Latinos watch the Democratic National Convention. Photo: Frederick J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images
The Democratic Party’s presidential fortunes have been revived since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the presidential candidate, largely due to the return of Democratic-leaning voters who had previously rejected Donald Trump, nonmajor party candidates, or simply had no interest in voting at all. This includes a significant improvement in support among Latinos (aka Hispanics), a rapidly growing segment of the electorate, and Trump, despite his xenophobic views, made impressive gains from this demographic in 2020 (from 28% in 2016 to 38% in 2020). Notably, this improvement has made Harris more competitive in Sunbelt states with large Latino populations.
How did Harris turn things around? As Carlos Odio of Equis Research told my colleague Benjamin Hart in a recent interview, it mostly reflects a more general trend among younger, less partisan voters who intensely disliked the Biden and Trump choices.
If you look at the voters that Kamala Harris picked up right away, they were Latinos who leaned Democratic. About 60% of them had voted for Biden in 2020, and the rest hadn’t voted in 2020. Young voters, 60% of the people she picked up were under 40. So those were voters who were not happy with the choice in front of them. A third of them were double haters, they hated both Biden and Trump. They didn’t like the choice in front of them. It was like Sophie’s Choice.
So whether Harris can retain or even widen her support among Latino voters depends in large part on whether she can present herself as a candidate of change — a change that’s safer than the one Trump represents. But she faces specific challenges, too. Odio suggests that Harris’ campaign is finally moving away from a one-size-fits-all message to Latinos that treats them as a monolith and places too much emphasis on maintaining liberal immigration policies. And indeed, as Politico reports, Harris’ messaging to Latinos has often been about the economy, crime, and even hardline rhetoric on the border.
Harris is exploring ways to move away from identity politics, including how to win over Latino voters in states like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Harris’ campaign ads, targeted at English- and Spanish-speaking Latinos in those battleground states, talk about the economy, rising drug prices and crime. In a Spanish-language radio interview aired earlier this week, she stressed her support for sending more immigration agents to the border and cracking down on the flow of fentanyl into the U.S.
She also avoids the temptation to appeal to Latino voters because, like them, she is a person of color: Aside from the fact that roughly 10 million Latinos in the U.S. identify as white, many others, including mixed-race Latinos, don’t feel any particular solidarity with non-white groups.
While Harris’ messaging to Latinos appears to be working to some extent, some Latino activists have vocally complained about her (and Biden’s) pivot away from sympathy for immigrants and the adoption of tougher border policies. At the same time, her decision to limit the discussion of immigration policy to neutralizing Trump’s long-standing obsession with border security (though she occasionally calls out the most popular group of undocumented Americans, DREAMers, who were brought to the U.S. as children) may be eliminating some potential targets for attack.
Harris briefly mentioned Trump’s pledge to “conduct the largest deportation operation in American history,” as outlined in the 2024 Republican Party platform, during a recent speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. She posed a few questions:
We all remember how they tore families apart, and now they’re vowing to carry out the largest deportation, mass deportation, in American history.
Imagine what that would be like and what it would be like. How would that happen? Massive raids? Massive detention facilities? What are they talking about?
But then she moved on to other topics.
The opportunity for her and her campaign is to raise broader questions about the potential impact of a mass deportation plan on legal Latinos. Would this be something like Arizona’s infamous 2010 “present papers” law, which allowed police to randomly question people who may be illegal immigrants? That law was partially struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court because it infringed on the federal government’s monopoly on immigration policy. If something like a racial and ethnic profiling regime were imposed nationwide under the guidance of Trump’s longtime immigration adviser Stephen Miller, even Latinos who support tough border and immigration policies might have reason to be concerned. To be sure, polls show a majority of Americans say they support mass deportations, but few are likely to focus on the real-world impacts, as the Harris campaign encourages.
Harris and her campaign are certainly walking a tightrope on these issues. So far, she appears intent on avoiding immigration-related topics as much as possible, focusing her campaign on abortion rights, health care, and Trump’s dangerous character. But the prospect of Trump using his final term in office to build barbed-wire-encircled transit camps and a massive transportation system to funnel law-abiding migrants to the border and round up “suspects” with police-state-like tactics is a vision worth sharing with Latinos and all Americans.
See All
Subscribe to the Intelligencer Newsletter
Daily news on the politics, business and technology that shape our world.
Vox Media, LLC Terms of Use and Privacy Notice
