The stars are aligned for 2020 to be a breakout year for the political participation of the Latino community, the largest minority group in the electorate at 32 million. Joe Biden will have a hard time beating Donald Trump without achieving new levels of support. But if Democrats don’t act, we predict nearly 60 percent of eligible Latino voters in battleground states will stay home.
My organization wanted to create a fuller picture of our community and figure out what might get more of them to cast ballots. So we collected nearly 30,000 interviews of Latino voters in 11 battleground states. Of our many findings, two stand out: Increased turnout among Latinas and ambivalent voters are the keys to winning in November.
Latina women are the glue of our families and our communities, our matriarchs, soccer moms and college-aged kids. Our research shows Latinas are deeply anti-Trump, far more so than Latinos. They are driven by concerns over his moral failings, especially in his handling of immigration. Family separation is an issue that disturbs even those who agree with the president on some other policies.
In North Carolina, for example, only 52 percent of men disapprove of Donald Trump’s performance versus 73 percent of women. And while a majority of Latina rural women disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, that’s true for only one in three Latino rural men.
Yet Latina turnout rates are 14 percent to 20 percent lower than non-Hispanic black or white women. One reason is the excitement gap. While Latinas feel motivated to vote, they report lower levels of excitement about doing so, and in some cases, the disparity is vast. We have to close this gap because high levels of excitement could influence not just someone’s decision to go to the polls, but also her ability to take others with her.
That’s all the more reason we need to engage Latina women in ways that are culturally resonant, including through nonpolitical channels on YouTube and Instagram, like makeup, gaming and mommy influencers. Latinas respond to messages that tie the importance of voting to tangible changes in their communities, that speak to collective power and reassure them that they don’t need a Ph.D. in political science to fill out a ballot.
Our second major finding is that there is an enormous pool of registered but ambivalent Latino voters (38 percent) in the battleground states, who are vital to winning back the White House. They are mostly young and female, and in a given battleground, they make up 28 percent to 41 percent of registered Latinos. Some are undecided, and some are considering a third party. Most are supporting their preferred candidate (Joe Biden), but they say they’re “probably” voting for him, not “definitely.”
Lower turnout among this group isn’t driven by apathy. Instead, ambivalent voters don’t believe their vote will make a material impact on election outcomes, much less on their lives, based on past experience. Or they don’t feel confident that they’ll cast an informed vote, even when they have all the information they need. Or they respond to the violent anti-immigrant environment not with anger, which is mobilizing, but justifiably with fear, which can be demobilizing. “It’s really difficult to be excited about something that seems as though it’s out of your hands,” a focus group respondent told us.
Ambivalent voters need to be persuaded to cast ballots. It’s a problem that campaigns tend to think about Latinos (and most other voters of color) as only “mobilization” voters who just need a nudge to vote right before the election — with the assumption they’ll vote for their side. It’s true that most Latinos are fairly set in their vote choice; few are traditional swing voters weighing both parties. But Democrats should be concerned that an ambivalent voter will swing to the couch.
Latinos who were ambivalent broke for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, but nearly 30 percent ended up not voting. That’s nearly double the rate of nonparticipation as among ambivalent white voters, and slightly higher than among ambivalent black voters. And the Latinos who skipped the 2016 and 2018 elections tend to give Trump worse approval numbers than those Latinos who voted in both contests; they are the rare demographic in which nonvoters are more progressive than voters. If we want to expand the Latino electorate, we need to convince this group to vote in the first place.
Instead, many Democratic campaigns over the past 15 years have let the rising nativism of the Republican Party do the job for them. It mostly worked, but that strategy left a scar. It signaled that Latinos weren’t a priority, at least not compared with the kinds of voters who were courted with post-convention TV ads. Latino voters are more likely than other voters to feel chilly toward both parties. Young Latinos are more likely than their peers to believe public officials don’t care about what they think. Perhaps partisanship fueled by disgust for one party instead of loyalty to the other has left large numbers of Latino voters feeling sapped, neglected and unimportant.
Democrats could easily choose a more engaged approach. Take Bernie Sanders’s primary campaign this year. After losing the Latino vote to Hillary Clinton, he ran an early, well-resourced operation in the 2020 primary. It was an effort that leveraged all parts of the campaign, from organizing strategies and direct voter contact, to paid and digital spending and Mr. Sanders’s time.
In short, the campaign treated Latinos as persuadable voters, not mobilization targets. And it worked. In our polling, Mr. Sanders was well liked across Latino age and gender groups. And uniquely among the top Democratic contenders, he did very well with ambivalent Latino voters. In Nevada, where his campaign really dug in, his favorability among Latino Democrats grew 23 percentage points from December to February. He did not run a similar operation in Colorado, however, where his numbers barely budged.
Latinos will turn out to vote this year in historic numbers. The threats to our community are that acute. But the future of democratic governance depends on whether Latino turnout is high or sky high. President Trump hopes to win partly by skimming off a few Latino voters — and he can, if his opponents take us for granted. Democrats who want to see higher levels of support from Latinos need to act with the urgency that this moment demands.
Stephanie Valencia (@stephanievalenc) was a special assistant to President Barack Obama and the principal deputy director of public engagement in the White House. She is a co-founder and the president of EquisLabs.
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