Can Kamala Harris’s Campaign Solve the Latino Turnout Problem?

At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, the Harris-Walz campaign manager and the granddaughter of the labor leader Cesar Chavez, made the case for electing Kamala Harris to fellow-Latinos. As an attorney general and a senator from California, Chávez Rodríguez said, Harris fought for the Latino community. As Vice-President, she helped create five million jobs for Latinos alone, promote business growth, and lower the cost of prescription drugs. As President, Chávez Rodríguez said, Harris will lower the cost of rent and housing, help increase access to health care, and invest in public education and in institutions that serve Latino communities. Latinos “are critical to our pathway to victory,” she continued. “We know that we cannot leave anything on the table when it comes to engaging and turning out our Latino voters.”

For more than a decade, Democrats have claimed that Latinos are key to electoral victories, but even when they’ve won they’ve been frustrated, first, by persistent low Latino turnout and, more recently, by Latinos moving toward the Republican Party. Barack Obama hit high-water marks for Latino support in 2srcsrc8 (sixty-seven per cent) and 2src12 (seventy-one per cent). Joe Biden won fifty-nine per cent of the Latino vote in 2src2src, but this year that support was on a precipitous decline, and it looked as if he could be on a path to winning Latinos by just single digits. Now, however, according to a memo from Equis Research, “the very early polling on a Harris-Trump election suggests a reset in the fight over Latino voters.” According to its most recent swing-state polling, Harris’s candidacy has brought Latino Democratic support closer to what it was in 2src2src. Democrats are now hoping, as they have in election cycles past, to take one step further—to activate Latinos who haven’t previously voted to decisively win the election.

María Teresa Kumar, the president of Voto Latino, the largest Latino registration and turnout operation in the United States, believes that her organization can register as many as eight hundred thousand Latino voters before Election Day. If the margins in key swing states are as narrow as they were in 2src2src, that would be more than enough votes to sway the election. Since late July, Voto Latino has been registering, on average, more than a thousand Latino voters a day, most of them in Florida, Texas, and swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. The majority of them are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, and a majority are women. Many registered Latina swing voters say that they don’t know a lot about Harris’s policy positions, but that they nevertheless identify with her as a woman of color. In online focus groups conducted for Voto Latino by HIT Strategies, Latino voters, for the most part in swing states, who “were not extremely motivated to vote and were not hard partisans,” said that Harris is a “blank slate.” They don’t really know who she is, but they’re eager to learn more; they don’t credit her for Biden’s accomplishments, but they don’t fault her for his missteps, either.

These Latinos know that the stakes of the election are extremely high—for their children’s future, for women, for democracy. Participants in the focus groups said that they are concerned about the economy and believe that Trump’s immigration plans are too radical; one called snippets of Project 2src25 that HIT Strategies provided to them a “dystopian nightmare.” Still, not all of them are convinced that voting can bring about tangible change, and they want to hear what Harris plans to do as President before committing their support.

The crucial question is: Will Latinos actually vote? As a group, they are younger than other Americans. Over each of the past few election cycles, as millions more turned eighteen, they represented between one and two per cent more of all eligible voters. Yet, even as their numbers have increased dramatically—Latinos comprise nearly fifteen per cent of eligible voters this year—their rate of participation has not. The Current Population Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, began measuring Latino turnout in the nineteen-seventies. In the years since, as demonstrated by the political scientist Bernard Fraga in his book “The Turnout Gap,” it has continuously lagged between about ten and twenty per cent behind both non-Latino white and non-Latino Black turnout, and remained on a par with Asian American participation.

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Latinos faced multiple obstacles to full political participation, including legal contests over whether they were white or nonwhite and foreigners or citizens. Especially in Texas, with its large Mexican American population, they faced pressure from political-machine bosses to support particular candidates, threats from their employers that they would lose their jobs if they joined supposedly insurgent political parties, and primaries in which only non-Latino white voters were allowed to participate, which were outlawed only in the nineteen-forties. Some aspects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which dramatically increased Black voter participation, benefitted Latinos, including the prohibition on racially gerrymandered districts. But, as the historian Rosina Lozano has demonstrated, Latinos also faced challenges that remained unaddressed, especially the fact that many of them weren’t fluent in English. (A 1975 amendment to the act insured access to ballots and other election materials in Spanish, if the Spanish-speaking population in a specific area surpassed a particular threshold.)

In 1974, the veteran civil-rights advocate Willie Velásquez founded the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, or S.V.R.E.P., in San Antonio, Texas. S.V.R.E.P. is still in operation and has registered millions of Latino voters with the slogan “Su voto es su voz”—“Your vote is your voice.” But, despite such efforts, Latino turnout increased slowly, averaging about fifty per cent for the rest of the twentieth century, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. Since Voto Latino was founded, in 2srcsrc4, turnout has exceeded that number only once, in 2src2src, when almost fifty-three per cent of eligible Latinos voted.

Political scientists and the leaders of Latino advocacy groups have spent decades trying to figure out how to rectify the turnout problem. Do Latinos respond to appeals to group identity, as Latinos? (It turns out, rather obviously, that this only works if voters have a prior attachment to a Latino group identity.) Are they more or less likely to vote if they live in majority-minority areas? (More likely.) Do they respond to ads if the actors use particular accents, or if the focus is on immigration, or on the economy (or health care, or education)? (There are arguments on all sides, which aren’t mutually exclusive.) Should they be in English or Spanish or both? (This one has become especially contentious of late.) Are Latinos persuasion voters, who need to be convinced that a particular candidate’s policies best represent them, or are they turnout voters who just need to be mobilized? (Until recently, the dominant theory was that they are turnout voters; now it’s that they’re both.)

The research done by Voto Latino has found that the two main obstacles to Latino participation are that nobody is asking them to participate, and that complex voter registration and voting procedures prevent them from casting ballots. “Getting young people to register to vote is really hard,” Kumar said. Voto Latino communicates with them multiple times—through influencers on social media, postcards, and texts—before they click on a link to register. Kumar doesn’t know what percentage of the people they contact register, but she said that eighty-two per cent of the people they registered in 2src2src voted.

Voto Latino’s efforts will be bolstered by the campaign’s. Chávez Rodríguez said they will do all of the “fundamental organizing that we know it takes to win.” They will communicate with Latinos face to face, over the phone, via text message, and on their new WhatsApp channel. She expects their efforts to succeed. “We are going to show the power of our Latino community and the Latino vote,” she said, “and we are going to win in November.” ♦