Trending Now
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
A photo of Trump with Latino Americans for Trump
Bloc by Bloc: Harris and Trump scramble to reach Latinos
This GZERO 2024 election series looks at America’s changing voting patterns, bloc by bloc.
________________________________
With less than two weeks before Election Day, both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have been focusing on a diverse but potentially decisive bloc: Latino voters.
In recent days, the former president has done a Town Hall with the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision and a round table with Latino community leaders at his golf club in Doral Florida. The core of Trump's messaging has been to remind people of the pre-pandemic economy, which was boosted by tax cuts when he was president, and to paint Harris as a left-wing radical.
Harris, meanwhile, taped a prime-time interview with Spanish-language channel Telemundo in which she pledged to increase economic opportunities for Latino men and small business owners, in particular, and looked to counter Republican messaging that she is a “socialist.”
This sudden flurry of outreach is welcome, but it’s late, says Clarissa Martínez, vice president of the Latino Vote initiative at UnidosUS, a leading non-partisan Latino civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.
“It’s frankly dumbfounding that the outreach has remained so low for an electorate that proved to be so decisive in 2020,” she says.
A recent UnidosUS study showed that barely a third of Latino voters had heard directly from the Democratic campaign at all, and less than a quarter had heard from Republicans.
Latino voters are a fast-growing bloc that now makes up 15% of the electorate. Half of all growth in newly eligible voters this cycle has come from Hispanics, and more than a fifth of Latino voters will be voting for president for the first time ever this November.
Latinos have long been a largely Democratic voting bloc – over the years, about 60-70% of Hispanics have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate.
But Trump’s support among Latinos has been edging up in the past two cycles – he got 28% of the Latino vote in 2016 and 32% in 2020. (For more on why, see our broader look at the Latino vote here.)
In fact, in the months before he dropped out of the race in July, President Joe Biden was actually trailing Trump among Latino voters, clocking just 40% support compared to the former president’s 46%, according to a New York Times/Siena poll.
Harris’ entry into the race has swung things back in the direction of the historical norm. The vice president is polling at 56% among Hispanics, against Trump’s 37% in the latest poll. Trump’s support is particularly strong among Latino men, where he trails Harris by just 3 points – among women the gap is 10 times as large.
Those numbers suggest Harris will likely win more of the Latino vote than Trump, but the margins are what matters, particularly in key swing states where lots of Latino votes are up for grabs.
There are more than 600,000 registered Latino voters in Pennsylvania, which Biden won by barely 80,000 votes in 2020. In Wisconsin, which Biden won by a mere 25,000 votes, there are 180,000 registered Latinos. In Nevada, nearly one in five registered voters is Latino.
The two candidates’ focus on economic issues is no accident. Polls consistently show the top three issues for Latino voters are inflation, jobs, and housing costs. Immigration reform – where most Latinos support stronger border security alongside a path to citizenship for long-time undocumented immigrants in good standing – is barely in the top five.
As Election Day approaches, the urgency of reaching Latino voters is only rising, according to Martínez of UnidosUS, who says about a third of Latinos still say they don’t have enough information to choose.
And the key subset to watch in this cycle? “It’s the new Latino voters,” she says. “That’s where you are seeing the biggest churn between the parties. How those voters break is going to be the thing to look at.”
“But meaningful outreach is essential,” she says, “You can’t just expect people to know what you stand for.”
This article updates our more in-depth look at the Latino vote, which we published before Biden dropped out of the race. You can find that piece here. Our entire series of Bloc by Bloc profiles of key demographic groups is housed here.
Graphic Truth: Latino voters and votes since 1980
Latinos make up the largest minority group in the US, accounting for nearly 15% of eligible voters. They are also one of the fastest-expanding electoral forces – first-time Latino voters account for half of the growth in US eligible voters since 2020.
Historically, Latinos have leaned Democrat – a Republican presidential candidate has never won the Latino vote. The closest any GOP candidate has come was George W. Bush, who took 40%.
But over the past several election cycles, Latino support for the GOP has been rising. Former President Donald Trumpcurrently polls at 39% among Latinos. If that holds through Election Day, it would represent an 11-point Trumpward swing since he ran for president in 2016. Here is a look at how Latinos have voted in every US presidential election since 1980, along with their share of the electorate in each year.Russian-American journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Alsu Kurmasheva, who is in custody after she was accused of violating Russia's law on foreign agents, attends a court hearing in Kazan, Russia May 31, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Russia jails another US journalist, Latinos warm to RFK Jr., Paris tightens security for Olympics, India looks to roll in the deep, HIV prevention milestone for Africa
6.5: A Russian court revealed on Monday that Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva was sentenced on Friday to 6.5 years in prison for “spreading false information” about the Russian army. Kurmasheva, a dual citizen who works for the US-funded Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe service in Prague, was arrested while visiting her family in Russia in October. Her husband says the charges relate to a book of profiles of anti-war Russians that Kurmasheva edited. She is the second American journalist that Russia has sentenced to a lengthy prison term in the past four days alone.
24: ¿Latinos por Roberto? A new poll shows 24% of US Hispanic voters support third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That’s nearly 10 points above the national average. Respondents were split 36 to 36 on Biden vs. Trump. The poll was taken before Biden dropped out of the race, but it illustrates the increasingly uphill battle that Democrats face in keeping the support of a traditionally blue voting group. Read our in-depth look at the “Latino vote” here.
30,000: France is not messing around when it comes to security for the Paris Olympics, which begin later this week. Authorities will deploy 30,000 police throughout the event, rising to 45,000 during peak times. Alongside them will be 15,000 French military personnel and nearly 2,000 foreign police. Security officials have already conducted hundreds of raids, arresting members of far-right, far-left, and jihadist groups suspected of planning attacks. At least two plots have reportedly been broken up already.
4: India wants to get into the deep-sea mining game as it tries to secure supplies of rare minerals critical for its economy and energy transition. New Delhi has already won several licenses for the Indian Ocean, but it’s eyeing a bigger prize: a vast swathe of the Pacific between Mexico and Hawaii. Experts say it will take India at least four years to develop the required skills and technology to compete with Asian rival China. In the meantime, international authorities are still working out rules for deep-sea mining.
56: For the first time ever, a majority of new HIV infections occurred outside of sub-Saharan Africa, a UN report says. The milestone, based on numbers from 2023, reflects sustained progress against the disease by governments in Africa – where new infections have fallen 56% since 2010. Globally, new infections have fallen 39% during that time. But experts warn that case numbers are currently rising elsewhere in the world, particularly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and north Africa.
An "Aqui Vote Here" sign at the Guerra branch library in San Antonio, Texas, USA.
Bloc by Bloc: Biden and Trump fight over a changing “Latino Vote”
This GZERO 2024 election series looks at America’s changing voting patterns, bloc by bloc.
________________________________
Just days ago, President Joe Biden announced a sweeping executive measure that would legalize the status of undocumented immigrants who are married to American citizens. The move, which primarily benefits hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Latin America, was the latest salvo in the contest between Biden and Donald Trump to win over Latino voters.
Both sides have been honing their pitches to Latino communities.
Trump, who recently rebranded his outreach as “Latino Americans for Trump,” has begun visiting Democratic strongholds to find “persuadable Black and Latino voters.” Last month he went to the heavily blue South Bronx, where GZERO was on the scene.
The Biden campaign, for its part, has spent tens of millions on ads targeting Latino voters, including some in Spanglish. “For our abuelos,” one says, “insulin that costs treinta y cinco dólares or cientos de dólares, that is la diferencia between Joe Biden y Donald Trump.”
The campaign even has a new ad called “Goalll!” as part of its pitch to Latinos during the month-long Copa América soccer tournament.
The main audience for all of this? More than 36 million registered Latino or Hispanic voters who trace their heritage to the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America.
At nearly 15% of the electorate, that’s America’s largest group of minority voters, and it’s growing fast. This fall, there will be four million more eligible Latino voters than in 2020. Latinos alone account for half of the total growth in registered voters during this electoral cycle.
They are also more than 20% of the registered voters in battlegrounds like Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, and they could have a big impact even in swing states where their numbers are smaller.
There are more than 600,000 registered Latino voters in Pennsylvania, which Biden won by barely 80,000 votes in 2020. In Wisconsin, which Biden won by a mere 25,000 votes, there are 180,000 registered Latinos.
Hispanic voters have historically leaned left-ish. Between 50-60% of Latinos identify as Democrats while only a quarter say they are Republicans. But they are hardly a one-dimensional group.
“Hispanic voters are diverse in many ways, including in their political identities,” says Jens Manuel Krogstad, an expert on Latino communities at the Pew Research Center. “Factors like origin country, immigrant generation, religion, and geography all intersect in complex ways to shape Hispanic political attitudes.”
Miami Cubans, marked by their flight from Fidel Castro’s revolution, are famously much more conservative than, say, Mexican-Americans in California, traditionally a Democratic bastion, or Puerto Ricans just a few hundred miles north, in the Orlando area.
Those differences sometimes play out under one roof.
“We’ve got four Latinos living just in this house,” says Joe Pabón, 47, a Harlem-raised paralegal of mixed Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican descent who lives in Baltimore with his Puerto Rican-Dominican wife and two kids, “and I don’t know that the four of us would even vote the same. So I really couldn’t tell you what, say, a 25-year-old Latino in New Mexico or LA thinks about things.”
But in recent years, Trump and the GOP have made inroads into the Democrats’ azul wall of Latino support. Trump took 29% of the Latino vote in 2016 and 32% in 2020. In the 2022 midterms, 33% of Latinos reported voting Republican.
Experts caution that the rightward lurch didn’t occur in all Latino communities.
“It was not a uniform shift toward Trump,” says Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas, director of UCLA’s Latino Politics and Policy Institute. “There were particular places in the country where that shift happened more than in others.”
In the 2020 election, for example, the GOP won over South Florida Colombians and Venezuelans by raising the specter of Democratic Party “socialism,” and they gained the support of Mexican-Americans in energy-rich districts of South Texas, who worried that Biden’s environmental agenda would eliminate their oil and gas industry jobs.
And perhaps this undeniably catchy Cuban timba-style anthem also helped: “¡Yo voy a votar, por Donald Trump! (No matter what your politics are, it hits.)
But there was also a “reversion to the mean,” says Dominguez-Villegas. Republican-leaning Latinos or independents appalled by Trump’s openly anti-immigrant rhetoric in 2016 were more receptive to his economic, deregulatory, and anti-lockdown messages four years later.
The picture has gotten even dimmer for Democrats since then.
Recent polls show as many as 46% of Latinos now support Trump. If that holds on Election Day, it would set a new record of Latino support for a GOP presidential candidate. Until now, none has gotten more than George W. Bush, who campaigned on comprehensive immigration reform, spoke passable Spanish, and was reelected with 40% of the Latino vote in 2004.
Part of the reason Trump is doing better among Latinos? Es la economía, estúpido.The top issues for Latinos right now are, overwhelmingly, economic: inflation, jobs, and housing costs, with health care and gun violence rounding out the top five.
While large numbers of Latinos still see Democrats as stronger on many of these issues, the broader sense of economic malaise has taken a toll on Biden’s support in Latino communities. Two-thirds of Hispanics think the economy is going badly, according to a recent CBS poll. That’s two points higher than the national average.
But there’s something else at work too, according to Dominguez-Villegas.
“Although a lot of Latinos fled places that were dictatorships, there is still a sense that strong leadership is good and that Trump had things under control and that Biden has not,” he says.
That sense is one reason Mauricio Hernández, 30, a Colombian-American entrepreneur who runs an aircraft repair business in Miami, supports Trump.
Under the last president, he says, “I remember gas being cheaper, companies prospering more.” And while he thinks both candidates are flawed, Trump seems to take a “harder stance” on key issues like national security and, of course, immigration.
Ah, immigration. Over the past half-century, the majority of US immigrants, both legal and undocumented, have come from Latin America. As a result, immigration policy touches Latinos more directly and more broadly than other groups.
Latino views on immigration are nuanced, but recent polls of the Latino community broadly show hardening opinions. A narrow majority of Latinos now say they would support Trump’s proposal to deport all undocumented immigrants.
“I’m an immigrant, but I came here from the Dominican Republic through the front door,” said Ana Peréz, a woman who spoke to us at Trump’s Bronx rally last month. “Sorry if I don’t think we should let just anyone sneak in to take jobs, to commit crimes. As a woman, I’d like to feel safe walking down the street at night again.”
Latinos in swing states, meanwhile, now view Democrats as worse on immigration than Republicans, according to Equis, a prominent Latino-focused pollster.
But part of the reason for that, the study showed, was the feeling that Democrats “fail to deliver” on immigration policy promises.
A separate study of swing-state Latino voters conducted by UnidosUS, a major Latino advocacy organization, showed strong support both for creating a path to citizenship for long-term undocumented immigrants, while also supporting stronger border measures and cracking down on human trafficking.
“Latino voters want immigration policies that are firm, fair, and free of cruelty,” says Janet Murguía, president and CEO of UnidosUS.
That may be why Biden chose to legalize the status of undocumented spouses last week. The Equis poll showed that this policy, in particular, had a huge net upside for Biden among Latino swing voters.
Biden’s move also helped to repair some of the rift with immigration advocacy organizations that were infuriated by Biden’s decision earlier this month to limit asylum applications at the Southern border.
He will need their support to get out a Latino vote that has historically shown low turnout, in part because Hispanic voters are younger than those of other ethnic groups.
Biden’s narrow victories in Nevada and Arizona in 2020, for example, depended a lot on grassroots organizers who favor less restrictive border policies.
If he is going to carry those states again in 2024, he will need them on his side.
“Those are the boots on the ground,” says Dominguez-Villegas, “and if you don't have them, it's going to be really difficult to win.”
This piece contains additional reporting by GZERO’s Riley Callanan.
Latino dreams, NY States of Mind
Hi there! Welcome back to our new daily feature, Midterm Matters, where we pick a couple of red-hot US midterm stories and separate the signal (what you need to know) from the noise (what everyone is yelling about). Enjoy and let us know what you think.
GOP looks to Latinos for upsets in Texas ... and beyond?
Republicans are betting on three Latina candidates to overturn decades of Democrat dominance in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Dems are still the party to beat, but Republicans have made major inroads with Latino voters in South Texas, seeing double-digit swings to the GOP between 2016 and 2020, when Trump spoke to local Latino voters’ anxiety about disorderly immigration and the impact of Democrats’ climate agenda on the energy industry there. This time, GOP candidates are also appealing to local voters’ conservative and Catholic values.
Nationwide, there’s a lot of noise about Dems' advantage with Latino voters fallingfrom 40 to 27 points since 2018. That’s because the GOP has begun to more effectively campaign among Latinos beyond the reliable Republican bedrock of South Florida Cubans (even if their outreach to them is still catchy as hell.) And with 40% of Latino independents undecided, there are lots of votes up for grabs.
But while Latinos are now the second-largest — and fastest-growing — ethnic/racial group in America, the signal is this: they are hardly a monolith, politically or demographically. For example, Latinos of Mexican and Puerto Rican origin tend to vote blue, while Cubans and Venezuelans skew red. Evangelical Latinos, a rapidly growing community, are overwhelmingly Republican, while two-thirds of Catholic Latinos vote Democrat. Second and third-generation Latinos tend to tilt more Republican, though younger generations across the board are more sympathetic to Democrats. Immigration matters to some Latino communities, while the economy or abortion is more pressing for others. In sum, as one super sharp 2020 study put it: “There’s no such thing as the ‘Latino vote.’”
NY governor’s race tightens
Democrats are noisily freaking out that Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin is closing his polling gap in the New York gubernatorial race against incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul, with Empire State voters seemingly digging Zeldin's tough-on-crime message. The two took part in their first and only debate on Tuesday night.
Yet Zeldin winning is a long shot. The race has tightened, mainly due to Zeldin hammering his rival with daily press conferences about rising crime rates outside NYC subway stations while spending millions on TV campaign ads. But Hochul's lead remains well above the margin of error, a strong signal that she's likely to eke out a win.Democrat hand-wringing aside, a shock Zeldin victory would be a tectonic shift for deep-blue New York, whose last Republican governor was George Pataki (1995-2006).
This comes to you from the Signal newsletter team of GZERO Media. Sign up today.