country.
Moreover, Democrats have assumed Latinos would be particularly progressive on the issue of immigration. But as the years and the generations pass — and these voters grow more distant from their foreign origins — that’s less and less true.
According to NBC, 35% of Latinos say “immigration hurts more than it helps” the country, the highest share of Latinos with those negative feelings in two decades of polling. Almost half (46%) say it is “more important to secure the border and stop immigrants from entering the country illegally” than it is to end discrimination against undocumented migrants and ease their path to citizenship.
Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who focuses on Latino issues, says that Democrats have consistently misread this trend. “Latinos have been screaming at the top of their lungs, ‘We want an economic agenda, we want a jobs agenda, we want an affordability agenda,'” he said to the New Yorker. “What did they get? They get immigration reform.”
Demographer Ruy Teixeira wrote in the Washington Post the “default presumption among many Hispanics that they should vote Democratic” is increasingly less valid.
“The challenge for Democrats is this: The party can no longer rely on simply mobilizing this constituency,” he explained.
“They will have to convince these voters that Democrats share the values of a community that is socially moderate-to-conservative, upwardly mobile and patriotic with down-to-earth concerns focused on jobs, the economy, health care, good schools and public safety.”
This shift away from “default” support for Democrats comes as Latino voters are more important than ever. This year, reports Pew, 36.2 million Latinos are eligible to vote — more than double the 14.3 million who were eligible in 2000. Moreover, Latinos play an outsized role in two swing states — Arizona and Nevada — while also having an impact in Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Trump is particularly popular with younger men who lack college degrees and respond to his macho mixture of bluster and bravado. In Arizona, reports USA Today, 51% of Latino men ages 18 to 34 support Trump, and in Nevada, that rises to 53%.
The Harris campaign is making an aggressive effort to counteract this rising threat, devoting $3 million to new ads on Spanish-language radio over the next month and focusing mainly on the sports programs where those young men might be found.
She’s also talking tougher on border issues, and as Politico puts it, “It’s a major shift in how Democrats are targeting Latino voters this cycle — and a rebuke of the belief long held by many Democrats that overt appeals on race and progressive policies on immigration are key to winning Latino votes.”
“The Harris campaign understands what we’ve been saying about Latinos for a long time, which is that we’re not a monolith,” explained Matt Tuerk, the first Latino mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania. “We’re all Americans, too. We have a lot of the same basic values that every American has.”
If Harris can press that point with Latino voters over the final weeks of the campaign — and deter their defection to Trump — her chances of winning will go way up.
(Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.)
