With Vice President Harris gaining traction as her party’s likely presidential nominee, Democrats are making efforts to shore up her support with a key voting bloc in Arizona: Latino voters.
Nearly 25% of Arizona voters in 2020 were Latino, a trend that is expected to continue in this year’s presidential election, according to projections from the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.
“A lot of times, the Latino voting bloc has been compared to that sleeping giant,” said Tania Torres, who owns a Phoenix communications firm that specializes in voter engagement. “A lot of people like to make that analogy; I say this giant is side awake and it's been making its presence felt during at least the last three voting cycles.”
The Harris campaign is counting on endorsements from influential public figures as it looks to mobilize those voters, including 94-year-old civil rights leader Dolores Huerta.
“We have to go recruit our compadres, our comadres, our vesinos, our neighbors, our relatives, okay?” said Huerta, who later led the crowd of hundreds in chants of “Si se puede.”
Huerta was joined by several other Latina leaders, including Harris’ campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the granddaughter of labor organizer Cesar Chavez.
Both women cited the Biden-Harris administration’s record supporting unions and policies they say benefit working families.
“I’ve seen who she’s fighting for when she’s in the halls of power … she fights for families like ours,” Chavez Rodriguez said.
Harris supporters say her campaign to reach Latino voters is an extension of the same effort under President Biden.
“Vice President Harris is fighting to make sure that working families have a shot,” said Tucson Mayor Regina Romero, a Harris campaign surrogate who also worked on the “Latinos con Biden-Harris” campaign. “She is pro-public education; she is pro-Medicare; she is pro-Social Security; she is pro women’s reproductive freedoms – and that’s exactly the message that we have to put out.”
But an ABC/Washington Post/Ipsos poll conducted before Biden stepped down from his reelection effort showed him with less support among Latinos than when he first took office.The poll found 49% of Latino voters supported him nationwide. That was still ahead of Trump, but down 10% from 2020.
But Harris also has the opportunity to engage those voters in a way Biden could not, said Luis Acosta-Hererra, an Arizona Democratic consultant and DACA recipient — that’s the federal policy that defers deportation of immigrants brought to the U.S. as children if they meet certain requirements.
“I do think that there is a reinvigorating of that base and of people who maybe just didn't feel like Biden really represented them or or felt like he just couldn't do it,” Acosta-Herrera said.
The Harris campaign says they’ve recruited nearly 2,000 new volunteers in Arizona since Biden dropped out.
Backers also believe Harris’ vocal support for reproductive rights will mobilize voters in Arizona. She’s already visited the state three times this year as Arizonans grappled with the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade and the temporary reinstatement of a near-total abortion ban that dates back to the Civil War.
A 2022 poll from Pew showed 57% of Latinos across the country saying abortion should be legal in most or all cases, and Torres said Harris’ track record on the issue could ingratiate her with Latinas.
And, she said, Latina matriarchs like her can then influence other voters in their families.
“As a Latina myself, I was voting my early ballot this weekend, and I reached out to at least fifty friends and family, reminding them to fill out their ballot,” Torres said. “A lot of those turned into conversations about the candidates on the ballot.”
She added, “Once you get the 'comadre' circuit going, there's no stopping it.”
And Torres said Harris’ age — she’s two decades younger than Joe Biden — is a big part of engaging younger Arizonans.
“You have to remember that Latinos in Arizona are young,” she said. “Their median age is about 29 years old. That's about 10 years younger than the overall Arizona population.”
Critics, meanwhile, believe Harris is vulnerable on another issue important to Latino voters — immigration and the border. A CBS poll from May found that 62% of Hispanic voters in Arizona believed the Biden Administration has been too easy on immigrants crossing the border and only 23% believed the president was handling things correctly.
And Republicans have already released an attack ad calling Harris Biden’s “border czar” after the president put her in charge of efforts to slow migration in 2021.
Rep. Juan Ciscomani, who represents a southern Arizona Congressional district, says his constituents hold both Harris and Biden responsible for the rising cost of living and what he calls a wide open border.
"So when I talked to my Hispanic community …the perception is the same one — the same policies that we were making Joe Biden responsible for are the same ones that Kamala Harris is responsible for," Ciscomani said.
Ciscomani, himself an immigrant from Mexico, says the border and inflation are the top issues for Hispanic families in his district.
Joe Garcia with Chicanos Por La Causa, a Latino nonprofit that provides social services in five states, said the immigration issue hits home for many Latino voters.
“Could be an older brother and sister is a dreamer, but the younger brothers and sisters, they were born here, so they're not,” Garcia said. “Their parents may be documented, maybe not. But the point is, to the Latino community, immigration issues are personal and real.”
He spoke with Harris earlier this year when she visited Phoenix. He warned her against thinking the 2.3 million Latinos in Arizona all share the same views about the country’s border and immigration policies.
“I advised her not to fall into the trap of focusing only on the border,” he said. “The border crisis was there before she came. The border crisis will be there after she comes, because the truth is the border crisis is there because we've never done anything to fix it.
But the Biden administration’s handling of immigration has been criticized by both parties in the state.
Even Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs said Biden needed to do more to secure the border after an influx of migrants forced the closure of a port of entry in southern Arizona late last year. But that didn’t stop her from endorsing Biden, and later Harris, in this year’s election.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been updated to correct the number of times Harris visited Arizona this year.
