Kamala Harris courts the Latino vote

In the heat of the first week of her unexpected presidential campaign, Kamala Harris took time, with just over 100 days to go before the election, to host a barbecue on the grounds of her official residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., for a select group of “Latino community leaders.”

The event took place last Thursday and featured Mexican food, papel picado ornaments and a band playing mariachi, salsa, and merengue music. Vice President Harris, who had just spent the day in Houston, Texas, where she gave a rally for a teachers’ union, welcomed Hispanic members of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet: Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Miguel Cardona (Education) and Xavier Becerra (Health), as well as actors Rosario Dawson, Wilson Cruz and America Ferrera, television personality Ana Navarro and dozens of activists who work in defense of the community’s interests.

The Voto Latino Foundation, the event’s co-hosting organization, was one of the first to show its support for the U.S. vice president after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race. It also pledged to contribute $44 million to Harris’ campaign in the swing states that could decide the outcome of the presidential election in favor of one side or the other. “While the far right seeks to demonize immigrants, destroy our democracy, and limit our rights, she has led the way in defending a multicultural democracy,” the organization said in its endorsement message. The group, it announced, will focus its efforts in Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.

Harris knows only too well the boost the Hispanic electorate can provide. It proved crucial in her two campaigns as a contender for attorney general of California, a state with a quarter Latino voters. In the 2010 election, they even preferred her to one of their own, popular Democratic Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez.

Her agenda as a presidential candidate connects with them, as Clarissa Martinez de Castro, vice president of the Latino voting initiative of Unidos US, the largest Latino lobby in the country and another of the organizations present at the barbecue, explained last week in an interview with EL PAÍS, through her proposals such as the fight for reproductive rights, the expansion of access to health, consumer protection, and increased gun control. “Most of us reject the mass deportations [proposed by Trump]. We prioritize the legalization of undocumented immigrants who have been in the country for years. We also expect a firm hand against human and drug traffickers,” Martinez de Castro said

The day before the event at the vice-presidential residence, the Harris campaign, buoyed by the enthusiasm following Biden’s decision to step aside and by donations totaling over $200 million in one week, had outlined in an internal document its plan to retain the White House in which they promised to expand their battlefield to some of those decisive states, including Georgia, which Biden had given up for lost. It is a plan in which the support of Hispanics, with their 36 million votes, is essential. And it is possible, according to their data: the memo cited a poll that concluded that this traditionally Democratic segment of the electorate not only prefers the vice-president to the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, but would also support her more decisively than they would Biden.

Harris, according to a CNN poll conducted last week, has 6% more support than the president among the Hispanic electorate, whose voting intention has grown the second-most following the change of candidate, only behind African-Americans (8%). These brighter prospects are essential in two of the seven decisive states in November: Arizona and Nevada, where Latinos represent 21% and 19% of the electorate, respectively. If Biden won both in 2020, it was due to that support.

In the head-to-head with Trump, a New York Times/Siena College poll released over the weekend put the share of the vote Harris would receive from Hispanics at 57%, compared to 38% of those who would vote Republican. These numbers may seem reassuring, but they may prove deceptive: they actually hide an unprecedented trend, even if it is one that worse with Biden. In June, the same pollster found that the president led among Latino voters by a single point (45% to 44%).

Electoral transfer

That is why analysts have been trying all year to decipher how a candidate who promises mass deportation if he gets to the White House can win new support among the community. “It’s very simple,” explains Jaime Flórez of the Republican National Committee. “Because all those people who are arriving are coming for our jobs, for the places in our children’s schools, for the beds we get in the hospitals; for everything we have been achieving in the last five decades. Latinos have finally realized that Republican values are more aligned with our values, in terms of abortion, family, education...”

While Republicans have been attempting to apply the label of “border czar” to Harris, a position she has never held despite the fact that Biden asked her at the beginning of the legislature take charge of relations with Mexico — a task in which she had a rather disastrous performance — Latino Democratic leaders have embarked on reminding the community “what the Trump presidency was like,” as Angela Romero, president of the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators, explains: “Anyone who is tempted to vote for him just has to listen to his speeches and how he dehumanizes us, without distinguishing those like me who have been in this country for many generations from those who have just arrived. It’s hate-filled rhetoric.”

Conservative voting intention among Hispanics is, however, a problem for analyst Mike Madrid. These are similar numbers to what Trump obtained in 2020. “It’s not good and is consistent with the decade-long trend of political assimilation,” he said on social networks. The analyst asks for caution while new state-by-state polls are conducted before drawing conclusions, while pointing out something that is often forgotten: Latinos do not form a uniform whole. The majorities of Mexican origin in Arizona are not the same as the Puerto Ricans and Central Americans who dominate Pennsylvania.

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