There Is No One Way to Win the Latino Vote

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Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the Presidential election, despite the fact the he underperformed with Latino voters, compared to Hillary Clinton’s results in 2016. Although Biden won the votes of a majority of Latino Americans, Trump likely did somewhere between several and ten points better among them than he did in 2016. (We don’t have precise figures yet, but election data suggests that there was a large gender gap among nonwhite voters as well as white voters, with women more likely than men to favor Biden.) Biden not only lost Florida by the greater-than-expected margin of three percentage points, but he also struggled to compete in Texas, where some polls had shown a tight race. He won Nevada and Arizona, but the Democratic Party will have to find a way to appeal to more Latino voters if it wants to win consistently across the Sun Belt states.

I recently spoke by phone with Ruben Gallego, the Democratic representative for Arizona’s Seventh Congressional District, which includes parts of Phoenix and has a majority-Latino population. Gallego, the son of a Colombian mother and a Mexican father, is in his third term, and won an overwhelming victory on November 3rd. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what Democrats who are trying to win more Latino votes can learn from Bernie Sanders’s campaign, what the Trump campaign did differently this time, and the reasons for the gender gap among Latinos.

How do you understand Biden’s weakness with Latino voters, and how long have you thought that this disappointing showing was a possibility?

Well, I don’t think we just generalize and say that it’s across the board. He surpassed Hillary Clinton’s numbers both in the aggregate, as well as the percentage, in Arizona. And then I think the area that we fell flat was with Florida Cubans. And that’s not a function of Biden; that’
s a function of the Cuban-American community. The Republicans and Donald Trump had four years to work on this community, knowing that they were going to be a swing community, while the Democrats did not have a nominee for the last three and a half years.

So what it does tell me is that you can work on this. We can win Latino votes back. And we can encourage people to come out and vote. One of the things we heard early on was, “You’re just not going to get Latinos excited about Biden, especially in Arizona.” In the primary, Bernie won the Latino vote, and everybody was worried about that. [This was true in Nevada and other states, but not Arizona, according to exit polls.] And, at the end of the day, it wasn’t the case.

I know we don’t have final numbers in, but it definitely seems that even though Biden improved his standing in Texas over all, compared to Hillary Clinton, he came up very short. What do you think people did not respond to about Biden or responded to about Trump?

There are a couple of things you have to remember. No. 1, Donald Trump shut off his anti-immigrant rhetoric starting in June. If you were watching Spanish-language TV, he was talking about how he’s going to pass citizenship for Dreamers by executive order.

I didn’t know that. You’re saying that on Spanish-language TV, in the last few months, Donald Trump was actually running pro-immigration ads?

Oh, absolutely. And he was actually running ads in Spanish all over the country, which is something that did not happen in 2016. And he’s the incumbent. That’s the other thing, too. At some point, the bogeyman that you heard about for four years doesn’t end up being as horrible, and he’s running commercials. So he’s going to narrow that margin. And this happens every election cycle. George W. Bush did better with Latinos when he was running for reëlection. Part of the problem with Texas is that it’s so massive that, in order for you to get any work done, you have to start getting it done early. And Trump ran a campaign that was targeting Latinos.

How much do you think that this story that we’re telling about the Latino vote is the gender gap manifesting itself across racial and ethnic lines? There’s a lot of early evidence to suggest that Trump increased his standing a lot with Latino men.

There’s certainly a growing trend where Latino men are still voting Democratic, but by not as much. A lot of it, I think, has to do with just machismo and other types of anti-women sentiments. I think that’s certainly a factor that Trump was playing into. I don’t know if it’s something that’s long-term and lasting, though.

The Democratic-primary Latino electorate is obviously not the same as the entire Latino electorate, but Bernie Sanders had a lot of success in the primary in winning Latino voters. We saw that in his big win in Nevada. What do you think it was that he was doing with a subset of the Latino population that Democrats should follow? Or is it something that’s maybe not replicable for a general election, but is replicable in a Democratic primary?

It is actually replicable for a general election, because Bernie Sanders had the money to do it early. It’s very intensive work for you to get younger Latinos out to vote, and you need to put in the money and have the confidence that the money will have a return on investment. This is why a lot of campaigns can’t do that, especially when it’s hard to fund-raise. Bernie did not have that problem. I think that President Biden, in his reëlection, is not going to have that same problem. At least he’s going to be able to fund-raise early enough so that he can do all the general-election work to get back the Latino base and then some. I predict that, by four years from now, we’re going to have the Cuban community back at the level that we wanted, and we will win and flip Florida because of it.

Thinking about flipping Florida, every four years.

Hope springs eternal.

You mentioned that Trump toned down some of his immigration rhetoric in Spanish-language ads, but how important is the immigration issue? I think that after 2012, when Barack Obama won and there was a bipartisan push for immigration reform, the sense was that the only way to win Latino voters was to be in favor of comprehensive immigration reform. It seems like that’s perhaps less true now. Do you think that the importance of immigration to Latino voters is overstated?

It is a very complicated issue. Latinos care about immigration reform. But there are a couple of things to think about when it comes to this. The Cuban migration story is very different from the non-Cuban migration story, right? Cubans, for decades, have not had a bad relationship with any Administration when it comes to immigration, because they have special status that allows them to essentially automatically become a permanent resident, or used to, until recently. So they don’t have the same kind of angst when it comes to immigration. And then you have your different levels of migration within other Latino communities that give you different perspectives. You have the Venezuelans, who look at it from a political-refugee perspective. And then you have other Latinos that are running away from bad economic situations. The fact is that, right now, the top priority for Latinos is COVID-19 and, related to it, the economy. And this is why a lot of them still voted for Biden. For Cubans, a lot of it was still tied to the idea of socialism that was being amped up by Republicans. If you don’t have the socialism rhetoric that’s coming out of Florida, then things might spring back.

Joe Biden is about as far from a socialist as anyone in the Democratic Party. And yet the attacks seemed to have an effect. Did you sense that the Biden campaign understood that this was potentially a problem?

Yes, of course. We knew that we were behind the eight ball, and the Biden campaign tried to pivot as fast as possible, but it was going to be difficult to pivot that fast in the middle of a pandemic. The way you fight the issues of socialism down in Little Havana is you actually go there, you campaign a couple of times, and you send a bunch of surrogates. And when you don’t have that, that’s when misinformation from different people, from different governments or government officials, specifically in South America, comes in. There were conspiracy theories that were going around social media and among Cuban-Americans, and they really took hold.

What governments are you talking about, and also how much are you concerned about misinformation?

Well, I was definitely disappointed in Colombian right-wing politicians getting involved in our elections. And they were helping spread a lot of misinformation about Biden and the Biden-Harris ticket. There were a lot of social-media influencers, largely Cuban-American, that were also spreading misinformation. I don’t know where they got their misinformation, but there was no way to answer it, because there was, again, no way for us to have a footprint, an organic social-media footprint, that is created from having rallies and talking to people, and things of that nature.

The Latino community has a lot of people who are religious, and some people who may be more socially conservative than the average Democrat. Are you concerned that the Party is taking a leftward turn or will take a leftward turn on cultural issues and, if it did, what sort of challenges would the Party face winning the Latino vote?

The Latino community is not as religiously conservative as people make it out to be. Yes, we go to church. Are we as conservative as evangelicals? No. Are we anywhere near that? No. I believe that being socially liberal is the correct thing to be. You have to be socially liberal, but you also have to be fiscally liberal. You have to have actual fiscal benefits for families, such as increasing wages and health care and things of that nature. Because, if not, I think that’s when a lot of opportunities come for outside groups that basically point to the Democratic Party not doing anything for Latinos.