Joe Biden is trying to recover the Hispanic vote. The Democrat launched the "Latinos con Biden" initiative this Tuesday to capture the support of the Latino electorate. He did so on the occasion of his visit to the states of Nevada and Arizona, where the Latino population is of huge importance.
"The announcement of 'Latinos con Biden' in Arizona comes after the president visited Washoe County during the morning, located in the city of Reno (Nevada) and considered a hinge county that oscillates between Democrats and Republicans, but where Biden's party has recently achieved victories," AFP explained.
Biden's efforts come at a time when Hispanics are moving away from the Democratic Party while the number of Hispanics backing former President Donald Trump has grown in recent months.
As a Biden-Harris national co-chair, I'm thrilled to help President @JoeBiden launch #LatinosConBiden.
With Donald Trump calling immigrants "not people," and his hateful rhetoric targeting Hispanic communities, there's so much at stake this November. Stand with us! pic.twitter.com/RlM7e9QgDr
— Veronica Escobar (@vgescobar) March 19, 2024
For example, a study published in January explained how Hispanic support for Democratic President Joe Biden fell to 34% compared to 39% for former Republican President Donald Trump. This is a large decline from 2020, when Biden won 65% of the Latino demographic compared to 32% for Trump.
Hispanics are an increasingly important voting bloc
But this is not the only study that reveals that the Hispanic vote is no longer Democratic. The blue party advantage among Hispanic adults and adults ages 18 to 29 has diminished almost 20 points in the last three years, as revealed by a Gallup poll which detailed that right now, in the middle of an election year, Democrats have only a modest advantage among Latinos compared to the historical support that this group has given them.
These shifts in the party affiliation of key subgroups provide the demographic backstory for how Democrats went from enjoying significant leads over Republicans between 2012 and 2021, to slight deficits in 2022 and 2023.
Biden's attempt to recover the Hispanic vote is due to the importance that this demographic group will have in the next elections. An Axios study revealed that Latinos are increasingly relevant in defining the country's political future. In fact, it is estimated that 36.2 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote this year, compared to 32.3 million in 2020.
“Latinos are an increasingly important voting bloc, representing 18.7% of the U.S. population and growing,” highlighted the study carried out by Axios and Ipsos.
"Joe Biden is vulnerable"
In that sense, political analyst Alfonso Aguilar, president of the conservative group Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, spoke with Voz Media and explained that a very interesting “integration” phenomenon is occurring with Hispanics that is leading them to become swing voters.
“These data demonstrate several things, among them, that Joe Biden is vulnerable, since he needs a good performance among Hispanics to be able to win undecided states like Wisconsin or Georgia where the Hispanic vote reaches 6-7%,” Aguilar told Voz Media.
But Democrats' efforts to regain the trust of Latinos needs to go further. The issues that most concern Hispanics are inflation and the rising cost of living, according to a Unidos US survey. These two topics were mentioned by 54% of Latinos as their priority, while employment and the economy came in second place (44%) and health care came in third place (33%). Latinos also expressed concern about violence (29%) and 20% about the border crisis.
For Jesús Márquez, a political consultant linked to the Trump campaign in Nevada, Republicans have proposals that address the problems of Hispanics. An example of this is immigration policies, Márquez explained that Latinos are not happy with the border crisis.
"That's something that Latinos who have lived here for decades don't like, because they feel that many people are skipping their place in line," Márquez expressed in a conversation with AFP.
