“In Trump’s four-year term we had great international politics, no wars, unemployment or inflation, and we were self-sufficient in oil.” Argentinian dentist Ecio Pozzi, 47, emigrated to the United States in July 2001. Now a resident of New Jersey and an American citizen, he says he’ll vote for Donald Trump in November: “Latinos like myself, who came here legally and never lived off the State, don’t want what’s happening in our countries to happen here. And that is what we see in Biden and Democrats.”
Ecio voted for Barack Obama twice and then in 2016 he supported Trump. As well as the former president’s most radical followers, he is convinced that Joe Biden fraudulently won the election in 2020 —despite the fact that there is no evidence to support that claim. He also believes in one of Trumpism’s conspiracy theories: that the current government is opening the doors to immigrants in order to get votes. “They are paying for their stay in Manhattan hotels, and this month they began handing out pre-paid credit cards with 1,000 dollars for monthly expenses.”
Colombian Daniela Rey, 37, has been living in California for 15 years. She works as a “herbalist and an entrepreneur” and in November, unlike Ecio, she’ll vote for the candidate of the Democrat party: “Trump is crazy. His four-year term was a total joke. Biden is old and he is probably not the best choice, but he is a serious man who has handled the financial crisis of recent years.”
For her, the economy has been the greatest achievement of the current president, who is seeking reelection if (as expected) the primaries confirm his nomination. “For three years we have not been concerned with what the government does because we have a reliable and serious person in office. And then there is the fact that Trump won’t shut up about Russia… so they are obviously in collusion,” Daniela adds. She is one of many voices condemning the alleged connivance of the former president with Putin, the great enemy of Biden and the United States.
Ecio and Daniela are part of the 36.2 million Latin Americans eligible to vote in the presidential election in November. For this new face off, Biden and Trump have cleared the way for their nominations this week after securing the respective primaries in the so-called Super Tuesday.
According to data by Voto Latino, an organization dedicated to encouraging the community’s participation in civic life in the United States, the number of Latino voters in 2024 has increased 6.5% in relation to 2020, and 20.5% more voters can vote now than in 2016, when Trump won the election. In the upcoming election, set for November 5, more than one of every ten voters (14%) will be Latino.
Aside from the White majority, Americans of Latino origin are the second voting bloc, followed by African Americans. However, fewer Latinos voted in 2020: 51% of them cast their ballot, while Black voters amounted to 63% of the vote, and Whites for 74%.
Dennis Gonzalez, Vice-President of Strategic Initiatives at Voto Latino, told CONNECTAS that in this election, 4.1 million new Latino voters will be eligible. And he highlighted that “they are either very young or seniors, and live in swing states,” such as Florida and Arizona.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
For the first time in nearly 250 years of history, Latino immigrants might be key in electing the new president. And their traditional sympathy for Democrat candidates can’t be taken for granted in 2024. According to the Annual Hispanic Public Opinion Survey, many have opted to refrain from party affiliation, which could be detrimental to the Democrats. Moreover, in the last four years, Biden’s support among Latinos went from 67% in 2020 to 53% nowadays. In the meantime, Trump’s support has grown in that segment from 29% to 33%.
That is why the Republican campaign is trying to fish in troubled waters, among Black and Latino voters. As Steve Bannon, the guru of Trumpism himself, admitted in his speech in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the far right conference held in Washington D.C. There, Trump shared the spotlight with two Latin American “stars”: the Presidents of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, and Argentina, Javier Milei.
“Polls show that Latinos are not satisfied with Biden’s politics, and it is a huge opportunity to win their trust,” declared Mercedes Schlapp, organizer of the CPAC, to justify the invitation of the two Hispanic rulers to an electoral event in the United States, an unprecedented situation.
A week later, Trump, who unreservedly embraced the Argentinian president in the CPAC, praised him in public again, “I love him because he loves Trump,” he said. And he added, apropos of his slogan Make America Great Again: “This is the greatest movement in the history of our country, maybe in the history of any country, even in Argentina they went MAGA.”
Donald Trump volvió a elogiar a Javier Milei: “Él me ama y yo lo amo”https://t.co/EJXEJBEm83
— elDiarioAR (@elDiarioAR) March 3, 2024
Michael Shifter, former president of the political forum Inter-American Dialogue, minimizes the influence that Milei might have on the Republican campaign. “The U.S.-based Argentinian population has no electoral or political clout,” he stated. And pertaining to Bukele, his words were similar: “The Salvadoran population is significant, but it is concentrated in three places, Washington DC, Los Angeles and New York. And because those states are Democrat, Biden has a strong lead there already. It is almost impossible for Trump to win there.”
Nowadays, Americans are more concerned with illegal immigration than with any other issue, as a recent poll by Gallup revealed. Nevertheless, Latinos are more worried about the economy, another poll found. It is, paradoxically, one of the accomplishments of the Biden administration, but its benefits seem not to have reached migrants in the lowest social levels, who are underpaid, can’t access housing and are largely affected by increased prices.
“Even though inflation has gone down, prices in the consumer basket are still on the rise, and that is something Americans are experiencing on a daily basis,” analyzes Robert Valencia, journalist of the #CONNECTASHub of Colombian origin specializing in international affairs and based in the United States. To explain the change in trend of the Latino vote against Biden, he adds: “Although figures at macroeconomic level show one thing, the overall citizen emotion differs because their basic products are getting more expensive. That is likely what has affected Joe Biden and favored Donald Trump”.
Ultimately, as Valencia says, “the economy has always been the main driver in a presidential election. That was exactly what happened to Trump in 2020, the pandemic upended the economy and Biden won.”
On Saturday, March 2, a new poll on voting intention was published confirming Trump’s favoritism to return to the White House. In it, the Republican gets 48% of the voting intention, versus Biden’s 43% (with 10% of undecided voters). A likely explanation of the bad outlook for Biden’s reelection: most people polled consider the economy is not going well.
An Heterogeneous Vote
Both Shifter and Valencia acknowledge that the Latino vote (encompassing immigrants and first and second generation children) is becoming more and more relevant in the United States due to its mounting demographic weight. A projection by the United States Census Bureau points that one in four Americans will be of Latino origin by 2060.
Yet Latinos can’t be considered a monolithic cluster. As with any other populational segment, there are noticeable ideological differences among them. Ecio and Daniela are proof of it.
“Although a Cuban, Nicaraguan or Venezuelan voter may vote Republican in southern Florida, voters in other parts of the United States (Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican in New York, in Illinois) might vote Democrat,” Valencia asserts. And he closes with a specific case: “In southern Texas there is an area called the Rio Grande Valley, it has a large Mexican population that used to be entirely Democrat and which chose to vote for Donald Trump in 2020. This shows that Hispanics are not necessarily loyal to a party.”
Dennis Gonzalez admits that, historically, “Latino voters have overwhelmingly supported Democrat candidates,” but that “each election is largely decided by the indecisive.” As an example, he cited the last 2022 midterm election, in which 60% of Latinos aged 40 or more supported Democrat candidates to the Senate, a number that rose to 67% in voters 40 or less. However, whereas the turnout of Hispanics aged 40 or more was 46% (close to the average), that of 40 or less was only 24%.
It’s not super Tuesday YET, but we wish you all a SUPER Tuesday!
Register to vote or check your registration today! 🗳️✅https://t.co/UUNddumEXT
— Voto Latino (@votolatino) February 20, 2024
But undoubtedly, the Latino vote is poised to play an important role in the upcoming election. The most recent report of the NALEO Educational Fund projects an increase of 6.5% in the turnout compared to 2020, way above the non-Hispanic vote, which is set to grow only 1.5%. “We project that Latino voter turnout in 2024 will be consistent with long-term growth in Latino voting rates, with the trend of at least a majority of Latino voting-age citizens casting ballots in a presidential election continuing in November 2024,” says the document, published in February.
That is why campaigns are starting to look at that community of almost 40 million citizens. At the core is the other topic that concerns Americans the most, albeit with radically different attitudes – illegal immigration.
On one hand, Biden’s speech is welcoming of hundreds of thousands desperate people reaching the border with Mexico, although without granting refuge and without being successful at containing them in their countries of origin. On the other hand, Trump doesn’t miss a chance to insult them and to pin every possible human evil on them, whilst he hugs Milei and Bukele, presidents of countries of origin of some of those very immigrants.
In this context in which the country’s economy seems to be doing well, despite the inflation that affects the people’s day-to-day, amidst a harsh debate sparked by non-stop illegal immigration, Latinos in the United States will have a decisive role in electing the next president. Even though the expected turnout is 17.5 million, the intricate electoral system of the United States may tip the scale in states such as Florida, where Trump is the front-runner, again. If that happens, the Republican may rephrase his slogan to Make Latin America Great Again.