Amidst the wreckage of the 2024 campaign, one thing that can’t be said about Democrats is that they’ve made little effort to win over Latino voters.
If you looked closely, it was clear that the National Party, the Biden-Harris campaign and Democratic-allied groups were determined to avoid 2020 repeatWhen Joe Biden’s campaign was widely accused of neglecting Latino voters, launching his campaign too late and making tone-deaf appeals — all mistakes that allowed Donald Trump to make historic gains with these communities even though Biden ultimately won the election.
This time, the Biden (and then Harris) campaign was determined to get everything right. They hired top Latino consultants, strategists, and recruiters chosen officials. They opened field offices and staffed early spring in heavily Latino swing states like Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania. They reached out to voters WhatsAppa personal messaging app used as a form of social media by many Latino and immigrant communities; sending surrogates to Spanish-language radio stations; and microtargeted advertising to Puerto Rican, Dominican and Mexican American voters.
Spanish and bilingual ads have run continuously since March on TV, radio and online. And those ads moved beyond an obvious focus on identity, instead touting policies and achievements such as Medicare’s cap on insulin prices, expansion of health care coverage, and job creation during the post-Covid economic recovery.
The hope was that this earlier, smarter, more tailored campaign would help reverse a couple of trends that were evident in 2023 and much of 2024: that Latino voters were deeply dissatisfied with the status quo, unenthusiastic about Biden’s re-election and questioning them. Loyalty to the Democratic Party.
It is now clear that this strategy was not enough. While more granular data will take months, county-level results and exit polls suggest a shift to the right by Latino voters across the country that contributed to Trump’s victory. To be clear, it appears Democrats still won most Latino voters — but the harsh reality for Democrats is that Trump has managed to improve his standing again.
That doesn’t mean Democrats should throw The Playbook for Campaigning with Latino Voters. Call for a hard pivot the right Outright resignation to cultural matters, or to a permanent ethnic realignment — e.g something of conventional intelligence It has been floating around since the election – Akal. Republicans can’t be sure those gains will hold without Trump on the ballot.
But given what we know so far, there are two strangely contradictory moves: Democrats can assure themselves that they’ve run a pretty good campaign to win back the support of Latino voters. But, at a deeper level, they missed a more fundamental connection between the party and the electorate, particularly the working class, which a textbook campaign simply could not fix.
Two takeaways from the election
There are two separate points to be taken from November 5.
First, campaigns are still important. D National trends Trump posted better margins of support in non-battleground states than in swing states, which also applied to Latino voters.
In areas where Democrats campaigned heavily for the Latino vote, Kamala Harris saw a smaller drop in support than in areas where she didn’t focus her campaign efforts — meaning Harris’ campaign shouldn’t discount the Latino ground game, spending and organizing.
The second point cuts the other way: There are deeper problems with Democrats’ appeal to Latino voters, which will take time to repair. Nationally, Democrats like Biden and Harris are not trusted by many Latino voters as champions of the working-class, who are still overwhelmingly working-class and not college-educated.
The memory of economic hardship during the pandemic (for which Trump largely avoided blame) and the inflation that followed never went away and was not properly addressed by either Biden or Harris during the campaign. Coupled with an overwhelming anti-incumbency mood in the global electorate this year, Democrats were almost certain to do worse with Latino voters.
There were some exceptions. For example, Republican Senate candidates did not do as well as Trump among Latino voters, and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who won the Arizona Senate race in a state Harris lost, notably overperformed, winning by two percentage points in a state Trump won in five. But the larger point holds: Democrats have lost ground with Latino voters, and analysts point to their inability to appeal to the working class as the culprit.
“It starts with the credibility of the message,” Chuck Rocha, a Mexican American strategist who advised Bernie Sanders’ 2020 primary campaign and helped Biden’s general election campaign, told me. “People like to say that Bernie Sanders was this, or that — the thing that made Bernie Sanders great was that he always said the same thing, so he was credible. People see the crap in politicians now. They want someone who likes him. or hate.”
Rebuilding that credibility will be essential if Democrats are to turn their fortunes around not just with Latino voters, but with a broader swath of the electorate.
Democrats have never really figured out how to restore Latino confidence in the economy
In retrospect, the story of Latino voters was fairly consistent. Poll after pre-election poll told the same story: These voters were most concerned about the economy and were as likely as white voters to say they either missed the policies and economic conditions of the Trump era, or trusted Trump more than Biden or Harris. To distribute relief.
At the heart of this sentiment was a disconnect between what voters meant by “the economy” and what many national Democrats, including Biden and Harris, were talking about. Latino voters, concerned by inflation prior to a Biden presidency, largely meant “prices should be lower,” while Biden and Harris mostly talked about job creation, lower inflation and slower wage increases.
That was true as early as November 2023, when a poll by the Democratic research firm Blueprint found that Latino voters care most about lower prices and least about “creating more jobs” — which is especially problematic because, as Blueprint also found, Latino voters More than any other ethnic group Thought more jobs were Biden’s priority.
Add to this dynamic that it is Latino and black Americans who have experienced uniquely traumatizing financial rollercoasters in the post-Covid era — their wealth and financial potential increased during the pandemic only for many to be wiped out due to government assistance for the rising cost of living. Among those gains are before wages start to rise again — and you can see where the credibility gap for the Biden administration is opening up.
Biden’s economic message focused on trying to sell a positive economic success story — and indeed there was data and legislation they could point to to tell that story. But according to Camille Rivera, Voto Latino’s senior adviser and founder of the Puerto Rican civic organization La Brega y Fuerza, the campaign’s touting of top indicators — GDP, improvement in the consumer price index, low unemployment rates and investment in infrastructure and production, among others — failed to sway voters who still don’t have food. And saw stark reminders of peak inflation in prices of household essentials.
“We were talking about the economy in macro form, but people were not feeling it. They just weren’t feeling it. My dad would be like, ‘Hey, did you see that? I just bought these potato chips. These potato chips contain as much as 50 percent air and cost more,” Rivera said. “We keep saying, ‘But the economy is great. Look at the stock market!’ That to me was our lot of mistakes.”
The “identity force-field” showed cracks
Over time, this connection can be severed Overall “party of the working class” brand National Democratic Party. And perhaps there’s no better sign than one that focuses specifically on a dynamic that binds Latinos to the Democratic Party: which party best “cares about people like you.”
It’s that sentiment that tends to root most Latino voters in the Democratic camp, even if those voters don’t agree with every social position, economic or immigration policy, or cultural value of the party—a kind of “identity force”-field,” like Equis, Latino. A democratic research firm focused on voters, calls it.
After the 2022 midterms, Equis found evidence that those sentiments were still fairly strong. During those midterms, there were conflicted or swing voters who turned out and who, because of that warm affinity with the Democratic Party, pulled the levers for Democratic candidates. There were also Latino voters who voted for Republicans—but who still harbored warm feelings toward Democrats. Generally, Equis polling found, Democrats were still the party viewed as “good for Hispanics” and one that “cares about people like you.”
But Carlos Odio, an Equis co-founder, warned at the time of that report that there was a good chance Latino voters would drop out in 2024 if “there is a major shift in the issue environment, unbalanced campaigns, or weakening of identity bonds.”
And that seems to have happened. There were signs of weakening identity bonds. Biden’s campaign faded. And the economy, as well as increased immigration, put national Democrats on the defensive with both Latino voters and general voters.
By October 2024, Harris was able to regain the party’s standing after Biden’s positive perception of the party among Latinos declined before his late July exit. His campaign strategy hasn’t changed drastically, but polling has shown Latino voters returning to the Democratic candidate, though not at the rate they voted for Biden in 2020. By the end of the campaign, Harris was seen as “advancing Hispanics” and “people like you.”
but Democratic advantage was shrunk from two years ago. The force field was weak. And by then, it was too late for the Harris campaign.
Democrats now face a challenge: reassessing how they talk about the economy, class and material circumstances in ways that connect with voters. There’s a tendency within the party — strategists, commentators and elected officials — to either trash the way they reach Latino voters or deny that they have a problem (and “confuse” or blame offers counterintuitive data to reinforce that thought). Democratic campaigns weren’t useless in 2024, but if the party is to have a shot in 2028, rebuilding credibility with working-class Latinos starts now.
