Kamala Harris and Donald Trump race to win over Latino voters as US election nears

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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are racing to win support from Latinos in battleground states — voters with the potential to break a polling gridlock in one of the tightest White House contests ever.

Both candidates will travel to Nevada and Arizona in the coming days, swing states where Latinos make up more than a fifth of the electorate, and separately take part in televised events on Univision, the US’s largest Spanish-language channel by audience.

“The Latino voter is emerging as the fastest-growing segment of the blue- collar workforce,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant and author of The Latino Century. As a proportion of the electorate they would also be bigger than the margin of victory in any swing state, he added.

With the race virtually tied in all seven swing states, the campaigns are looking to eke out gains among a once-reliably Democratic group that has drifted to the right and grown.

“You don’t need huge shifts. A couple [of] points is small as a polling subsample but it’s tectonic in the real world,” said Madrid.

Harris’s campaign this week launched “Hombres for Harris”, an initiative to court Latino men — a group that has increasingly been drawn to Trump’s strongman rhetoric and economic agenda.

Pew estimates about 36.2mn Latinos will be eligible to vote this year, or about 15 per cent of the electorate — double their share in 2000. In 2020, the group overtook the US’s Black population to become the country’s second-largest ethnic voting bloc.

Harris will be quizzed on Thursday by Latino voters at a Univision town hall event in Las Vegas, Nevada — a state where Latinos account for 22 per cent of the electorate — before holding a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, where they make up 25 per cent of the vote.

Her push comes as Democrats try to arrest a slide in Latino support over the past decade driven, say pollsters, by a lack of faith in the party leadership, economic concerns, and disillusionment with Democrats’ stances on social issues.

Barack Obama won 71 per cent of the Latino vote in 2012, according to Pew, but this fell to 65 per cent for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and 59 per cent for Joe Biden in 2020.

In September, a poll from NBC News/Telemundo said Harris’s support among Latinos was 54 per cent. Further losses could prove decisive in swing states that may be decided by small margins.

Democrats on the ground said they were confident that efforts to engage and motivate voters would prove effective on November 5.

“I have never seen a more organised, focused and co-ordinated effort [than] what the Harris campaign is doing in terms of reaching out to Latino voters,” said Matt Barreto, a California-based Democratic pollster advising the Harris campaign.

“I think people are going to be surprised on election night when they see a very strong number in the 60s with Kamala Harris [among Latino voters].”

Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, an Ecuadorean-American former congresswoman in Florida running for the US Senate, blamed “disinformation” from the Trump campaign for Democrats’ lacklustre polling numbers, and encouraged her colleagues to engage more with Spanish-speaking voters.

Mark Jones, chair in Latin American studies at Rice University, said Harris had to walk a fine line between wooing Latino voters in the south and those in the Midwest, especially on immigration, considered an easy target for Trump.

“The difficulty for Harris is she has to avoid any sort of messaging to the Latino community that could be counterproductive among white working- class voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin,” he said.

Trump will make his own pitch to Latino voters in Nevada this weekend with a roundtable for small business owners and union workers in Henderson, Nevada, outside Las Vegas. On Sunday he will hold a rally in Arizona’s Prescott Valley, a town north of Phoenix.

The former president will also participate in a separate Univision town hall in Florida next week, after a taping originally scheduled for this week was delayed due to Hurricane Milton.

Republicans say Trump’s gains among Latino voters will last.

“It is pretty clear that President Trump has locked in the additional support he received from Hispanics when we compare 2016 to 2020,” said Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman from Florida. “Democrats are going to have to look for other voters to make up the difference.”