Roughly every 30 seconds, a Latino in the United States reaches voting age. More than one-fifth of Latinos who are eligible to vote this year would be voting in their first presidential election, and 38 percent of the Latino electorate consists of new voters since 2016. Latino youth are concentrated in the West, where they’re 40 percent of newly eligible voters across the region that includes the battleground states of Arizona and Nevada.
The possibility that Donald Trump could attract a significant share of Latino voters and shave down his margins against President Biden is one of the open questions of this election. But conservative Latino voters have taken up outsize space in the national imagination. The Biden campaign should worry less about a mass defection of Latinos to the MAGA camp than about motivating young Latinos to go to the polls. It is these youths who will determine the fate of the Latino vote. As of the 2020 Census, the median Hispanic in the United States was 30 years old.
On major domestic policy issues, polls show that most young Latinos are aligned with progressives. They believe in abortion rights, gun control and a pathway to citizenship for the longtime undocumented population. They want to stop climate change.
Latino youth are also more likely to belong to groups hurt by Mr. Trump’s policies than other voters. They’re more likely than non-Hispanic white and Black youth to identify as L.G.B.T.Q. and more likely than older generations of Latinos to be the children of immigrants. More than half have undocumented family members or close friends.
For a vast majority of these young people, voting for Mr. Trump would seem to be unthinkable. The question is whether they’ll vote for Mr. Biden, who many seem to see as disappointing and disconnected from their communities. Recently, Mr. Biden appears to be taking young Latinos seriously. His June executive actions to protect undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens from deportation and to facilitate work visas for Dreamers and others were a good start. But his failure to counter Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric during the disastrous presidential debate last Thursday may have erased any advantage he had. If Mr. Biden is to have any hope of winning in November, he must prove to young Latinos that he actually cares about their most vulnerable friends and family members, and that he has the strength to stand up for them.
In Nevada, where Mr. Biden is lagging far behind Mr. Trump, Latino youth could tip the election in Mr. Biden’s favor. Among them is the 19-year-old Berlin Butchereit, a pre-nursing student at the University of Nevada, Reno. The daughter of a single Mexican mother who washes dishes at a casino, she plans to cast her first ever ballot in November for Mr. Biden. She sees him as imperfect but preferable to Mr. Trump, who vows to launch the largest-ever deportation operation, which would fracture and financially devastate millions of primarily Latino families. Ms. Butchereit has undocumented loved ones who’ve lived here for most of their lives. They have no path to legal status because of discriminatory immigration laws. She’s voting to keep them safe from Mr. Trump. She’s also motivated by the cost of health care for ailing friends and relatives.
“Our vote counts for so many people other than ourselves,” she told me over the phone. “That’s why it’s so important, because we’re also voting for those who maybe don’t have the ability to vote.”
Liberal-leaning Latinas seemingly continue to outnumber the MAGA machos some Democrats worry about. But not all of them believe they can make a difference by voting, because both political parties have chronically underinvested in the mobilization of Latinos, with young ones as the lowest priority if they’re remembered at all.
“Even when they’re registered, they don’t hear a lot from candidates,” said Mindy Romero, a political sociologist at the University of Southern California. She adds that both parties have done a “really inadequate job” of reaching out to Latino youth. “If you’re missing young Latinos, you’re missing Latinos.”
Mr. Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez, who oversaw Latino outreach for his 2020 campaign, has been leading an effort to invest in Latino voter outreach many months earlier than in previous campaigns, including on YouTube and other social media platforms where Latinos tend to get news. The campaign spent $30 million on spring ads targeting nonwhite voters, which included content in Spanish, Spanglish and English with Latin American accents that vary by region. And it’s spending seven figures on an ad buy around Copa América, which is expected to have a large Spanish-language audience.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has largely lacked a Latino voter strategy since the Republican National Committee shuttered many of its minority outreach centers, including those that focused on Latino voters. During the debate, he tried to appeal to Latino voters by claiming that newer immigrants were taking “Hispanic jobs” — a statement that could well turn off the millions of Latinos who live in mixed-status households.
A Pew Research Center analysis last year found that the Republican Party’s gains with Latino voters have been driven by a turnout advantage more than by changing preferences. While recent polls do show Mr. Trump gaining ground among Latino voters, some Democratic strategists argue that the surveys exclude too many mostly Spanish-speaking voters. And likely-voter models don’t capture the reality of Latino youth, who are still making up their minds about what to do in November — including whether to vote.
In a November poll by Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, only 51 percent of Latinos between ages 18 and 34 said they were “extremely likely” to vote in the 2024 election, compared to 62 percent of white youth. Less than one in five of all surveyed youths said they’d heard from a political party or community organization in the past year.
Unfortunately, Generation Z Latinos remain an afterthought for many philanthropists and political operatives.
There are even signs that the delusion of a red wave among Latinos has dampened wealthy donors’ desires to invest in mobilizing this demographic. “It became harder for us to raise funding,” María Teresa Kumar, the president of Voto Latino, told me, adding that the difficulties began mounting after a December 2021 Wall Street Journal article featured a poll with a large margin of error that led would-be benefactors to believe that Latino voters had become “evenly split” between the two parties.
“The high net worth donors that fund elections to win said, ‘Wait a second, I’m going to put my money elsewhere,’” Kumar said.
Meanwhile, Latinos are contributing to blue waves to little fanfare. In Arizona, they played a role in the victories of Senator Mark Kelly and Governor Katie Hobbs, two Democrats, one an incumbent senator and the other a governor who flipped a Republican-held seat. Ms. Hobbs’s race was decided by less than 20,000 votes in 2022; about 200,000 Latinos between the ages of 18 and 21 who were not eligible to vote in the last presidential election can participate in this one, according to Matt Barreto, a political scientist who leads polling on Latinos for the Biden campaign. In Nevada, where Latino voters helped the Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto hold her seat for the Democrats in 2016, when Harry Reid retired, and win re-election in 2022, 80,000 Latinos between the ages of 18 and 21 are newly eligible to vote.
But many Latino youth feel powerless, disillusioned with politicians in general and what they see as Democrats’ broken promises. “A lot of younger Latino Democrats are saying, ‘My parents were Democrats and were promised all of these things, and they haven’t come’” to pass, said Lisa Sanchez, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona who studies the electoral impact of Latinos in the United States.
Most young Latinos who distrust Democrats aren’t joining the Republican Party. Instead, they’re trending toward independence and nonpartisanship, according to a May report by the Latino civil rights organization UnidosUS. Will their non-allegiance to either political party translate into disengagement?
Growing up in a country in which both parties have failed their families, many young Latinos describe a state of learned helplessness and a lack of interest in politics. It’s not strategic for Mr. Biden to focus on the all-too-real threat that Mr. Trump poses to them. While that threat does mobilize many Latino voters, for others it creates a paralyzing fear.
If Mr. Biden wants young Latinos to show up to vote for him, he can’t rely on more fear to motivate them. He needs to give them hope — and concrete reasons to believe in the Democratic Party. “They’ve got to do more persuasion,” said Clarissa Martínez De Castro, the vice president of the Latino vote initiative for UnidosUS. “It’s not just mobilizing.”
In 2020, Mr. Biden promised a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented people who’ve contributed to the country for decades. But the immigration bill he backed in January 2021 stalled in a divided Congress. His executive actions to provide relief to many undocumented people who’ve lived and worked here for a long time will surely energize young Latino voters, as some data suggests President Barack Obama managed to do in 2012 after he announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, his temporary protections for immigrants brought to the United States as children.
While immigration isn’t their main concern, for many Latino voters it’s at the root of the economic pain that is important to them. Mass deportations under both Democratic and Republican presidents have long curtailed the economic mobility of Latino communities. This frustrating reality has given many young Latinos from mixed-status families the impression that both parties are failing immigrants equally. Over the course of decades, U.S. authorities have deported Latino breadwinners and deprived the relatives who are left behind of a living wage. Latinos, the lowest paid group in the United States, are more likely than others to say the economy is worse than it was a year ago. Many young Latinos feel especially pessimistic about the future.
Border policies aren’t a priority for many young Latino voters, but immigration is more than a border issue for them in ways polls may miss because it is often inseparable from their economic security and job prospects. Immigration is an economic issue.
To win over young Latino voters who are experiencing the long-term economic consequences of interior immigration enforcement, Mr. Biden needs to talk unapologetically about the restraints he has placed on interior deportations and frame that relief as an economic issue that benefits all Americans and is separate from the border. And he should offer deportation relief to all essential workers. Among young Latinos, that could destabilize the idea that Democrats are no better than Republicans when it comes to the most economically marginalized group in this country.
A few weeks ago, when I asked Gen Z Latinos who were on the fence about Mr. Biden whether they’d be more inclined to vote for him if he defended the longtime undocumented population, they said that it would make them more enthusiastic.
Further and bolder executive actions on this issue may also help to repair the broader impression that Mr. Biden is just as bad as Mr. Trump when it comes to oppressed communities. Many young Latinos are especially outraged by Mr. Biden’s support for Israel amid mass civilian casualties in Gaza. For voters whose families came from Latin American countries with histories of mass civilian deaths and disappearances made possible by U.S. weapons, the suffering of Palestinians feels personal. Some young Latinos in the Southwest told me they plan to sit out the election because they’re so upset about what they see as a genocide. Others said they’ll vote for third-party candidates.
“I always believed that voting was really important,” said Camila Medina, a 24-year-old student at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. “But at this point, it honestly feels like it would make me almost complicit.” She unsubscribed from the Biden campaign’s text-messaging list after watching videos of death and destruction in Gaza on social media.
When I asked how she felt about Mr. Trump’s promise to ban all refugees from Gaza, she said she hadn’t heard about it. It confused her because she had read news about Mr. Trump agreeing with his fans as they chanted “Genocide Joe.” Knowledge of Mr. Trump’s proposed ban made her reconsider her perception of Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump as the same. “The information you gave me now is making me think,” she said.
It’s imperative for Mr. Biden to reach out to young Latinos with accurate information about his courageous steps to protect long-persecuted people here and abroad, as he did in a recent video with Carlos Eduardo Espina, a TikTok star and Gen Z Latino. Crucially, he must refuse to cower in the face of Mr. Trump’s timeworn misdirection about “open borders” and continue to attend to the long-forgotten half of the immigration story — the people who’ve lived here for decades, building our roads and raising our children. He should promise that a pathway to citizenship for them will be priority No. 1 in a second term, and explain that the reason it hasn’t gotten done yet is because there aren’t enough progressive Democrats in Congress. If he communicates loudly and directly to young Latinos who are inundated with disinformation and disillusionment, they may begin to see him as a fighter for the oppressed and regain their sense of agency.
But they won’t believe in their power until other people start to have faith in them. It starts with the president. Mr. Biden can choose lukewarm action out of fear that their MAGA counterparts are the future. Or he can bet on young Latinos.
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