How Harris is changing the way Democrats target Latino voters

Kamala Harris doesn’t often talk about her Black and South Asian American identity. She also doesn’t talk to Latino voters about their identity.

It’s a major shift in the way Democrats are targeting Latino voters this election. It’s also a rejection of a belief long held by many Democrats that overt appeals to race and progressive immigration policies are essential to winning Latino votes.

But after Democrats lost much of their Latino support over the past decade, Harris is trying to move away from identity politics, in part through the way she’s reaching out to Latino voters in states like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

In those battlegrounds, Harris’ campaign ads targeting both English- and Spanish-speaking Latinos talk about the economy, high drug prices and crime. Harris, in a Spanish-language radio interview that aired earlier this week, emphasized her support for stationing more immigration agents at the border and cracking down on the flow of fentanyl into the U.S.

“The Harris campaign understands what we’ve been saying about Latinos for a long time, which is that we’re not a monolith,” said Matt Tuerk, the first Latino mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania, a predominantly Latino community that was a recent stop on the campaign’s bus tour to highlight abortion rights. “We’re all Americans, too. We have many of the same core values ​​as every American.”

Latino strategists on both sides of the aisle said the strategy reflects the diversity of Harris’ staff, which includes campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez, the granddaughter of labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chávez. They say it also reflects a candidate who understands firsthand what it means to be defined by others based on race or gender. And then there’s the politics: Immigration has been one of the Democrats’ weak points, and Harris has adopted a tough-on-the-border rhetoric to counter the immigration-focused attacks that Donald Trump has made a hallmark of his political campaigns since his first run for president in 2016.

“There’s no question that this campaign is 180 degrees different with Hispanic voters than any other Democratic candidate in history,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who focuses on Latinos and co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “The great irony — and I think it’s a beautiful one — is that it took a black woman to help the Democratic Party break the stranglehold that they had maneuvered themselves into on identity politics.”

The strategists said the campaign’s approach shows a nuanced understanding of the Latino diaspora in the U.S. — which they say has long been missing from Democratic politics — and how to message different facets of it, from Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in Pennsylvania to Mexican Americans in Arizona and Nevada. For example, the campaign recently ran an ad featuring Puerto Rican radio host Victor Martinez, who is from Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, that will air on TV and radio in Spanish, but only in the Philadelphia, Allentown and Reading media markets.

“They care about the diasporas and they’re looking at this from a diaspora strategy, as opposed to a blanket, monolithic strategy that we often hear and that unfortunately is being played out in many different areas,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO. “So I think as time goes on, we’ll see the results of that more refined approach.”

Harris’ shift away from progressive messaging on the border is partly a continuation of President Joe Biden’s approach. After the failure of a bipartisan border security bill in Congress, he angered many progressives with executive actions clamping down on asylum-seeking migrants.

But Harris is even tougher in her hard-line rhetoric about the border. Her campaign speech touts how she “took on transnational criminal organizations” as attorney general of California, a border state, and she talks often about her support for the border security bill that Trump’s Republican allies in Congress have rejected. One of her first ads, “Tougher,” promises to hire “thousands” of additional border agents if elected president.

It’s come at a cost. Some Latino activists on the left are frustrated by Harris’ border rhetoric and don’t believe she’s clearly defined what she plans to do with immigration reform, beyond an “earned path to citizenship.” And they warn it could potentially hurt her at the ballot box.

“The Democratic Party has fallen back into this neoconservative conversation about ‘Immigrants are bad and they bring drugs.’ Right now, there’s very little difference between Democrats and Republicans on immigration, and I think it’s a dramatic misstep for Democrats across the board,” said Leo Murrieta, Nevada executive director of the immigrant rights group Make the Road Action, which has endorsed Harris. “Quite frankly, this rhetoric about the border dampens that excitement. It doesn’t extinguish the flame, but it certainly doesn’t fuel the fire.”

Harris is still struggling to make up ground among Latinos, after Trump made gains among them in the last presidential election. While she has improved significantly from where President Joe Biden stood among Latinos before he dropped out of the race, she still trails Biden’s 2020 numbers, including an Entravision poll released Wednesday that showed Harris leading Trump 55 percent to 33 percent. In 2020, 61 percent of Latino voters cast ballots for Biden, and before that, Democrats did even better among Latinos. Hillary Clinton won 66 percent of the Latino vote in 2016, while Barack Obama won more than 70 percent of the Latino vote in 2012.

Harris does talk about immigration on the campaign trail. And when she does, it’s usually to a Latino audience. During an interview on Spanish-language radio that aired Tuesday, she criticized the former Trump’s family separation policy while promising to “take care of” Dreamers and “provide a path to citizenship for those who have earned it.” And on Wednesday, in a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute in Washington, D.C., she lashed out at Trump for calling for “mass deportations.”

Carlos Odio, co-founder of Equis Research, said it reflects the “more balanced” approach to immigration that Harris is trying to take, which “is about recognizing both the need for order at the border and a humane, practical approach to dealing with people who are already there.”

“(It) contrasts well with Trump’s more bombastic proposals, especially when you’re talking about mass deportations of people who have been working and living here for decades,” Odio said. “Those are incredibly unpopular.”

Odio said there is a “narrow but critical” group of Latin American voters who are “softly choosing one side or the other” but who are “strongly pressured” by the campaigns.

And a Harris aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak candidly about campaign strategy, said Latinos who can be persuaded want to hear more about border security.

“Based on the data that I’ve seen, you still see a pretty high percentage of Latinos who are still getting to know her,” Harris pollster Matt Barreto said. “The longer that campaign goes and she puts her case out there in the Latino community, I would expect that we’ll see a two- to three-point increase every two to three weeks.”

This weekend, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, will be in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley for a Latino-focused rally with actors Anthony Ramos and Liza Colón-Zayas. It’s a continuation of the campaign’s Hispanic Heritage Month events, which also included Chavez Rodriguez, Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) for a super middleweight bout between Canelo Alvarez and Edgar Berlanga in Las Vegas.

Harris’ campaign is spending $3 million on new ads on Spanish-language radio over the next month. And it’s specifically targeting sports programming, where the campaign believes it can best reach some of the unengaged Latino voters, the campaign official said. And the campaign also recently launched a WhatsApp channel, “Latinos con Harris-Walz.”

“The campaign is calling all the time and saying, ‘Where can you go? When can you go? We want to send you out. We want to make sure our deputies are out there,'” said Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.). “For Latinos, it’s all about touch and outreach.”

Still, Harris’ allies in Congress acknowledge that Harris has struggled to strike a balance in winning the Latino vote.

“All of us Latinos want comprehensive immigration reform, but we know that we may have to do it in pieces because it’s hard. That’s why it hasn’t been done for decades. I think you can’t avoid addressing border security head-on. The asylum challenges, we want to make sure that it’s humane and that it’s sustained, but it also has to be orderly,” said Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.). “I think she’s picking up the slack and I think she’s doing a good job.”