The Latino swing that could cost Joe Biden the election
When Maria Montero was growing up in small-town Pennsylvania, she used to sit with her grandfather and watch him shout at Ronald Reagan on the television. Most people in her neighbourhood, Hispanics who had moved out into steel and coal country to find work and cheap housing, were true-blue Democrats.
But as she listened, Reagan and his message of hard work and the American dream struck a chord. Now she is running for Congress as a Republican. And increasingly, it is President Biden who is drawing the ire of Hispanics in a realignment that could win Donald Trump the election.
“Over the last 15 years I’ve seen my friends who were registered Democrats become Republican, not because they’ve changed, but because they feel that the Democratic Party has changed,” said Montero, 47, a Peruvian-Irish lawyer with a sheet of long black hair. “They just feel like the values of the Democratic Party are not focusing on America’s best interests, like making sure we have a secure border, making sure we’re supporting our law enforcement.”
Hispanics are the fastest-growing voter demographic in the United States. They make up nearly 15 per cent of the electorate, registering to vote in record numbers — a quiet wave breaking across the country, from Texas and Arizona to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. This November, for the first time, they will outnumber black voters, whose support has underpinned every Democratic president since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s.
They are some of the most powerful voters, and a rising number are turning towards Trump. In 2020 Biden won Hispanic voters by 21 percentage points but last month a poll by The New York Times predicted that Trump would win the Latino vote with 46 per cent to Biden’s 40 per cent (though this almost exclusively polled English-speakers, leaving out the mainly low-income Spanish-speakers who would tend to vote Democrat).
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In a poll conducted by the Latino Public Opinion Forum late last year, 58 per cent of Hispanic voters said the Democratic Party best represented their values, but nearly 20 per cent said they had considered switching parties in the past year. Of those, 38 per cent said that the switch was from Democrat to Republican, 23 per cent from Democrat to independent, and only 11 per cent from Republican to Democrat and 9 per cent from independent to Democrat.
“It’s a clear trend, and it’s a clear trend all over,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a professor of politics at Florida International University, who directed the poll. “There are more Hispanics who are becoming Republicans, and there are also more Hispanics who are becoming independents.”
Along Route 222, which winds through the fields of eastern Pennsylvania, is the so-called Latino Corridor, a string of towns settled by Hispanic workers and families since the 1920s. Allentown, where Montero practises, has been majority-Hispanic since four years ago. Reading and Lancaster have sizable Latino populations. And in Bethlehem, which was founded by Moravian missionaries, at least one church holds mass in Spanish.
Although plenty of states have a larger proportion of Hispanic voters, they may matter most in places like this. Pennsylvania is a vital swing state. In 2016 Trump won here by just 44,000 votes, and in 2020 Biden took Pennsylvania by about 80,000. There are more than 600,000 Hispanics eligible to vote in Pennsylvania, and according to a survey late last year, more than a fifth of them will be voting for the first time in November. In a national race likely to be decided by minuscule margins their allegiance could mean the difference between four more years of Biden or another Trump term.
Trump ran for the presidency in 2016 claiming that rapists and criminals were flooding into the country from Mexico. In office he separated families of migrants at the border and sought to end protection for immigrants brought to the US illegally as children. Yet in 2020 he improved his share of the Hispanic vote. Now he appears poised to do so again.
Economic pressures are partly responsible. Many Hispanic voters have struggled under a post-pandemic rise in inflation, which sent prices at the grocery store and petrol pump soaring, though they now appear to have stabilised.
At Casa Del Mofongo in Bethlehem, which has the best Dominican food in town, every table was empty last Wednesday afternoon. Mayra, who has run the place with her husband for five years, said slow business and high prices meant she was not going to vote for Biden again. “I’ve been a Democrat, I’ve voted Democrat, but I guess I’m not one any more, I guess I’m a Republican,” she said.
Since the pandemic, she said, their business had been crippled by rising costs, and her customers, who would come here for perfectly cooked shrimp and crispy chicharrón every day if they could, were staying at home. “When Trump was president there was more money on the street,” she said. “I mean, when he talks he’s not so good, but he’s a businessman and he’s very good with money.”
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Democrats are painfully aware of the challenge they face on the economy, which crosses racial groups. Lori McFarland, the chairwoman of the Lehigh county Democratic committee in Pennsylvania, said part of the Hispanic community was disengaged because they were “too busy surviving” and did not feel represented by the party.
“We can’t seem to get a grasp,” she said. “And I’ve already been told, it doesn’t matter whether they’re Democrats or Republicans, their lives do not improve.” The way forward, she said, was to sign up more Hispanic volunteers and increase outreach.
However, the growing appeal of the Republican Party is also cultural. Isidro Gonzalez, deacon at Holy Infancy Church in Bethlehem, led the 30-strong Spanish-speaking congregation on Tuesday night in prayer. Among them were people from Mexican, Dominican and Puerto Rican families, who had chosen Pennsylvania as their home. Though most supported the Democrats, he said, some would be voting for Trump. As staunch Catholics, they were drawn to the fact he had packed the Supreme Court with judges who overturned Roe v Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion.
“Hispanic voters are in rapid flux in America,” said Albert Eisenberg, a Pennsylvania man who runs a small political consultancy, BlueStateRed, that has worked on Spanish-language outreach to potential Republican voters. “It’s an overwhelmingly working-class group of people with sort of normal, moderate tendencies.”
For these Latino voters, Trump’s blunt rhetorical style often is not a turn-off.
And for people who waited for years to get visas or bring family members to the US, the idea of closing the border to stop people from “jumping the line” by coming in illegally seems reasonable. As does the Republican call for law and order, since many live in poor neighbourhoods decimated by the drug fentanyl, which is often smuggled over the border.
“The Republican Party is now representing normal working people more … Trump has accelerated a trend that already existed,” Eisenberg said. “Republicans would be very, very smart to realise that this is a generational shift that is happening and invest in outreach.”
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Some Hispanics, such as Cubans in Florida, have for decades tended to vote Republican — partly drawn by the party’s historic anti-communist stance.
But for a long time, Hispanic voters in states such as Pennsylvania were considered a sure bet for Democrats, if they could motivate them to vote. Raymond Santiago, executive director of the Hispanic centre in Lehigh Valley, said both parties still needed to do more.
“When they realise they’re polling low with Hispanics and Latinos they’ll get onto us, that’s the unfortunate truth of it all,” he said. “What the Hispanic community is looking for is relief, and an understanding of what we value, what we believe in, and what is ultimately going to help us and our families. Anything outside of that when people are struggling to pay for groceries? They’re not going to be receptive.”
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