In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.
But after Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos over the last decade, Harris is attempting to chart a path away from identity politics, including in the way she’s courting Latino voters in states like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
In those battlegrounds, Harris campaign ads targeted at 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, stressed 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 highlighting abortion rights. “We’re all Americans, too. We have a lot of the same basic values that every American has.”
Latino strategists on both sides of the aisle said the strategy reflects the diversity of Harris’ staff, which includes campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez, who is the granddaughter of the labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chávez. They say it also reflects a candidate who has a first-hand understanding of what it means to be defined by others on the basis of race or gender. And then there’s the politics: Immigration is one of Democrats’ weak points, and Harris has adopted tough-on-the-border rhetoric as a counter to the immigration-focused attacks that Donald Trump has made a hallmark of his political campaigns since his first run for president in 2016.
