TUCSON, Ariz. — Vice President Kamala Harris’ West Coast swing, aimed at ginning up support among Latino voters, is a sign of the larger emphasis Harris and former President Donald Trump have placed on pursuing the nation’s second largest racial or ethnic group. But they’re chasing those votes in very different ways.
Trump, whose campaign is barely advertising in Hispanic media, according to AdImpact, is wrapping his appeal to Latino voters in a broader message of prosperity and nostalgia for the pre-pandemic economy under his presidency, while also leaning on high-profile endorsers. Harris’ campaign is pouring more money and effort into advertising, targeted messaging and on-the-ground organizing.
Polling has found that most Latinos prefer Harris over Trump, an advantage Harris’ campaign and voters alike have linked in part to her own upbringing as a daughter of immigrants.
“Harris definitely understands Latino voters a lot more just because she is a person of color and is able to understand the community a lot better,” Mya Brady, a Pittsburgh resident of Guatemalan heritage, told NBC News.
But while Harris has the edge, the data suggests Latino support for Democrats is far from fixed: The new NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC poll shows Harris with a 54%-40% advantage among Latinos, her party’s lowest mark in four presidential election cycles. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden all cleared 60% support.
That drop could have big implications, according to Clarissa Martinez De Castro, vice president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS, which conducts one of the largest analyses of Latino voting habits in the country. (UnidoUS’ political arm endorsed Harris earlier this year.)
“Republicans don’t need to win a majority of this electorate, so they can be a lot more surgical with their efforts,” De Castro said. “Democrats need to get at least the historic 60% or so that they’ve received from this electorate.”
Latino voters represent a striking opportunity for both Trump and Harris’ campaigns: an ideologically diverse voting bloc that includes a sizable share of first-time voters who experts have found are more independent-minded than older generations. Unlike with the broader electorate, Trump did better among younger Latinos in the NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC poll, especially among men under 50.
“One in five Latino voters in this election are going to be voting for the first time, so they’re forming their opinions about the candidates. Almost 40% are new since 2016,” De Castro said.
Winning over those new voters will be central to both Harris’ and Trump’s paths to victory this November — not just in Nevada and Arizona, where Latinos comprise roughly 30% of the population, but also in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, where fast-growing Latino populations could play decisive roles in tightly divided states.
Trump’s plan to win Latino voters
For Trump’s presidential campaign, the large share of new Latino voters presents an opportunity to redefine the former president, less around his past derision of Latino immigrants and instead around his handling of the pre-pandemic economy, an issue on which poll after poll has found Americans view him more favorably than Harris.
“Republicans, I think successfully, have built the perception that they are good on the economy,” De Castro said. “That opens up opportunities for them.”
Those opportunities, according to Abraham Enriquez of the conservative-leaning nonprofit Bienvenidos US, hinge on Trump’s “understanding of the changing coalition that is the Hispanic vote.”
“Two-thirds of Hispanics on the voter rolls are second- and third-generation Americans, meaning that we are assimilating to American culture better. English is predominantly our first language,” Enriquez said on a Trump campaign press call earlier this month.
“Most of us have college degrees, and we care more about policies that uplift economic opportunity, rather than be bunched into what the Democrats would like to be focused on, which is these illegal immigration talking points that they think that Hispanic voters care about,” he said.
Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio also said the diversity of the Latino community stands to benefit Trump, asserting that Latino voting habits are broadly more in line with those of white voters than they are with other minority groups.
“I know that the tendency is to put all of those groups together from a polling perspective and look at them as, you know, nonwhites. But the fact of the matter is, Hispanics now are behaving politically and socioeconomically more like white voters than they are other minority voters, with the exception of perhaps Asian AAPI voters,” Fabrizio said.
That trend has fueled much of the campaign’s messaging.
“We have the same message for everyone, because regardless of people’s background, demographic, gender or origin, everyone is reeling from the current economic policies,” said Vianca Rodriguez, the Trump campaign’s deputy director of Hispanic communication.
While Trump has an advantage on handling the economy among Latinos and voters more broadly, there are other issues Harris can capitalize on. Those issues, according to an analysis by UnidosUS, include health care and health insurance, democracy, public education, abortion and immigration.
In the new NBC News/Telemundo/CNBC poll, Trump had a big advantage over Harris on handling border security, while Harris had a big advantage on the issue of treating immigrants humanely. And Harris’ advantage on abortion policy mirrored her broader advantage on the issue.
“Because Latinos are faith- and family-oriented, the assumption had been that they were against abortion,” De Castro said. “More than 70% of Latinos say that regardless of their own beliefs, they don’t think it should be illegal or want that decision taken away from others.”
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign’s forgoing of targeted Latino outreach has resulted in only 16% of the Latino voters across battleground states reporting contact from the Republican Party, according to UnidosUS. More have heard from Democrats, though a majority say neither party has contacted them.
Like with Trump’s outreach to Black voters, the campaign has opted to rely on culturally relevant entertainers as surrogates.
Puerto Rican reggaeton musician Anuel AA, born Emmanuel Gazmey Santiago, endorsed Trump during a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in August, telling Puerto Ricans to “stay united” and “vote for Trump.”
Pennsylvania is home to the third-largest Puerto Rican diaspora community in the country.
“I don’t know if these people know who the hell you are, but it’s good for the Puerto Rican vote,” Trump told the rapper while introducing him to several thousand attendees at the campaign rally. “Every Puerto Rican is going to vote for Trump right now. We’ll take it.”
Roughly a month later, reggaeton artist Nicky Jam, born Nick Rivera Caminero, who is Puerto Rican and Dominican, endorsed Trump onstage at a rally in Las Vegas, telling supporters in Spanish, “It’s been four years and nothing has happened. We need Trump. Let’s make America great again.”
That endorsement resulted in fierce backlash for Caminero, with some critics highlighting Trump’s past threats to programs like DACA, the executive action preventing deportation of eligible undocumented immigrants who arrived to the U.S. as children, a policy Caminero vocally supported. Others poked fun at the artist for endorsing Trump even though the former president appeared to be unaware of Caminero’s gender.
“Latin music superstar Nicky Jam, do you know Nicky? She’s hot. Where’s Nicky?” Trump said while introducing the artist.
Caminero has since removed all traces of the endorsement from his social media profiles.
Harris works to maintain support with ‘unprecedented’ outreach
Under the helm of Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the first Latina campaign manager for a general election, the Harris-Walz campaign has sought to made robust investments into Latino outreach, from advertising to organizing. That effort ratcheted up in September as the campaign sought to mark Hispanic Heritage Month.
“Building on our historic efforts to break through and earn the support of Latino voters everywhere, this Hispanic Heritage Month will be a key part of our aggressive campaign efforts to make our case to voters about Vice President Harris,” Rodriguez said.
That has meant an aggressive slate of programming this month across the battlegrounds, where Harris’ team far outpaces Trump’s on the ground, with 17 field offices in Arizona, 14 in Nevada and 50 in Pennsylvania.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona visited several schools in the Pittsburgh area earlier this month to kick off back-to-school season. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra spoke to first-generation Latino college students in Arizona. Rodriguez headlined a “Latinos con Harris-Walz Call-A-Thon” aimed at reaching 500,000 voters.
The campaign’s outreach to Latino men has included more informal approaches.
Earlier this month, Rodriguez, Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York attended a fight between champion boxer Canelo Alvarez and Edgar Berlanga in Las Vegas with Harris-Walz gear in tow, their messaging aided by a mobile billboard that roamed the Strip playing an ad focused on Harris’ efforts to secure the border.
With polls suggesting immigration now ranks lower among Latino voters’ priorities, the campaign’s advertisements have focused more on issues like the cost of goods and reproductive rights.
Since the beginning of August, Harris and allies have spent $13.4 million on advertising in Hispanic media, according to AdImpact, which tracks political ads. Trump’s campaign and allies have spent $609,000 — an advantage of more than 20-to-1.
In a Spanish-language advertisement released by the campaign in Pennsylvania, Victor Martinez, a popular radio morning show host, credited Harris for “standing up to greedy corporations making it harder to afford food and pay the rent.”
“We know that we need to earn the vote of Latinos. It’s not just going to be given and it’s important that we’re driving home that stark choice our community is going to face at the ballot box,” said Maca Casado, the campaign’s director of Hispanic media.
That effort includes reminding Latino voters of the hard-line immigration policies and inflammatory rhetoric Trump displayed while in office, as Harris did during a campaign event in Douglas, Arizona, on Thursday.
“He did nothing to fix our broken immigration system,” Harris said. “He separated families. He ripped toddlers out of their mothers’ arms, put children in cages and tried to end protections for Dreamers. He made the challenges at the border worse, and he is still fanning the flames of fear and division.”
The Harris campaign is also incorporating popular surrogates into its outreach efforts, inviting Emmy-winning actor Liza Colón-Zayas and Grammy-winning film and theater star Anthony Ramos to join running mate Tim Walz at a campaign rally in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, an event that also sought to recognize the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Maria.
“We remember, after Hurricane Maria devastated the island,” Colón-Zayas said, “Trump blocked billions of dollars in hurricane relief, OK, contributing to thousands of deaths, how he disrespected us, and how he called Puerto Rico dirty and poor and tossed paper towels at us. We can’t go back.”
More work to be done
Roughly six weeks before Election Day, De Castro said the majority of Latino voters still say they haven’t been contacted by either campaign.
“A full 55% of Latino voters had not heard from anybody, not just candidates, but nonpartisan or any other type of organization. So as you can see from those numbers, the outreach is still low,” she said.
In the final stretch, she expects to see robust on-the-ground engagement from both campaigns, maintaining that few other voting groups are as ideologically diverse and gettable as Latino voters.
Harris’ campaign will be aided in part by its allied groups. The Latino Victory Fund on Saturday kicked off a plan to bus volunteers from New York to Pennsylvania to engage with the state’s more than 400,000 eligible Latino voters. The six-figure effort will also fund field operations, bilingual digital outreach and targeted paid media, the organization said.
“You’ve got to persuade these voters,” De Castro said. “It’s not just about turnout. It’s about winning them over, particularly given the number that are new and the number who are frustrated that a lot of solutions to these things have been lagging or dragging on for a long time.”