Can Latinos Stomach Harris?
Anyone’s game: Right now, the race looks extremely close. Kamala Harris has changed course a bit in the last two weeks, choosing to get herself out there a bit more, but via aggressively normie formats instead of traditional media spots: The View, The Howard Stern Show, the absolutely terrible millennial/Gen Z podcast Call Her Daddy, and possibly the worst of all: sharing a Miller High Life with Stephen Colbert. Harris has a narrow lead in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia; Trump is leading in Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Pew finds that Harris is the favorite of 48 percent of registered voters, while Trump has won over 47 percent. The New York Times notes that her fundraising haul has far outpaced his.
None of this is to say that Harris is a good candidate or that I want to spend a single minute of my short time on God’s green Earth listening to mid-L.A. millennials yas kweening Harris on abortion rights; it’s just to say that she’s performing decently well in this last stretch. But she has one major liability: her inability to win over Latino voters.
In a Univision town hall last night, Harris tried to pitch her border approach and solutions for bringing the cost of living down. Her cheerleaders over at NPR called this “show[ing] empathy with Latino voters” and talked, in fawning terms, about how she “laid out her economic plans—such as expanding the child tax credit and tax breaks for first-time home buyers—sprinkling in her own life experiences as the daughter of a single parent.” Politico was a little more critical, noting that Harris actually didn’t “offer up any specific policies for Dreamers” whose immigration status is tenuous by nature of how they arrived here.
In Nevada, something like one in five voters are Hispanic; in Arizona, it’s more like one in four. Though both states went for Joe Biden last time around, Trump has been quickly gaining support with Latino men under 50, and specifically with third- and even fourth-generation Latino and Hispanic voters. “Support for Democratic presidential candidates among this group has been declining each cycle,” notes Politico. “Biden earned 61 percent of the Latino in 2020, Hillary Clinton carried 66 percent of this demographic in 2016 and Barack Obama won more than 70 percent of it in 2012.” Now, polls show Harris has 54 percent of registered Latino voters’ support compared with Trump’s 40 percent. (I always find the use of such broad categories to be somewhat distasteful, especially when you have a term like Latino that could classify a recent immigrant escaping Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela or a third-generation secular Mexican American, but polling relies on such grouping.)
“The chances of a Trump win in the Electoral College are about even,” writes Nate Silver on his Substack, where he details the sources of some Democrat poll panic this week: dawning recognition that the election is nearing, uncertainty about the situation in the Middle East and how the hurricane recovery efforts will hurt voting, and a fear th
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