WASHINGTON — Following a week of fallout from incendiary comments about U.S. Latinos, both Democrats and Republicans scramble to curry the favor of Latino voters from across the country. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have created Spanish-language advertisements, campaigned with Latino celebrities and courted voters in their local cultural hubs, all in the final months of their presidential campaign. Still, the question remains: how well do they understand this crucial voting bloc?
According to the Pew Research Center, Latinos are the second-fastest growing ethnic group in the 2024 electorate. An estimated 36.2 million Latinos are eligible to vote, amounting to 14.7% of the U.S. electorate this year.
Latino voters are instrumental in the upcoming presidential election because of their significant presence in several swing states, including Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. In Nevada, almost one in every five registered voters is Latino, according to the NALEO Educational Fund. In Phoenix last week, Harris campaigned with norteño band, Los Tigres del Norte, to attract the state’s Latino voters, who make up 25% of the electorate.
The efforts have not been one-sided in the least. Trump returned to Allentown, Pennsylvania last week with the support of Puerto Rican community members and officials to make up for the offensive comments made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe in his Madison Square Garden rally,
Although Latino voters have historically supported Democrats as a demographic bloc, the Latino electorate’s diverse national, racial and immigration backgrounds have led to the development of an increasingly fractured group of voters that experts are grappling to understand.
Estuardo Rodriguez, who attended and spoke at a panel for Florida International University’s Latino Poll Release on November 1, said his experience as president and advocate for the National Museum of the American Latino has shown him a more nuanced view of U.S. Latinos.
“I have seen and witnessed such division within our community as it comes down to what our origin stories are,” said Rodriguez at the panel.
While Latino voters tend to have a more favorable view of Harris than Trump, it is not necessarily due to Trump’s divisive rhetoric on Latino immigrants and citizens, which have long been staples of his campaigns.
An October New York Times/Siena College poll found that two-thirds of American-born Latino voters and half of foreign-born Latino voters said they did not think Trump was referring to them when he spoke of immigrants.
Professor Eduardo Gamarra, who led FIU’s panel and is director of the poll, said the trend may be due to the longterm establishment of Latino communities in the U.S.
“What we’re seeing now is that there are some very significant generational features to the vote, that as you become more ‘American’ you tend to be more like the general [American] public,” Gamarra said at the panel.
Experts have also surveyed Latino voters’ attitudes on immigration due to their more recent immigration history and shared cultural ties with incoming immigrants from Latin America.
However, policy experts establish that Latino voters are prioritizing the domestic economy and day-to-day issues this election over matters of immigration.
“Immigration is actually a top issue, but at the end of the day, you have to pay the bills and you have to feed your family,” UnidosUS senior immigration policy advisor Cris Ramón said.
Although some polls have come out saying that more Latinos are starting to support mass deportations of undocumented migrants, Ramón said that they do not adequately represent the electorate due to the lack of proposed alternatives in the questioning.
Ramón clarifies that Latinos tend to prefer other border management strategies over mass deportations, including working with Latin American countries to prosecute human smugglers, take in asylum seekers and provide routes for in-region processing of immigrants.
These trends are consistent even among Republican-identifying Latino voters, who have historically made up around a third of the Latino electorate.
“Even when we look at some of the differences by who based reporting the election… or how they identified by political parties, Latinos who identify as Republicans tend to have a softer stance than Republicans overall with these more punitive measures.” Pew Research Center research associate Luis Noe-Bustamante said.
Another thing to understand about the Latino vote is that it is more limited than the share of Latinos that make up the overall U.S. population. As of July 1, 2022, the U.S. Census counted 63.7 million Hispanics in the country, making up 19.1% of the population as the largest racial or ethnic minority in the United States.
Despite this number, Lydia Camarillo, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project based in Texas, said that voter representation in predominantly Latino areas is often diluted due to various factors.
“One-third of us are too young to vote and a third of us are not citizens. And of the number that can vote, we’re voting at the same respectable level, given that we’re a younger electorate, but there’s not enough of us,” Camarillo said.
Crucially, many Latinos in predominantly Latino areas may also not be sufficiently mobilized by political actors. According to the UnidosUS 2024 Pre-Election Poll of the Hispanic Electorate, about 55% [CQ] of Latino voters have not been approached by any political party, campaign or nonpartisan organization to vote in the 2024 election. The lack of outreach was consistent among both competitive and noncompetitive states.
Parties that have focused on outreach and cultivated Latino support have found success through campaigns specifically tailored to their constituents’ national and cultural origins.
Sonja Díaz, founder and leader of the Latina Futures 2050 Lab, noted that the South Texas Rio Grande Valley’s uptick in conservative victories was due to the Republican Party’s courting of Mexican American voters on traditional Mexican values of “God, family, and country.”
“Latino voters are like other American voters in that they have distinct and different views that are based on mobilization that is targeting them in language, culture and policy issues that are particular to their experience,” Díaz said.
Latino voters in the Valley may have also voted Republican in recent years due to the politically dependent nature of their professions.
“There is a percentage of Latinos that work for the Immigrant and Naturalization Service, Customs and for the oil industry, and believe that the only way they get to keep their jobs is to simply vote for the Republican Party,” Camarillo said.
Indeed, Latino demographic experts say the outcome of the election will also rely on a crucial group – U.S. Latinas. In an election increasingly defined by gender disparity, high-propensity female voters are expected to turn out in droves.
According to an October AP-NORC poll, Hispanic women voters are more likely to have a positive view of Harris than their male counterparts, who have been increasingly wooed by Trump’s messages of machismo and American patriotism.
Díaz sees high-propensity Latina voters to have an outsized impact on their communities due to the cultural multi-generational living of many Latino families.
“The zone of influence goes beyond a nuclear family and includes an extension of other family members who look to Latina breadwinners as trusted messengers for information,” Díaz said. So, keeping all of these factors in mind, is it certain that Latino voters will decisively vote for one party or one candidate over the other? At this point, experts are watching for the Election Day turnout, especially since the FIU report states that over 80% of Latinos say they are “very likely” to vote on November 5.
