The Latino swing voters who could decide the US election
Myles McCormick in Rio Grande City, Miami and Midland
August 7 2024
In Texas’s Starr County, mainland America’s most Hispanic parish, turning your back on the Democratic party once meant certain ostracisation. For Alberto Olivares, the decision to do so in 2020 was “kind of like divorcing your family”. But his reasoning was plain: “The party no longer represented me,” says the 54-year-old former border patrolman.
Today in Starr County, which has not backed a Republican presidential candidate in more than 100 years, voters are increasingly following suit.
In 2012, 86 per cent of voters in the sparsely populated border county backed the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama; in 2016, 78 per cent voted for Hillary Clinton; but Joe Biden took just 52 per cent of the vote in 2020. This November, GOP officials are confident Starr will flip red.
“I think the people in this county are ready for the first time to vote for a Republican president,” says Olivares, who is running as the GOP candidate for county sheriff. “Latinos, Hispanics, no matter what the origin is, are largely conservative people.”
Almost 98 per cent of Starr County residents identify as Latino or Hispanic, more than anywhere in the US outside Puerto Rico. Its shift rightward is a microcosm of a broader drift among a demographic that has for decades been considered reliably Democratic, drawn by the party’s reputation as the home of blue-collar workers and civil rights.
Underlying the change, say pollsters, is a lack of faith in the party leadership, economic concerns and growing disillusion with Democrat policies nationally, which have moved leftward on issues from LGBTQ rights and abortion to border control.
“There’s a certain disconnect or disjuncture that has opened up between what Hispanics want out of life, want out of their country and want out of a political party — and what Democrats were assuming they wanted,” says Ruy Texeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of the book Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
How America’s Latino population votes matters more than ever. The demographic reached over 62mn in 2020 — roughly 1 in 5 Americans — and has overtaken the Black population to become the nation’s second-largest ethnic group. The number of eligible Latino voters jumped from 14.3mn in 2000 to an estimated 36.2mn this year, according to Pew, doubling their proportion of the electorate to almost 15 per cent.
They are far from a monolith, comprising Cuban American voters who have largely always voted Republican, socially conservative evangelical Protestants, established communities who have lived in the US for three generations or more and a growing middle class with different priorities.
Yet a clear trend has emerged in recent years: enthusiasm for the Democrats has waned. The party’s margin over Republicans among Latino voters fell from 44 points in the 2012 presidential election to 38 points in 2016 and 21 points in 2020.
Before he dropped out of the race in July, Biden’s support had dwindled to historic lows for a Democratic candidate at this point in a campaign: one Pew survey put him neck-and-neck with Donald Trump.
The nomination of vice-president Kamala Harris has energised supporters, however, and the selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate could make inroads in working class rural communities that comprise much of the Latino population. In the coming days, the pair will visit cities in crucial swing states where the Latino vote is key, including Phoenix, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada.
Democrats are still widely expected to win a majority of the Latino vote. But the ebbing enthusiasm among a key demographic has set off alarm bells among strategists.
Fernand Amandi, a veteran Democrat pollster, insists there has not been an “exodus” of Latino voters. “But I think there is some legitimacy to the idea that, on the margins, there could be some of the dreaded e-word for Democrats: erosion.”
In a tight race, that erosion could have big implications, especially in the small group of battleground states likely to determine the next occupant of the White House.
Two swing states have Latino populations that make up more than a fifth of voters: 22 per cent in Nevada and 25 per cent in Arizona. In the others, their numbers are not insignificant: 6 per cent in North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania, 5 per cent in Wisconsin and 4 per cent in Michigan.
“Hispanics are still mainly Democrats [but they] are switching,” says Eduardo Gamarra, a political-science professor at Florida International University and director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum. “And that shift could be enough to seal the fate of the Democrats in the 2024 elections.”
When support for Trump swelled among Latino voters between 2016 and 2020, many Democrats were dumbfounded.
After all, this was the man who had referred to some Mexicans as “rapists”, made building a wall on the southern US border a key pillar of his campaigns and imposed draconian policies to deter illegal crossings.
Since then, Trump’s numbers have risen further, even as he doubles down on the anti-immigrant rhetoric, accusing new arrivals of “poisoning the blood of our country” and proposes a crackdown involving militarised mass deportations.
Biden, by contrast, has taken a more humane approach to the border, reversing Trump-era policies that separated families and increasing parole to allow people into the country.
But a more liberal approach to immigration is not the vote winner it once was among Latinos. Instead, many blame Biden for a surge in illegal immigration at America’s southern frontier. Crossings reached record levels in December, but have since dropped sharply as the administration tightens its approach.
In Rio Grande City, Claudia Alcazar, 56, another recent Republican convert, bristles at the notion that Latino heritage should make the community more sympathetic to new immigrants — and the Democrats.
“It’s not that we hate people coming across,” says Alcazar, who is running for tax assessor-collector in the county. But the assumption that people of Latino background should automatically have an affinity is fanciful, she says. “Other countries do not sit down and break down [political opinions] by ethnicity the way we do. But we do here and we’re supposed to be united.”
Democrats’ assumption that border policy would keep Latinos onside is part of a wider misunderstanding of voter motivations today, say analysts.
“Identity politics is effectively one of the driving forces within the progressive movement in the Democratic party. That leads Democrats to assume that all Latinos identify with all other Latinos,” says Mark Jones, a political-science professor at Rice University.
But many Latinos have been in the US for generations, he adds, speak more English than Spanish, and prefer American football to soccer. “They do not view themselves as having all that much in common with people who are currently crossing the border.”
Increasingly it is economics that drives the Latino vote. And as with other voting groups, they have felt the pinch from inflation. Many blame Biden.
More than 500 miles from Starr County, in the west Texas oil town of Midland, Andy de la Rosa cast his first ever vote in the 2020 presidential election: a thumbs up for Trump.
“I honestly felt like that it was one of the most important elections of our lifetime,” says de la Rosa, 36, who works in oilfield services. “I remember telling people, the only silver lining with Biden winning is it’s going to show how good we had it under Trump.”
His colleague Justin Esquibel, 37, agrees. “The way the nation is going, it almost seems like the American dream is kind of lost: the increase in food, taxes, housing . . . the middle class is almost gone.”
Unlike Starr County, Midland County has long been a Republican stronghold. But as its Latino population rises — reaching 43 per cent in the 2020 census — so too has Trump’s vote share, growing from 75 per cent to 77 per cent in 2020 in the county’s highest ever turnout.
De La Rosa and Esquibel are among a new generation of Latino voters — with new priorities. In November, one in five will be casting ballots for the first time, according to UnidosUS, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization.
“We are starting to see a very significant and dramatic increase in the number of third and now discernible fourth-generation Latino voter that is not motivated at all by the racial and ethnic lens that the Democratic party’s orthodoxy is basically predicated on,” says Mike Madrid, a GOP political consultant and author of the book The Latino Century.
“This is much more of a populist economic, pocketbook issue voter, and the same way that we’re witnessing a consolidation of the overall working class under the Republican banner, that’s where Latinos are moving.”
Democratic support among Latino voters has increasingly become split along similar lines to other parts of the population: college-educated voters back Biden, while non-college-educated voters, a much larger proportion of the bloc, drift.
Even the contested term Latinx — used by some liberal activists as a gender-free denominator — has irked many in the community. Some strategists say Democrats need to rethink their approach.
“The ways in which Democrats choose to present themselves these days, and their priorities on a variety of social and cultural issues, are actually much more consistent with white liberal college graduates,” says Texeira. “They speak a whole language that a lot of these voters don’t get.”
During a rally at his Doral golf club in Miami in July, Trump played another card that has proved effective in garnering support among some Latinos. Democrats, he said, were pursuing an “ultra-far-left government takeover”.
“I don’t think Kamala Harris’s California socialism is going to go down well with the people of Doral or the people of Miami or the people of Florida,” Trump said as the crowd broke out into chants of “U-S-A”.
Florida, once the most crucial US swing state, has become solidly Republican in recent years. Latino voters have led much of the realignment: while Miami’s Cuban Americans have long supported the GOP and its tough approach to the Castro regime, increasingly they have been joined by other groups, including Venezuelans and Colombians.
Miami-Dade, Florida’s most populous county and seen as the bellwether for the Latino vote nationally, has gradually shifted to the right: Democrat support fell from 63 per cent in 2016 to 53 per cent in 2020.
Armando Ibarra, head of the Miami Young Republicans, puts this down to voters being turned off by perceptions of a less-critical stance among Democrats towards left-wing regimes in their own countries.
“I think that what has happened over the years is that the Democratic party went so far to the left, that it reminded so many of these voters of the worst traits of their countries of origin,” he says, speaking at the Versailles restaurant, an iconic eatery in Miami’s Little Havana.
But Republicans have also become better at courting the Latino vote. In June 2023, after appearing at a Miami court to be arraigned on charges related to handling classified documents, Trump headed straight to Versailles, where he drew comparisons between his case and political persecution in Latin America.
Outside Versailles last month, however, some remained skeptical of the Republican effort to woo voters. Misael Vega, 54, who moved to Florida from Cuba three years ago and drives an Uber in the city, bemoaned that some Latinos had forgotten their roots.
“Today they are Republicans, but why are they Republicans?” he asks. “Because there is no need to open the door for me [any more], there is nothing wrong with [Trump].”
The former president’s personal appeal divides opinion. Trump’s support among Latinos lags that of many Republican candidates in congressional swing districts. Republican governors such as Texas’s Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis have outperformed him.
“Trump is actually a hindrance to further Latino growth,” says Madrid. “Not the pied piper bringing them into the fold.”
With less than three months to polling day, Democrats are hoping that Harris’s rise to the top of the ticket can stem — or even reverse — the slide in support for the party among Latinos.
Amandi, the Democratic pollster, who supported both of Obama’s successful campaigns, says her nomination “has not only redefined and reset the race, but has really electrified the electorate in a way that I don’t think a lot of folks anticipated would be so sudden and so widespread”.
Supporters say grassroots campaigning is picking up: phone campaigns targeting Latino and Latina voters launched in late July raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and recruited swaths of new activists.
“The Harris-Walz campaign knows Latinos’ political power and is the only campaign working aggressively to make the case because we won’t take their votes for granted,” says Maca Casado, a campaign spokesperson.
Organizers are hoping Harris’s strong record campaigning in Latino communities in California — the state with the biggest Latino population — will be an asset.
“Harris knows exactly what to do to win the Latino vote because she has won multiple elections in California — including against Latino candidates,” says Matt Barreto, a Democratic pollster advising the campaign, noting that internal polling shows a strong lead over Trump especially among independent, younger and female Latino voters. “She’s not new to this.”
Meanwhile, Democrats have stepped up campaigning efforts in tight districts, signing up younger voters at nightclubs, bowling alleys and soccer fields. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s Bold political action committee (Pac) has begun funding field campaigns for the first time.
Linda Sánchez, a Democratic congresswoman representing a Los Angeles district, and head of the campaigning arm of the CHC, says there has been a surge in interest since Harris became the party’s nominee, with Pac fundraising jumping more than 60 per cent.
“We are seeing increased fundraising numbers, increased interest in voter registration. And anecdotally, when I talk to young Latinos they are very excited there’s a woman of colour [on the ballot],” she adds.
The sudden nature of Harris’s elevation — and the recent selection of Walz as her running mate — means polling so far has been limited. An FIU survey taken in July, before Biden’s departure, put Harris’s approval rating among Latinos at 53 per cent, versus of 50 per cent for Biden and 43 per cent for Trump.
A poll this week by Somos Votantes — the first big measure of Latino voter sentiment since Harris became the presumptive nominee — found she had an 18-point lead over Trump among Latino voters in battleground states, a marked improvement on Biden’s latest numbers but still below the lacklustre margin by which he won in 2020.
Sylvia Garcia, a congresswoman representing Houston, says she has seen a noticeable uptick in enthusiasm on the campaign trail among Latino voters since Harris’s replacement of Biden, and that the addition of Walz, as a former teacher, should increase that.
“I think their record and history and values are all about supporting working people [and] the average Latino is a working class person,” she says. “This is a marathon, but I think the momentum is on our side.”
