Some of the issues Hispanic voters care about most this election cycle are those on which Republicans perform the strongest, suggesting the GOP has an opening in November to deepen the inroads it made with Latinos during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Recent polls show Hispanics, like most voters, regardless of race or education level, care primarily about the economy heading into the midterm elections. Crime has also registered as a major concern of Latino voters amid a tide of violence in most major cities.
Gone are the days when political strategists viewed the Hispanic community as a monolithic voting bloc that judged candidates solely on their immigration rhetoric. The Republicans’ recent success in courting some Latino voters has cast doubt on the long-held Democratic assumption that the country’s growing Hispanic population would one day deliver the party lasting majorities.
But despite the GOP’s recent gains, Democrats continue to have a number of issue-based advantages over Republicans.
Polls show Hispanic voters are increasingly concerned about abortion, although this may or may not be a decisive issue for most Latinos.
While roughly 5% of Hispanic voters said abortion was among their top issues in 2020, 19% said the same in an August poll, according to the Brookings Institution.
Inflation was overwhelmingly the top concern of Hispanic voters in a survey conducted last month by UnidosUS and Mi Familia Vota, two Hispanic advocacy groups, with 46% of respondents ranking it as their top issue.
Crime came in second at 36%, and jobs came in third with 29%. Immigration reform, by contrast, ranked 12th in the list of issues Hispanic voters most wanted leaders to address.
“This poll shows that the best ways to reach our communities is to address the issues that we care most about,” Irving Zavaleta, the national programs director at Mi Familia Vota, told the Washington Examiner. “This is a wake-up call for both parties, to make sure that they’re talking to us, to let them know that we’re paying attention.”
The Republican Party has worked to capitalize on Latino voters’ leading concerns in its messaging.
In Nevada, for example, the National Republican Senatorial Committee dropped a Spanish-language ad last week hitting Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto on crime.
The ad highlighted Cortez Masto’s tenure as the state’s attorney general, during which the NRSC said she worked on early prison release for criminals. The ad also went after Cortez Masto’s vote in the Senate against funding to crack down on drug trafficking at the border.
A person familiar with the ad said numbers showing Hispanic voters were increasingly worried about safety has informed its messaging strategy in the battleground state.
Trump’s relative success in attracting Latino votes — he improved his overall performance with Hispanics by 8 percentage points between 2016 and 2020, the Democratic data firm Catalist reported — has given the GOP hope it can chip away at a longtime well of support for Democrats.
GOP groups such as the NRSC and the Republican National Committee have boosted their resources for Hispanic outreach.
Reps. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) launched a political action committee in May aimed at boosting Latino candidates and mobilizing Hispanic voters.
Gonzales said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that the PAC, the Hispanic Leadership Trust, is in its early stages but has already helped orchestrate support for a handful of Hispanic candidates, including GOP Rep. Mayra Flores, whose victory in a Texas special election earlier this year made her the first Mexican-born congresswoman.
“Right now, it looks like two things,” Gonzales said of what shape the PAC’s work has taken so far. “It is the voter contact, which is, to me, the most important aspect of it. The second aspect of it is direct mentorship with the candidates, just to make sure they’re up to speed with the things they have to do.”
The PAC has aimed to support a number of Latino candidates, incumbent and nonincumbent alike, including Monica De La Cruz in Texas and Rep. Maria Salazar in Florida.
Beyond talking to voters about specific issues such as border security and the economy, Gonzales said it is important for Republicans to make Hispanic voters feel understood and valued.
“The messenger matters,” Gonzales said. “I’m a Hispanic guy representing a Hispanic district. I have six kids. I’m Catholic.”
The religious roots of many in the Hispanic community have long led to speculation in Republican circles that Latino voters may be more sympathetic to the GOP’s support for abortion restrictions.
But numbers suggest the relationship between Latino voters’ religious beliefs and their support for government limits on abortion is complicated.
The UnidosUS/Mi Familia Vota poll found that 76% of Catholic Latino voters agreed with the sentence: “No matter what my personal beliefs about abortion are, I think it is wrong to make abortion illegal and take that choice away from everyone else.”
Sixty-eight percent of non-Catholic, Christian Latino voters also concurred with the statement. And in Arizona and Nevada, two battleground states with substantial Hispanic populations, the percentage of Latino voters who agreed with the statement was even higher than the national average.
Zavaleta noted abortion is such a salient issue to Hispanics in large part because Latinos already reported more difficulty accessing healthcare than others before the Supreme Court struck down nationwide protections for abortion.
“With the loss of Roe v. Wade, it will have such an outsize effect on women of color,” he said. “It will only worsen health and other inequalities for Latinas.”
In its messaging to voters of all backgrounds, the Democratic Party has focused heavily on abortion amid polling that shows more people trust Democrats to lead on the issue than Republicans. Polls have also suggested the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which returned the topic of abortion to the state level, has energized Democratic voters who showed less enthusiasm about casting a ballot this year before the ruling.
The GOP, by contrast, has worked to keep the midterm conversation centered on the economy.
A New York Times/Siena College poll released this week reinforced the notion that the GOP’s perceived superiority on economic issues could drive more Hispanics away from Democrats this cycle.
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While most Hispanics said they planned to vote for a Democratic candidate in November — only 32% of Latino voters said they planned to vote for a Republican — the majority of respondents said they would decide their vote based on economic issues rather than social ones.
Hispanic voters were nearly evenly split when they were asked which party they trust most to deal with economic issues.
In other words, Hispanic voters’ preference for Republicans jumped dramatically when they were asked to view the election through an economic lens instead of a partisan one. And the same poll, as well as several others, suggested most Hispanic voters are indeed viewing the midterm election through an economic lens.
