With time running out, Kamala Harris takes action for the Latino vote

On a recent Sunday, a young organizer named Daniel Zevallos sat in Kamala Harris’s campaign office in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The office, hastily set up in a former home health care agency, had opened on August 11, and the silver balloons and paper streamers from the grand opening were still hanging there. From his post, Zevallos could see a countdown calendar, reminding him that only two months remained until the election. Hunched over his laptop, he studied local maps, which showed Republicans had made significant gains among Latinos in the state in recent years. Although Donald Trump lost Pennsylvania in 2020, he increased his vote share in Allentown by 22 percent after winning in 2016.

Zevallos’s father, who is Peruvian, came to Allentown as part of a wave of Latino immigrants who have transformed the city in recent decades. Allentown used to be the Queen City of the Lehigh Valley, defined by miles of silk mills and foundries that brought generations of Germans and Italians to work. As the region’s industry declined, the foundries lost workers and the streets emptied. Over time, however, a new wave of businesses drew a workforce made up largely of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Mexicans. Today, Allentown is a key hub in Pennsylvania’s so-called Latino Belt, a handful of towns with just enough Hispanic voters to keep the state thriving.

Zevallos learned the political terrain early. In high school, he volunteered for Bernie Sanders, knocking on as many as 150 doors a day. In Pennsylvania, such numbers could make a difference; elections were often won and lost by narrow margins. In 2020, Joe Biden won the state by fewer than eighty-two thousand votes, just over one percent of the total.

At the office, a small group of New Yorkers who had come to recruit were working through a checklist of tips that ended with, “Don’t forget to smile.” The group had driven more than a hundred miles to be there. “I invited all my friends!” one woman declared. Zevallos said more people were signing up to volunteer these days and stopping by to ask how they could get involved. “There’s a lot more enthusiasm among the rank-and-file members,” he said, as he picked up a stack of flyers and a list of doors to knock on.

The city center is mostly small, tightly packed row houses. “You can do 200 or 250 a day if you really try,” Zevallos said. He had learned that the key to voting was gentle prodding. “Just here for Vice President Harris!” he said after the first knock. “Are you going to vote this year? Do you know who you’re going to vote for?”

The answers he got showed an electorate that was, at best, moderately engaged in the election. On a porch, a man in cargo shorts and rubber sandals said, “I’m sick of all the politics, honestly.” Next to us, a young woman in pink leopard pajamas said, “Oh, I’m not going to vote.” A block away, a man with a thick mustache told Zevallos, “I’m busy making dinner.” He wiped his hands, which were covered in oil. “It’s politics, I don’t generally talk to people about it,” he said. “It’s kind of like religion, two subjects I’ve been taught never to discuss.”

Harris’s advisers like to say that she built her career in California, the nation’s largest Latino state, and that she knows how to win over that electorate. In 2010, when she became California’s attorney general, she won the support of a majority of Latinos, and she did so again when she ran for reelection four years later. In the race to represent California in the U.S. Senate, she easily defeated Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat of Mexican descent. But whether those state-level victories indicate she can win over an electorate of more than 36 million, whose specifics vary by geography and ethnicity, is still an open question.

In her first ad aimed at Latinos, Harris emphasized her immigrant roots, praised the influence of her mother, who left India at age 19, and described Harris’s rise from a summer job at McDonald’s to the San Francisco district attorney’s office and ultimately to the vice presidency. “With the same determination,” a narrator says in a subtly accented voice, “she always defended us.” But it was not entirely clear who “us” referred to, let alone whether it was Latino swing voters. Mike Madrid, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, argued that the ad spoke to first- and second-generation Latinos, who were already solidly Democratic. “This is not where Democrats have a problem,” he said. Third- and fourth-generation voters, particularly men without college degrees, “those are the voters they’ve been bleeding.”

Another campaign ad, titled “Tougher,” takes a different tack, highlighting Harris’ early career as a prosecutor who busted drug cartels. It also touts her support for a strikingly conservative border security deal that Republicans helped craft (and ultimately blocked, as Trump tried to prevent a Democratic victory). Mention of the deal was a departure from the Democratic Party’s traditional message on immigration, which has prioritized humanitarian policies over enforcement.

Madrid argued that immigration was the wrong focus in any case. “It’s never been a litmus test, the way the Democrats — and the Republicans, for that matter — have been throwing themselves at it,” he said. “Latinos have been screaming at the top of their lungs: We want an economic agenda, we want a jobs agenda, we want an affordability agenda. What did they get? They got immigration reform.” One of Harris’s first major policy proposals showed some awareness of these concerns; it was an ambitious initiative to tackle the housing crisis, with proposals to build 3 million homes over the next four years. “One in five Latino men are employed in housing or a related industry,” Madrid said. “They’ve been hit hard, at a time when interest rates have tripled since the Trump administration.”

Just before Biden ended his campaign, a Pew poll showed he and Trump virtually tied among Latinos in swing states — a disastrous finding for a party that historically secures nearly two-thirds of the Latino vote. After Harris announced her candidacy, early polls showed her with an 18-point lead over Trump.

Chuck Rocha, a top Democratic consultant, said Harris’ age, coupled with the grassroots positivity of her campaign, worked in her favor; the Hispanic electorate is overwhelmingly young, with nearly a third of voters under 30. “That this campaign is almost rooted in joy and optimism, versus the hatred and cruelty that they’re seeing from Republicans, is a stark contrast,” Rocha said. A large poll of Latinos released earlier this month by the group UnidosUS found that voters are most concerned with pocketbook issues: inflation, wages, the cost of housing and health care. “Latinos are sometimes misunderstood as not as ambitious as other sectors,” Rocha said. As he put it, they want to know, “What are you going to do almost immediately to make my life better?”

As part of Zevallos’ outreach, he met Norberto Dominguez, a respected community leader. Dominguez, 57, had lived in Allentown since the 1970s; his family had arrived there after fleeing the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. “My father, who was a steelworker, did what most Latinos do: He worked hard and saved up to buy a house,” Dominguez said. Growing up, Dominguez was one of the few Latinos who attended William Allen High School, but a huge influx followed. “In the last seven to 10 years, we’ve seen a third wave, and it’s really grown,” Dominguez said. The city is now majority Latino and recently elected its first Latino mayor.

“Half my family is Democrat, half Republican,” Dominguez continued. The GOP’s appeal among Latinos grew stronger around him — his cousins ​​and brothers had a particular affinity for Trump. “Men are attracted to men who make money,” Dominguez said. “The caveman is coming at us.” But, Dominguez noted, Trump also had a unique ability to turn off historically conservative voters. “The proportion of independents in the family is growing,” he said.

One of Trump’s persistent lines of attack has been to link Harris to the Biden administration’s handling of immigration. But respondents to the UnidosUS poll appeared to align with her policies, clearly supporting a path to citizenship for immigrants with deep roots in the country and rejecting the mass deportation initiatives Trump has proposed. On the economy, as on immigration, Latinos overwhelmingly said the Democratic Party represented their views. Abortion offers Harris a particularly pronounced advantage; when asked if they believed it was “wrong to make abortion illegal and take away that choice,” seventy-one percent of respondents said they did.

Overall, Harris has a lead in the high 20s, a marked improvement but less than the 30-point margin that helped Biden win in 2020. To close the gap, Harris will have to target the undecided, who represent about 15 percent of Hispanic voters, and also appeal to at least some of the 13 million Latinos who are not yet registered to vote. In the coming weeks, Harris will either match Biden’s 2020 numbers or the Republican Party will further consolidate its gains, Madrid noted, adding: “The latter would mean that there is a new base of support for Republicans, and that is the mid- to high-30s, which is extraordinary.”