One of the biggest challenges that President Joe Biden and his campaign will face as they embark on his fourth presidential campaign has been obvious for years: rebuilding support from Latino voters. Republican gains in Latino communities have been a major political story, a growing insecurity for Democratic politicians and donors, and a big liability for the Biden administration.
In 2020, Donald Trump did 8 percentage points better with Latino voters than he did in 2016, winning nearly 40 percent of Latino voters nationally. Trump made inroads in heavily Latino regions of southern Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas — all while Republicans flipped House seats in districts with large Latino populations from California to Florida. Republicans retained most of this Latino support in the 2022 midterms, holding about 40 percent of their national popular vote. And polling shows most of this support holding steady.
Those GOP gains stunned much of the political world. But, for many Democrats, the mistakes were clear. In 2020, the Biden campaign started their major Latino outreach operations far too late, and were limited early on by the pandemic and a lack of funds, which hurt their ability to invest in all the places they needed. As a result, Democrats let Trump gain the upper hand with his economic messaging.
But speaking to Latino civil rights leaders and activists now, I got a sense of anxious optimism about how Biden’s campaign, and Democratic candidates in general, will approach their Latino voter operations this year. The recent hire of Julie Chávez Rodríguez as Biden’s 2024 campaign manager is one sign that the Biden campaign is learning from 2020. Chávez Rodríguez is a White House aide, former Kamala Harris and Biden 2020 campaign staffer, and granddaughter of the labor icon Cesar Chavez, and she is largely credited for reviving the 2020 campaign’s Latino voter efforts.
“In 2020 and 2022, Latinos were critical to Democratic wins,…
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