With the 2024 presidential campaign in full swing, both major parties are sharpening their strategies to reach Latino voters, a group that could prove critical this November, particularly in key swing states.
This year, an estimated more than 36 million Latino voters will be eligible to cast a ballot in the general election, according to the Pew Research Center, an increase of nearly 4 million since 2020.
“The growth is mostly fueled by a growing number of young Latinos turning 18,” Dr. Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas, the director of research at UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute, told Spectrum News in an interview.
It's an increase that has put heightened attention on the voting bloc in political circles, especially amid recent polls and data from recent election cycles which show Hispanic voters, who have historically backed Democratic candidates, may be increasingly more open to the GOP’s message.
While statistics from the most recent elections show Democrats still have a firm grip when it comes to the support of Latino voters -- a Pew survey ahead of the 2022 midterms showed a 53-28 split toward Democratic candidates -- the margin by which Democrats have won has shrunk.
“A lot of those Latino voters that supposedly made the shift, it wasn’t because of persuasion, it wasn't really that a person who had voted Democrat before suddenly turned out and voted Republican,” Dominguez-Villegas said. “But it was that new Latino voters that had not voted before came out to the polls in 2020 and 2022, and cast a ballot for the Republican Party.”
In 2020, former President Donald Trump – the frontrunner to face President Joe Biden in a rematch this November – got the support of 38% of Latino voters to Biden’s 59%, according to the Pew Research Center. By contrast, Hillary Clinton won Latino voters 66% over Trump (28%) in 2016, though that number fell from the 71% who backed then-President Barack Obama for reelection in 2012. (Obama garnered 67% of Latino voters during his first presidential campaign in 2008.)
And looking at the two most recent midterm elections head-to-head, the GOP’s 25% support from Hispanic voters in 2018 grew to 39% in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center.
As Dominguez-Villegas argued, the gains by Republicans had more to do with turnout among Latino voters than a change in attitude. According to Pew, 37% of the Hispanic voters who cast ballots in the 2018 midterms did not vote in 2022.
But the improvements the GOP saw among Latino voters over the past few cycles, coupled with recent polls – including one Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted in December showing Trump leading Biden by 1% among 800 Latino adults surveyed – has given the party reason to believe there is an opening to continue making inroads.
“That is the result of the work that we've been doing for a very long time,” Republican National Committee Hispanic Outreach and Communications Director Jaime Florez told Spectrum News.
“It's very important for us to show them how Democrats have been taking them for granted for a very long time and making them promises that they never fulfilled,” Florez said.
Ahead of 2024, the Republican Party is putting a major emphasis, across all demographics, on getting GOP voters to cast a ballot early – something in which Democratic voters had a significant leg up on in 2020 and 2022 as some of the GOP’s influential figures, most notably Trump, condemned voting before election day.
But this year, the RNC is going all-in on the early voting push and hoping it will help lock in votes from Hispanic communities as well. During Hispanic Heritage Month last September, the party launched the Spanish-language version of its early-vote campaign called Deposita Tu Voto, which seeks to educate Latino voters on how to cast a ballot before election day and encourage them to utilize these methods.
The RNC is also doubling down on its strategy to reach minority voters through community centers, hoping to have a total of 40 Hispanic, Asian Pacific American, Black and Native American-focused centers open ahead of 2024.
National Republicans first deployed the idea of community centers to connect with such voters ahead of the 2022 midterms, pitching the move as a major push by the party to invest in these communities. Despite opening nearly 40 centers in 19 states ahead of 2022, just seven currently remain open, five of which are specifically Hispanic Community Centers located in California, New York and Texas.
The rest closed after the midterms at the end of the RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel's previous term because of how the budget is set up, according the RNC.
But the RNC said the community centers will be a large part of its outreach to Hispanic voters this year, with plans to reopen the ones in Las Vegas, Tucson, Milwaukee, and Allentown – all cities in major battleground states.
"Republicans will continue to make historic investments in Hispanic voter outreach, from opening more community centers to launching ‘Deposita Tu Voto’, that will further our gains with Hispanic voters and deliver Republican victories in 2024,” Florez said.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Dominguez-Villegas said getting the party’s supporters in Latino communities to the polls in November will be crucial.
“For the Democrats, it's really important that they keep their numbers up because their coalition really depends on having that two to one voting among Latino voters,” he said.
“That’s the foundation we’re excited to build on, but we’re also not going to take any vote for granted,” Biden-Harris 2024 campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez said in an interview with Spectrum News a few months ago. “We’re already out, reaching out to the Latino voters in all of our battleground states with the earliest and most historic kind of paid advertising campaign.”
An official from the incumbent president’s reelection team said the campaign has launched six ads targeting Latino voters between August and December, both in Spanish as well as English. The Spanish versions of the ads were recorded in two different accents in a bid to connect to different Latino audiences.
And the campaign is currently working on pilot tests of its organizing strategies on the ground in battleground states, including specifically reaching Black, Latino, women, and young voters. Currently, the campaign has launched the organizing pilots in Arizona, where they are seeking to reach Latino voters, and Wisconsin, seeking to connect with Black voters.
Ahead of the 2022 midterms, the Democratic National Committee made a seven-figure investment in radio, digital and print ads in Spanish and English targeting Latino voters.
With less than 10 months until the general election, how each party fares in November with Latino voters could be key in battleground states such as Arizona and Nevada, where Hispanics make up about 25% and 22% of the eligible voting population in each state respectively, according to the Pew Research Center.
Spectrum News' Cassie Semyon contributed to this report