David Mendez is part of Donald Trump’s army of Latino voters, a candidate who remains attractive to Hispanics despite his harsh speech against immigrants. “If we don’t fight now, this country will be communist in 30 years,” says Mendez, 53, originally from Mexico City and resident in Las Vegas, in the State of Nevada. He began working as a waiter in casinos. Afterwards, he distributed game at the tables. blackjack and rose to become a supervisor, a job he held for 18 years. “I have seen in this time how the country is declining, moral values have been lost,” he says by phone. He voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Since 2012, however, he has voted for the Republican Party to stop what he considers a free fall of the country in which he has lived for three decades. In Trump he found a cocktail of “new blood and fresh ideas.”
“Since 2016 I have lost many friends because of my support for Trump, including my best friend, who stopped talking to me,” says Mendez, who is now dedicated to financial training. “Democrats sell us the idea that we should all be equal, but that makes us lazy. For the economy to work there always has to be one person who has more. That’s how we grow,” he says. Mendez admits that his favorite candidate “loses his tongue very quickly,” but he doesn’t take it personally when he calls Mexicans rapists or criminals. He also rules out carrying out the mass deportation promised by the Republican. “It is impossible because there are too many people, but I agree that the criminals and terrorists who have arrived should be expelled,” he adds.
Mendez had his idol in front of him in September 2020 during a Trump meeting with Latino leaders held in Nevada, one of the disputed states and where there are 410,000 Latinos registered to vote. He asked the then president to give papers to the dreamersthe undocumented young people who arrived in the country as children. “You’re going to be pleasantly surprised,” Trump responded. But nothing happened. The dreamersThey are still waiting to regularize their situation.
Trump held an event this Tuesday in Florida like the one Mendez attended a few years ago. It was a round table in Doral, a city in Florida near Miami in which more than 80% of the population is Latino (35% were born in Venezuela). The former president changed his plans to meet with Latino leaders. For this he had to sacrifice a speech in Georgia, one of the seven hinge states, before the convention of the powerful lobbyof weapons, the National Rifle Association. This would have been unthinkable a few years ago for a Republican candidate. However, Trump has prioritized a gesture that aims to appeal to the 36 million Latinos called to vote in November. It is Trump’s second event with Latinos in less than a week. “The polls are going very well and, perhaps more importantly, the first voting numbers are incredible in states like North Carolina,” the candidate said this morning.
Kamala Harris remains the leading option among Hispanic voters. The Democratic candidate has a voting intention of 56% in this group, according to the Siena and The New York Timesfrom the beginning of this month. The figure maintains a trend in force for 40 years, which places Hispanics solidly on the Democratic side. Trump, surprisingly, has maintained between 37% and 40% of the voting intention of this key sector of the electorate since August. The percentage reflects his best moment in his three presidential campaigns; In 2016 it obtained 28%.
Analysts have racked their brains to try to understand how a candidate with Trump’s speech stays afloat among Latinos, who in the 2020 elections already formed the first minority in the country, above African Americans, with 11 % of the population registered to vote. These elections also have a large number of new voters. It is estimated that one in four Hispanics will vote for the first time on November 5.
If Trump obtains 37% of the Hispanic vote, he will tie Ronald Reagan’s mark from 1984. The Republican with the most votes continues to be George W. Bush, who achieved between 40% and 44% in 2004. The discrepancy is due to an alleged overrepresentation of the sample of Cubans from Miami-Dade, the most right-wing community among conservative Hispanics in the country. Among the Cuban community, Trump leads Harris (46% against 45% with 5% undecided), according to YouGov and Univision. Not so among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.
Mike Madrid, a political consultant who graduated from Georgetown and one of the leading experts on Latino voting trends, warns of the story the polls tell. He speaks of “Latin oases,” which appear in polls where the sample is too small to accurately reflect voting intention. “These results generally create a greater right-wing bias than the actual sentiment of voters, giving the polls a more Republican or conservative tilt (…). “Republicans often believe they are more competitive than they are, which creates many surprises on Election Day,” Madrid writes in The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy(Simon & Schuster, 2024). Madrid warns that in many of the surveys, Latinos who have been in the country for the longest time appear overrepresented, but they fail to find the Hispanics who are most difficult to access: those who migrate wherever the economy takes them.
Some voters are turning their backs on the Democrats. This is the case of Israel Uribe, the owner of a food restaurant tex-mex in Harlingen (Texas), a city in the Rio Grande Valley near the border with Mexico. Uribe collaborated in 2022 for the town to elect its first female mayor, a lawyer specialized in immigration and a Democrat. This year, however, he will vote for the Republican candidate for Congress and for former President Trump, whom he refused to support in 2020 due to his management of the pandemic. “These last three years have been very difficult for me and my business. “Things have to change,” he says by phone.
Uribe admits that he was close to closing his restaurant, which he opened only in 2019 with a partner he met as a local official. The city has always been a Democratic stronghold in Texas, the country’s quintessentially Republican state, but conservatives have been gaining ground in recent elections. He believes the Joe Biden Administration’s management of the border depressed the local economy. “Here we have always been very open with those who arrive, but we have had very bad press and one gets tired of repeating that this is still a good area to work in and one in which to invest,” he points out.
“Many Latinos are aware that Vice President Harris is the face of the increase in thousands of prices,” Daniel Garza, the president of Libre, recently told the Fox network, one of the many efforts recently born to bring Hispanics to the breadbasket of voters of the Republican Party and who have a great echo on social networks. This is the case of Lexit, an organization of Hispanics who abandoned the Democrats to join the pro-Trump conservative movement that has more than 200,000 followers on Instagram.
Mass deportation
Efrén Pérez, a political psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), assures in recent research that 27% of Latinos identify themselves as Americans rather than as Hispanics. “The more they prioritize their nationality over their ethnic group, the more likely they are to think of themselves as Republicans (…). In contrast, the greater their affinity with their ethnic group, the more they will identify as democrats,” the academic writes. Pérez and his team of researchers believe that 27% coincide with the third of Latinos who call themselves Republicans.
The potential shift to the right could especially affect Harris and the Democrats in the States of Nevada and Arizona, where Latinos were key to Biden winning the presidency in 2020. This campaign, however, has been marked by Trump’s promise to carry out the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in history.
“In the first Trump Administration, many of his anti-immigration gestures were symbolic, like the border wall. This did not impact Latinos born here, but rather future immigrants trying to arrive through the desert,” says Chris Zepeda-Millán, a professor of public policy and Chicano studies at UCLA. The academic warns of the threat posed by Trump’s return to the White House. “It would be an existential crisis for the migrant human rights movement because of its promise of mass deportation. If he starts doing it, we will begin to see large mobilizations of Latinos throughout the country,” he adds. Trump must first return to the White House.