Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Latinos, shifting toward Trump, land at the center of the presidential campaign
Former President Donald Trump’s growing support among Latino voters is threatening to upend the coalition that has delivered victories to Democrats for more than a decade, putting the politically divided group at the center of a tug of war that could determine elections across the country.
Polls show that Trump’s standing with Latino voters has grown since his defeat in 2020, with some surveys finding him winning more than 40% of those voters — a level not seen for a Republican in two decades. That strength has Democrats playing defense to maintain the large majority of Latino voters on whom they have relied to win in recent years.
The shift underscores a stark reality of the 2024 election: Neither party can win with white voters alone.
As the fight for both the White House and Congress shifts more squarely to racially diverse states, both parties will need to rely on coalitions that include Black, Asian and Hispanic voters.
Latino voters will make up an estimated 15% of eligible voters this year, and 33% of eligible voters in California, where several swing districts are poised to determine control of the House. Races in Arizona and Nevada, where Latinos make up roughly 1 in 4 eligible voters, are positioned to tip the balance of power in the Senate.
The fight for the presidency has expanded in recent elections from battlegrounds in the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt. President Joe Biden relied on victories in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada to win in 2020. This year, both parties are investing heavily in those states to persuade the large numbers of Hispanic voters they believe are up for grabs.
“The Latino electorate used to be seen as a massive liability for Republicans. Now, it’s turning out to be an asset,” said Daniel Garza, executive director of the Libre Initiative, a conservative group that targets Latino voters and is funded by Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by Charles and David Koch. “Republicans can’t win without them — it would be political malpractice not to have them in a winning coalition.”
The shifts among a large and diverse demographic group defy simple explanation. Differences across regions, generations and economics all play a role.
Trump has found new support among Latinos who work in law enforcement along the Mexican border, Cuban Americans in Florida averse to policies they view as approaching socialism, evangelical Christians attracted to Christian nationalism, and second- and third-generation U.s.-born Latinos who are more likely to identify with and vote like their white peers.
One of the clearest trends is the education divide. Tracking the gap among voters overall, Trump is increasingly doing better among Hispanic voters without a college degree than among college-educated Hispanics.
“The nation’s Latino population is so big now that it is multiple stories,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center. “This has changed before, and it can change again, but even if the shares don’t change, the numbers are going to keep going up — and that is going to have important implications.”
The changes raise a tantalizing prospect for Republicans: The parties may be seeing a political realignment, with Republicans pulling some Black and Latino working-class voters out of the Democratic coalition and Democrats winning over a slice of the upper-income, college-educated white voters who once would have landed in the GOP. It is a voter swap that could extend a lifeline to Republicans, whose dependence on white voters in a diversifying country has for years had strategists predicting doom.
“A moment like this would have been unfathomable in 2016,” said Patrick Ruffini, a pollster who argues that the GOP is assembling a more multiracial coalition. “The belief was that Republicans needed to moderate on immigration reform. Now, you have a figure who not only ignores that but completely turns it on its head. It debunks decades of conventional wisdom.”
However, it is unclear how major and lasting the Trumpera changes will be. Polling on partisanship shows that Latino voters have been fairly steady in their partisan identification, though have more recently started to drift toward the Republican Party. Republicans have gained some support with Black voters in polls, but there is no clear evidence of a mass movement.
Some Democratic strategists believe that current polls are overestimating Hispanic support for Trump, in part because they may exclude too many voters who primarily speak Spanish. They also believe that many Hispanic voters will move back toward Biden in the coming months, arguing that Trump’s rhetoric will repel them.
“Democrats are balancing two realities — the polls have been off and we have won, but there are still warning signs,” said Tory Gavito, a Democratic strategist who conducts focus groups with Hispanic voters. She said she often heard those voters focused on their economic security.
“Status threats are potent because Latino voters know that they are in a race to avoid last place,” she said. “They don’t want to be a loser, and they know it is an uphill climb.”
Biden campaign officials said they had spent about $25 million — and had plans to spend another $30 million — on advertising on television, radio and online platforms that attract large Latino audiences.
The political arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, known as BOLD PAC, has also encouraged candidates to use Spanglish in advertising as a way to reach native-born English speakers, who make up a vast majority of Latino voters.
“Our party hasn’t done the best job of really speaking to the Latino community, because we’ve too often been seen as monolithic and taken for granted,” said Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, D-fla., an Afro-cuban American, who is leading some of those efforts.
Frost said he had so far been encouraged by the party’s outreach this year. “The president,” he said, “does not have to do it alone.”