Latinx Voters, Projected to Be the Largest Minority Voting Bloc, Could Help Determine the 2020 Presidential Election

"Democrats will not survive without Latino voters.”
Image a yellow sign with red lettering posted on a wooden pole the sign reads VOTE AQUÍ HOY
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Julián Casto may have dropped out of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, but that doesn’t mean he won’t continue to have an impact on the race. The former San Antonio mayor and Housing and Urban Development secretary made big splashes with a campaign that helped shift the conversation on immigration reform.

Now it seems Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, one of 2020’s top Democratic contenders, will benefit from Castro’s game-changing potential. He endorsed her on January 6, and the duo appeared at a rally together in Brooklyn the following day, where Castro laid out why he supports Warren.

Castro was the only Latinx candidate in a primary where a historically diverse field has winnowed, with white candidates running at the front of the pack. While he was often policy-focused on the campaign, Castro also drew on his personal story as the grandson of an immigrant.

He invoked his family’s history in a video endorsing Warren released a day ahead of Tuesday’s rally, speaking about the powerful women who came before him, like his grandmother, a Mexican immigrant, and his mother, a single mom who raised Castro and his twin brother, Joaquin. The video showed Castro and Warren having a kitchen table conversation about selfie lines and the people power of Warren’s 2020 campaign.

To help contextualize the significance of Castro’s campaign, Teen Vogue spoke with Stephanie Valencia, cofounder and president of the Latinx voter research organization Equis Labs, and Representative Norma Torres (D-CA), a third-term congresswoman and immigrant from Guatemala.

“Julián Castro brought out an issue that no one was really talking about,” Torres said. “And that's criminalizing the border crossing for people that are seeking asylum.”

Torres is uncertain of the impact Castro’s endorsement could have on Warren’s campaign. Valencia thinks the endorsement is a “big one” given Castro’s envelope-pushing campaign on progressive issues, as she believes Warren “has a lot of work to do to introduce herself to the Latinx community.”

The Democratic Party has long drawn support from a broad coalition of minority voters, and 2020 looks to be no different. A long-overdue conversation is finally playing out about the importance of black voters — and especially black women — to the Democratic Party. Castro himself has been one of the most outspoken critics of how the shrinking Democratic field has grown whiter; alongside Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), he raised the point after Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) dropped out of the race in December.

Now Latinx advocates hope to elevate the conversation about their community’s voters as well, and with good reason: The Pew Research Center has projected that Latinx votes will surpass black voters as the largest group of minority voters in the 2020 election, with an estimated 32 million eligible Latinx voters.

“What I think is even almost more exciting is that the role that Latinas and young Latinas, specifically, have an opportunity to play is really, really important,” Valencia told Teen Vogue. “I think that Latinas could be the game changer in this election. We see that they are more progressive; they are more motivated to participate. We need to give them every single reason to turn out.”

Census Bureau survey data found that Latinx turnout in 2016 wasn’t that different from prior years, but Latinx turnout in the 2018 midterms was 40.4% — a 50% increase over the 2014 midterms. There are still challenges to boosting that number, though.

“We like to call Texas a nonvoting state because people, just for whatever reason, aren't participating,” Valencia said. “Some of that has to do with voter registration laws and the process being pretty complicated to register to vote. But it also has to do with candidates, and I think that's what Beto [O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate run] showed us.... When you have a very good, strong, aspirational, inspirational candidate at the top of the ticket, that really does matter to get people excited.”

There are barriers beyond voter registration and lackluster candidates, Valencia explained, saying young men of color’s turnout could be related to “systems of oppression that have left them feeling like they can't trust anything.”

The combination of Latinx voters making up a larger share of the electorate and turning out in higher numbers could have a huge impact in 2020, especially in the many states where the Latinx population is rising. In 2010, census data found the Latinx population more than doubling in some states compared to 2000. Nationally, the trend lines are spiking sharply upward (though growing slower than last decade) for Latinx people both in terms of sheer population and as a percentage of the U.S. population.

Latinx people already make up big chunks of several states’ Census Bureau population estimates. A handful of states that went for Trump in 2016 have sizable shares of estimated Latinx populations: Arizona (31.6% Latinx), Florida (26.1% Latinx), and Texas (39.6% Latinx), which account for a combined 78 Electoral College votes.

“[Texas and Florida] also stand to both [add] additional congressional seats and electoral votes,” Valencia explained before warning that despite this rapid population growth, Democrats should not consider the individuals and communities that comprise these figures to be a monolith.

“The Latinx community in a place like Florida is very different than the Latinx community in a place like Texas,” she said. “Culturally, there are different nuances between the Mexican-American community who've probably grown up near or around the border and border issues [and] a Puerto Rican, Cuban, more South American community in Florida that has a very different experience and view in the world.”

Avoiding monolithic thinking has to extend to age, too, Torres said. She said she’s seen candidates like Sanders and Warren appeal to younger Latinx voters with their economic platforms, but she's worried that older members of the community might be disengaged from electoral politics.

“There's the older American Latino that has been here and has seen year after year, election after election, their concerns ignored,” Torres explained. “Now they're saying to us, 'Look, there's a reason why we stay home. If you're not going to reach out to us now in this political race against a president who has treated people of color so inhumanely, when are we going to get it?'”

If Democrats hope to turn Latinx population trends in their favor, they will have to win over a demographic that hasn’t been as overwhelmingly supportive of their party as black voters have. Looking at estimates from the 2016 election, black voters went for Clinton by ratios of 10 to 1 or higher. Latinx voters' ratio in Clinton’s favor was closer to 2 to 1. (Still quite a contrast compared to white voters, who went for Trump outright.)

“Understanding and investing in understanding the Latinx community is critically important, not just for 2020 and beating Trump but building long-term progressive power,” Valencia told Teen Vogue. “At the end of the day, this is not an issue that we can just afford to think about for 2020 given the trajectory of the community. It is an issue that we need to figure out and understand for the long term because Democrats will not survive without Latino voters.”

Torres, a Democrat who went from city councilor to congresswoman and has won three straight elections by big margins to be the only Central American serving in Congress, had some insights on how she believes Democrats can win over Latinx voters in what she expects will be a very tight presidential race. She worries that immigration isn’t getting the prioritization it deserves and points to economic and environmental issues (like minimum wage and water quality) as other areas important to the community. Overall, she expressed a desire for Latinx communities to be included in policy conversations.

“When is it going to be the time for us to invite Latinos to the table?” Torres asked. “I'm still waiting.”

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