By Jennifer Medina
When the Harris campaign released its first television ad targeting Latino voters, one word was conspicuously absent: Latinos.
Instead, the ad included subtle cues to voters that Vice President Kamala Harris, the child of immigrants, is one of them and cares about their issues. In 60 seconds, there are pictures of young brown-skinned children and families playing in parks, while a narrator with a slight Spanish accent tells Harris’ family story.
Both Democrats and Republicans acknowledge that attracting Latino voters will be key to winning the White House this year. Latinos remain one of the fastest-growing groups of voters. They are disproportionately young and have less partisan loyalty than many other groups.
So it is especially notable that Democrats, four years after hemorrhaging Latino support, have not been offering a slew of overt appeals. Rather than ads filled with promises about immigration reform and Spanish phrases, Democrats have been focusing on economic messages, talking about the cost of housing and medication, or relentlessly hammering the promise of the American dream. In short, they are courting Latino voters by treating them like everyone else.
The change represents both a shifting political strategy and an evolving view of Latino identity. Rather than approach Latino voters as if they are an enigmatic niche group with a narrow set of interests, Democrats seem to be recognizing that Latinos have the same hodgepodge mix of priorities as other voters. With more than 36 million Latinos eligible to vote this year, they are firmly in the mainstream.
The approach is exemplified by one of the party’s biggest Latina stars, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who, after repeatedly emphasizing economic class, did so again in her nationally televised speech during the Democratic National Convention last week, as she spoke about growing up as the daughter of a domestic worker, finishing her homework at other people’s dining room tables.
“This, to me, is an enormous part of the fabric that makes up the Latino experience in America,” she said in an interview. “Many of us either are or grew up in a certain kind of either service class or underclass. So I believe that messaging to the concerns and experiences of that life is what it means to connect with the Latino community.”
For years, many Latino Democrats have criticized their party for taking those voters for granted or simply pandering to misconceptions. They argued that Latinos were not a monolith and that a one-size-fits-all approach to outreach could not cut it.
“It’s the same message forever — everyone got the same stuff,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost, an Afro-Cuban Democrat from central Florida who is the youngest member of Congress. “But now we’re really understanding that there all these communities, and there’s different, more strategic ways to learn and reach them. We don’t just have to say the same anti-Trump stuff again and again.”
Polls show that Latinos’ top policy concerns largely mirror those of other voters. They often prioritize jobs and the economy over immigration. The Harris campaign is still doing a blitz of advertising in Spanish, releasing an ad earlier this week promising “immigration reform” alongside a border security bill.
During the last two election cycles, many Democrats presumed that Latinos would be repelled by former President Donald Trump, largely because of his harsh immigration rhetoric and policies. Instead, Trump made inroads with Latino voters in many parts of the country, partly by appealing to their patriotism and religious beliefs, while playing up his macho image.
“We always knew that Hispanics cared most about the economy, the American dream, getting opportunities,” said Daniel Garza, the president of Libre, which has focused on conservative Hispanic outreach for years.
The Trump campaign has only increased those efforts in the last four years, deepening ties to Hispanic evangelical churches and rebranding the campaign’s outreach to Latino Americans.
And Democrats are taking notice.
During their convention, there were fewer direct appeals to identity politics, which in the past have come across as so blunt as to be comical. (President Joe Biden holding out his phone to a microphone to play “Despacito,” the Latin pop hit, comes to mind, along with the proliferation of mariachi bands.)
Still, what some see as cringe-worthy pandering, others see as an appealing rallying cry, such as when Eva Longoria, the actress turned liberal activist, led the crowd last week in a chant of “She se puede!” It was a play on “Si, se puede” or “Yes, we can,” which became a slogan of the 2008 Obama campaign but has its roots in farmworker unions of the 1970s.
In many ways, Democrats had been slow to update their perceptions of Latino voters since 2008, when Barack Obama reached a record level of support with a more than 2-1 majority over his Republican opponent, John McCain. But the universe has dramatically changed since then, as far more Latino voters are American-born and more likely to consume information in English than Spanish. The number of Latinos eligible to vote increased by more than 4 million just since the last presidential election in 2020, when Trump improved from his 2016 race.
“They don’t want to be invited to some separate party. They want to be at the same party as everyone else,” said Carlos Odio, a founder of Equis, a Democratic leaning research group that focuses on Latino voters. “Latinos want to be embraced as fully American.”
Latinos have also shown far less allegiance to the Democratic Party than strategists once expected and hoped for. And Biden was particularly unpopular, according to polls, with Latino voters even more likely than the overall population to view him as too old to serve. Now, with Harris as the Democratic candidate, Equis estimates that roughly 15% of Latino voters can still be persuaded, and that at least one-third of them did not vote in 2020.
“This is the swingiest element — irregular voters who don’t have loyal partisan identities,” Odio said. “They may or may not vote, and they are the hardest to pin down.”
But those same polls show that Latino voters are more optimistic than voters overall, which could point to a reason for the spike in enthusiasm for the Harris campaign. The campaign said it would continue to take a targeted approach, sending surrogates like Ocasio-Cortez to campaign in Nevada and focus on the economy.
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