Kamala Harris’s Tightrope Act With Latino Voters

The revival of Democratic presidential fortunes after Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the nominee is mostly explained by the return of Democratic-leaning voter groups that had defected either to Donald Trump , to a non-major-party candidate, or to a disinclination to vote at all. This has included significantly better polling numbers among Latinos (a.k.a. Hispanics), a rapidly growing segment of the electorate with which Trump made surprising gains in 2020 (from 28 percent in 2016 to 38 percent in 2020) despite his xenophobic views. Among other things, this improvement has helped make Harris competitive in Sun Belt states with sizable Latino populations.

How has Harris turned things around? As Equis Research’s Carlos Odio told my colleague Benjamin Hart in a recent interview , it mostly reflects a more general trend among younger and less partisan voters who intensely disliked the choice of Biden and Trump: When you look at who Kamala Harris picked up almost immediately, it was Democratic-leaning Latinos. Almost 60 percent of them had voted for Biden in 2020, and the rest had not voted in 2020. It was a younger voter: 60 percent of those she picked […]

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