As she gains in polls, Clinton expands Latino outreach efforts
Hispanic voters could make a difference in states like Georgia
ATLANTA — With Latinos making up just 2 percent of voters, Georgia isn’t usually a place where presidential campaigns go looking for Hispanic support.
But as she pulls away from Donald Trump in traditional battlegrounds, Hillary Clinton is now aggressively wooing Latino voters here and in other states with smaller Hispanic populations in hopes of expanding her margins in November.
The efforts in states such as Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania illustrate the extent to which Latinos are transforming electoral politics beyond competitive states such as Colorado, Florida and Nevada that they have long dominated.
“You don’t take for granted the Latino community in these states that aren’t traditional battleground states, because when you’re deciding states by 1, 2 or 4 percentage points, you have to lean on them,” said Lorella Praeli, the Clinton campaign’s director of Latino voter outreach. “You have to be communicating to them bilingually; you need to be sophisticated enough to talk about the issues they care about in the state.”
The Clinton campaign announced plans last week to invest more money and manpower in Georgia and Arizona, buoyed by recent surveys showing her trailing Trump by just single digits because of overwhelming Hispanic support. How exactly Clinton plans to campaign and organize in those two states – which haven’t been won by a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton did so in 1992 and 1996 – is still up for debate, according to campaign officials and Democrats in both states.
It can’t happen without voters like Arturo Cerezo. A legal immigrant from Mexico, he decided to become a U.S. citizen and register to vote this year after he and his wife heard Trump say something again about deporting immigrants.
“We don’t know what this guy is going to do in the future, so we said, ‘Why not get our citizenship now just in case?’” Cerezo said recently after becoming a U.S. citizen at a federal building in Atlanta.
“We have to express our disapproval by voting,” he added. “I don’t know how the process works, but I will do whatever I need to do.”
Thanks to Trump’s harsh anti-immigration positions and rhetoric, polls show Hispanics such as Cerezo are poised to vote this year for Hillary Clinton in overwhelming numbers. But as Cerezo suggested, many will be first-timers or may struggle to grasp the basic details of when and where to vote. That’s why the Clinton campaign in the past week hired Jheison Nieto, a former Senate aide, to lead Latino voter outreach in Pennsylvania, and Irene Godinez, a former Planned Parenthood official, to do the same in North Carolina.
Albert Morales, a former Democratic National Committee official who was responsible for Hispanic voter engagement, said neither of President Obama’s campaigns had Latino voter directors in those states. Given Clinton’s current strength in states such as Colorado, Virginia and Pennsylvania, “they’re hiring because they’re not having to spend millions of dollars on TV in Colorado or in the Philadelphia market,” he said.
Other Latino leaders were more measured in response to Clinton’s moves. Arturo Vargas, executive director of the nonpartisan National Association of Latino Elected Officials, faulted her campaign for extending its Latino voter outreach into new areas “only as those states come ‘into play.’ This strategy still ignores the vast majority of the Latino electorate. We are not a three-state or seven-state population. We are a 50-state population and Puerto Rico.”
Despite attempts by GOP leaders to improve Hispanic outreach, Trump has done little to cultivate Latinos. This week, the Republican National Committee launched a new online campaign to reach Hispanics with a series of videos explaining GOP policy positions.
But a new Fox News Latino poll showed Latino party identification shifting further toward Democrats, in part because of Trump’s rhetoric. Sixty percent of Hispanics identify with Democrats and 21 percent with Republicans – a 6-point swing since 2012, the poll said.