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Tag: latino voter

  • Commentary: Democrats are on a roll. So why not fight one another?

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    Democrats are starting the new year on a high.

    A series of 2025 victories, in red and blue states alike, was marked by a striking improvement over the party’s 2024 showing. That over-performance, to use the political term of art, means candidates — including even some who lost — received a significantly higher percentage of the vote than presidential candidate Kamala Harris managed.

    That’s a strong signal ahead of the midterm election, suggesting Democratic partisans are energized, a key ingredient in any successful campaign, and the party is winning support among independents and perhaps even a few disaffected Republicans.

    If history is a guide and the uneven economy a portent, Democrats will very likely seize control of the House in November, picking up at least the three seats needed to erase the GOP’s bare majority. The Senate looks to be a longer — though not impossible — reach, given the Republican lean of the states being contested.

    In short, Democrats are in much better shape than all the black crepe and existential ideations suggested a year ago.

    Yes, the party suffered a soul-crushing defeat in the presidential race. But 2024 was never the disaster some made it out to be. Democrats gained two House seats and held their own in most contests apart from the fight for the Senate, where several Republican states reverted to form and ousted the chamber’s few remaining Democratic holdouts.

    Still, Democrats being Democrats, all is not happiness and light in the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Clinton and Obama.

    Campaigning to become the party’s chairman, Ken Martin last winter promised to conduct a thorough review of the 2024 election and to make its findings public, as a step toward redressing Democrats’ mistakes and bolstering the party going forward.

    ”What we need to do right now is really start to get a handle around what happened,” he told reporters before his election.

    Now Martin has decided to bury that autopsy report.

    “Here’s our North Star: Does this help us win?” he said in a mid-December statement announcing his turnabout and the study’s unceremonious interment. “If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”

    There is certainly no shortage of 2024 election analyses for the asking. The sifting of rubble, pointing of fingers and laying of blame began an eye blink after Donald Trump was declared the winner.

    There are prescriptions from the moderate and progressive wings of the party — suggesting, naturally, that Democrats absolutely must move their direction to stand any chance of ever winning again. There are diagnoses from a welter of 2028 presidential hopefuls, declared and undeclared, offering themselves as both seer and Democratic savior.

    The report Martin commissioned was, however, supposed to be the definitive word from the party, offering both a clear-eyed look back and a clarion way forward.

    “We know that we lost ground with Latino voters,” he said in those searching days before he became party chairman. “We know we lost ground with women and younger voters and, of course, working-class voters. We don’t know the how and why yet.”

    As part of the investigation, more than 300 Democrats were interviewed in each of the 50 states. But there was good reason to doubt the integrity of the report, even before Martin pulled out his shovel and started digging.

    According to the New York Times and others, there was no plan to examine President Biden’s headstrong decision to seek reelection despite his advanced age and no intention to second-guess any of the strategic decisions Harris made in her hurry-up campaign.

    Which is like setting out to solve a murder by ignoring the weapon used and skipping past the cause of death.

    Curious, indeed.

    Still, there was predictable outrage when Martin went back on his promise.

    “This is a very bad decision that reeks of the caution and complacency that brought us to this moment,” Dan Pfeiffer, an alumnus of the Obama White House, posted on social media.

    “The people who volunteered, donated and voted deserve to know what went wrong,” Jamal Simmons, a former Harris vice presidential advisor, told the Hill newspaper. “The DNC should tell them.”

    In 2013, Republicans commissioned a similar after-action assessment following Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama. It was scathing in its blunt-force commentary.

    The 98-page report said a smug, uncaring, ideologically rigid party was turning off voters with stale policies that had changed little in decades and was unhelpfully projecting an image that alienated minorities and young voters.

    Among its recommendation, the postmortem called on the party to develop “a more welcoming brand of conservatism” and suggested an extensive set of “inclusion” proposals for minority groups, including Latinos, Asians and African Americans. (DEI, anyone?)

    “Unless changes are made,” the report concluded, “it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.”

    Trump, of course, won the White House three years later doing precisely none of what the report recommended.

    Which suggests the Democratic autopsy, buried or otherwise, is not likely to matter a whole lot when voters go to the polls. (It’s the affordability, stupid.)

    That said, Martin should have released the appraisal and not just because of the time and effort invested. There was already Democratic hostility toward the chairman, particularly among donors unhappy with his leadership and performance, and his entombing of the autopsy report won’t help.

    Martin gave his word, and breaking it is a needless distraction and blemish on the party.

    Besides, a bit of thoughtful self-reflection is never a bad thing. It’s hard to look forward when you’ve got your head stuck in the sand.

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    Mark Z. Barabak

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  • Californians sharply divided along partisan lines about immigration raids, poll finds

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    California voters are sharply divided along partisan lines over the Trump administration’s immigration raids this year in Los Angeles and across the nation, according to a new poll.

    Just over half of the state’s registered voters oppose federal efforts to reduce undocumented immigration, and 61% are against deporting everyone in the nation who doesn’t have legal status, according to a recent poll by UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab released to The Times on Wednesday.

    But there is an acute difference in opinions based on political leanings.

    Nearly 80% of Democrats oppose reducing the number of people entering the United States illegally, and 90% are against deporting everyone in the country who is undocumented, according to the poll. Among Republicans, 5% are against reducing the entries and 10% don’t believe all undocumented immigrants should be forced to leave.

    “The big thing that we find, not surprisingly, is that Democrats and Republicans look really different,” said political scientist Amy Lerman, director of UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab, who studies race, public opinion and political behavior. “On these perspectives, they fall pretty clearly along party lines. While there’s some variation within the parties by things like age and race, really, the big divide is between Democrats and Republicans.”

    While there were some differences based on gender, age, income, geography and race, the results largely mirrored the partisan divide in the state, Lerman said.

    One remarkable finding was that nearly a quarter of survey respondents personally knew or were acquainted with someone in their family or friend groups directly affected by the deportation efforts, Lerman said.

    “That’s a really substantial proportion,” she said. “Similarly, the extent to which we see people reporting that people in their communities are concerned enough about deportation efforts that they’re not sending their kids to school, not shopping in local stores, not going to work,” not seeking medical care or attending church services.

    The poll surveyed a sample of the state’s registered voters and did not include the sentiments of the most affected communities — unregistered voters or those who are ineligible to cast ballots because they are not citizens.

    A little more than 23 million of California’s 39.5 million residents were registered to vote as of late October, according to the secretary of state’s office.

    “So if we think about the California population generally, this is a really significant underestimate of the effects, even though we’re seeing really substantial effects on communities,” she said.

    Earlier this year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a series of raids in Los Angeles and surrounding communities that spiked in June, creating both fear and outrage in Latino communities. Despite opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other elected Democrats, the Trump administration also deployed the National Guard to the streets of the nation’s second-largest city to, federal officials said, protect federal immigration officials.

    The months since have been chaotic, with masked, armed agents randomly pulling people — most of whom are Latino — off the streets and out of their workplaces and sending many to detention facilities, where some have died. Some deportees were flown to an El Salvador prison. Multiple lawsuits have been filed by state officials and civil rights groups.

    In one notable local case, a federal district judge issued a ruling temporarily blocking federal agents from using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate immigration arrests in the Los Angeles area. The Supreme Court granted an emergency appeal and lifted that order, while the case moves forward.

    More than 7,100 undocumented immigrants have been arrested in the Los Angeles area by federal authorities since June 6, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

    On Monday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), Bass and other elected officials hosted a congressional hearing on the impact of immigration raids that have taken place across the country. Garcia, the top Democrat on the House’s oversight committee, also announced the creation of a tracker to document misconduct and abuse during ICE raids.

    While Republican voters largely aligned with Trump’s actions on deportations, 16% said that they believed that the deportations will worsen the state’s economy.

    Lerman said the university planned to study whether these numbers changed as the impacts on the economy are felt more greatly.

    “If it continues to affect people, particularly, as we see really high rates of effects on the workforce, so construction, agriculture, all of the places where we’re as an economy really reliant [on immigrant labor], I can imagine some of these starting to shift even among Republicans,” she said.

    Among Latinos, whose support of Trump grew in the 2024 election, there are multiple indications of growing dissatisfaction with the president, according to separate national polls.

    Nearly eight in 10 Latinos said Trump’s policies have harmed their community, compared to 69% in 2019 during his first term, according to a national poll of adults in the United States released by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center on Monday. About 71% said the administration’s deportation efforts had gone too far, an increase from 56% in March. And it was the first time in the two decades that Pew has conducted its survey of Latino voters that the number of Latinos who said their standing in the United States had worsened increased, with more than two-thirds expressing the sentiment.

    Another poll released earlier this month by Somos Votantes, a liberal group that urges Latino voters to support Democratic candidates, found that one-third of Latino voters who previously supported Trump rue their decision, according to a national poll.

    Small business owner Brian Gavidia is among the Latino voters who supported Trump in November because of financial struggles.

    “I was tired of struggling, I was tired of seeing my friends closing businesses,” the 30-year-old said. “When [President] Biden ran again I’m like, ‘I’m not going to vote for the same four years we just had’ … I was sad and I was heartbroken that our economy was failing and that’s the reason why I went that way.”

    The East L.A. native, the son of immigrants from Colombia and El Salvador, said he wasn’t concerned about Trump’s immigration policies because the president promised to deport the “worst of the worst.”

    He grew disgusted watching the raids that unfolded in Los Angeles earlier this year.

    “They’re taking fruit vendors, day laborers, that’s the worst of the worst to you?” he remembered thinking.

    Over a lunch of asada tortas and horchata in East L.A., Gavidia recounted being detained by Border Patrol agents in June while working at a Montebello tow yard. Agents shoved him against a metal gate, demanding to know what hospital he was born at after he said he was an American citizen, according to video of the incident.

    After reviewing his ID, the agents eventually let Gavidia go. The Department of Homeland Security later claimed that Gavidia was detained for investigation for interference and released after being confirmed to be a U.S. citizen with no outstanding warrants. He is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and immigrant advocacy groups alleging racial profiling during immigration raids.

    “At that moment, I was the criminal, at that moment I was the worst of the worst, which is crazy because I went to go see who they were getting — the worst of the worst like they said they were going to get,” Gavidia said. “But turns out when I got there, I was the worst of the worst.”

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    Seema Mehta, Brittny Mejia

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  • Trump made inroads with Latino voters. The GOP is losing them ahead of the midterms

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    WASHINGTON — President Trump made historic gains with Latinos when he won reelection last year, boosting Republicans’ confidence that their economic message was helping them make inroads with a group of voters who had long leaned toward Democrats.

    But in this week’s election, Democrats in key states were able to disrupt that rightward shift by gaining back Latino support, exit polls showed.

    In New Jersey and Virginia, the Democrats running for governor made gains in counties with large Latino populations, and overall won two-thirds of the Latino vote in their states, according to an NBC News poll.

    And in California, a CNN exit poll showed about 70% of Latinos voting in favor of Proposition 50, a Democratic redistricting initiative designed to counter Trump’s plans to reshape congressional maps in an effort to keep GOP control of the House.

    The results mark the first concrete example at the ballot box of Latino voters turning away from the GOP — a shift foreshadowed by recent polling as their concerns about the economy and immigration raids have grown.

    Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill celebrates with supporters after being elected New Jersey governor.

    (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

    If the trend continues, it could spell trouble for Republicans in next year’s midterm elections, said Gary Segura, a professor of public policy, political science and Chicana/o studies at UCLA. This could be especially true in California and Texas, where both parties are banking on Latino voters to help them pick up seats in the House, Segura said.

    “A year is a long time in politics, but certainly the vote on Prop. 50 is a very, very good sign for the Democrats’ ability to pick up the newly drawn congressional districts,” Segura said. “I think Latino voters will be really instrumental in the outcome.”

    Democrats, meanwhile, are feeling optimistic that their warnings about Trump’s immigration crackdown and a bad economy are resonating with Latinos.

    Republicans are wondering to what degree the party can maintain support among Latinos without Trump on the ticket. In 2024, Trump won roughly 48% of the Latino vote nationally — a record for any Republican presidential candidate.

    Some Republicans saw this week’s trends among Latino voters as a “wakeup call.”

    “The Hispanic vote is not guaranteed. Hispanics married President Donald Trump but are only dating the GOP,” Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida said in a social media video the day after the election. “I’ve been warning it: If the GOP does not deliver, we will lose the Hispanic vote all over the country.”

    Economic issues a main driver

    Last year Trump was able to leverage widespread frustration with the economy to win the support of Latinos. He promised to create jobs and lower the costs of living.

    But polling shows that a majority of Latino voters now disapprove of how Trump and the Republicans in control of Congress are handling the economy. Half of Latinos said they expected Trump’s economic policies to leave them worse off a year from now in a Unidos poll released last week.

    In New Jersey, that sentiment was exemplified by voters like Rumaldo Gomez. He told MSNBC he voted for Trump last year but this week went for for the Democratic candidate for governor, Rep. Mikie Sherrill.

    “Now, I look at Trump different,” Gomez said. “The economy does not look good.”

    Gomez added he is “very sad” about immigration raids led by the Trump administration that have split up hardworking families.

    While Latino voters fear being affected by immigration enforcement actions, polling suggests they are more concerned about cost of living, jobs and housing. The Unidos poll showed immigration ranking fifth on the list of concerns.

    In New Jersey and Virginia, Democrats’ double-digit victories were built on promises to reduce the cost of living, while blaming Trump for their economic pain.

    Marcus Robinson, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said Democrats “expanded margins and flipped key counties by earning back Latino voters who know Trump’s economy leaves them behind.”

    “These results show that Latino communities want progress, not a return to chaos and broken promises,” he said.

    Republicans see a different Trump issue

    GOP strategist Matt Terrill, who was chief of staff for then-Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said the election results are not a referendum on Trump.

    Latino voters swung left because Trump wasn’t on the ballot, he said.

    Last year “it wasn’t Latino voters turning out for the Republican party, it was Latino voters turning out for President Trump,” he said. “Like him or not, he’s able to fire up voters that the Republican party traditionally does not get.”

    With Trump barred by the Constitution from running for a third term, Republicans are left to wonder if they can get the Latino vote back when he is not on the ballot. Terrill believes Republicans need to hammer on the issue of affordability as a top priority.

    Mike Madrid, a “never Trump” Republican and former political director of the California Republican Party, has a different theory.

    “They’re abandoning both parties,” Madrid said of Latinos. “They abandoned the Republican party for the same reasons they abandoned the Democratic party in November: not addressing economic concerns.”

    The economy has long been the top concern for Latinos, Madrid said, yet both parties continue to frame the Latino political agenda around immigration.

    “Latinos aren’t voting for Democrats or Republicans — they’re voting against Democrats and against Republicans,” Madrid said. “It’s a very big difference. The partisans are all looking at us as if we’re this peculiar exotic little creature.”

    The work ahead

    Democrat Abigail Spanberger was elected governor in Virginia in part because of big gains in Latino-heavy communities. One of the biggest gains was in Manassas Park, where more than 40% of residents are Latino. She won the city by 42 points, doubling the Democrats’ performance there in last year’s election.

    The shift toward Democrats happened because Latinos believed Trump when he promised to bring down high costs of living and that he would only go after violent criminals in immigration raids, said Democratic strategist Maria Cardona, who worked with Spanberger’s campaign on outreach to Spanish-language media.

    Instead, she argued, Trump betrayed them.

    Cardona said Medicaid cuts under Trump’s massive spending package this year, along with the reduction of supplemental nutrition assistance amid the government shutdown, have Latinos families panicking.

    “What Republicans misguidedly and mistakenly thought was a realignment of Latino voters just turned out to be a blip,” she said. “Latinos should never be considered a base vote.”

    Political scientists caution that the election outcomes this week are not necessarily indicative of how races will play out a year from now.

    “It’s just one election, but certainly the seeds have been planted for strong Latino Democratic turnouts in 2026,” said Brad Jones, a political science professor at UC Davis.

    Now, both parties need to explain how they expect to carry out their promises if elected.

    “They can’t sit on their laurels and say, ‘well surely the Latinos are coming back because the economy is bad and immigration enforcement is bad,’” Jones said. “The job of the Democratic party is now to reach out to Latino voters in ways that are more than just symbolic.”

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    Ana Ceballos, Andrea Castillo

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  • Outrage against Univision grows after Trump interview

    Outrage against Univision grows after Trump interview

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    Univision has found itself at the center of a growing controversy after a recent interview with former President Trump that critics have blasted as too friendly.

    The interview that aired Nov. 9 was noticeably warm, and Trump received little pushback as he gave false or misleading statements on border security and immigration policies he instituted as president.

    Backlash from certain corners of the Latino community was swift, including calls for more balanced reporting and an outright boycott of the television network ahead of the 2024 election.

    Latinos are considered a crucial voting bloc — and largely up for grabs — in next year’s election, likely to be a rematch between Trump and President Biden. Although Latino voters have historically favored Democrats, the Republican Party in recent years has made significant progress in courting their votes.

    The exclusive interview with Trump therefore raised significant alarms within the Democratic Party and its allies that the leading Republican candidate was making unchecked claims to important swing voters.

    Actor John Leguizamo posted a video to his 1 million Instagram followers Thursday criticizing the Spanish-language media company for “softballing Trump” and reportedly canceling ads for Biden. He said the television network has become “MAGA-vision.”

    He implored fellow entertainers, athletes, activists and politicians to join him in boycotting the network until it reinstated “parity, and equality and equity” between the presidential candidates. The television network has also requested an interview with Biden, according to the Washington Post.

    The more-than-hourlong interview with Trump was conducted by Enrique Acevedo, an anchor from Mexican network Televisa who is not a Univision journalist. The two media groups merged last year. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly helped organize the interview.

    “All you have to do is look at the owners of Univision,” Trump said in the first few minutes of the interview when asked about Latino voters and recent polls showing him defeating Biden in 2024. “They’re unbelievable entrepreneurial people, and they like me.”

    “They want to see security,” Trump added. “They want to have a border.”

    During the interview, Trump made questionable claims that the partial wall built along the southern border was made possible by Mexico providing thousands of soldiers “free of charge,” and that former President Obama laid the groundwork for the controversial policy at the border to deter illegal crossings that became known as the family-separation crisis. Acevedo did not push back on either claim.

    “It wasn’t just a friendly interview. It was an embarrassing 1-hour puff-piece with lots of smiles and no pushback with a guy who relished in attacking, belittling and otherizing Latinos and Latin American immigrants,” Ana Navarro-Cárdenas, a prominent Nicaraguan American political strategist and commentator, said on the platform X, the company formerly known as Twitter.

    León Krauze, a veteran news anchor for Univision, has since resigned from the network. He did not provide a reason for his departure.

    State Sen. Susan Rubio (D-Baldwin Park), a member of the California Latino Legislative Caucus who is running for Congress, said she knew many other Latino leaders who were “personally upset” about the interview.

    Rubio said she was “appalled” at how the former president “was allowed to just continue to spew lies and go unchecked” during the conversation. She called the interview “an insult to our entire Latino community.”

    The network is “absolutely influential” in households like hers, she said, describing it as a news source she and her Spanish-speaking parents view as trusted and unbiased.

    “Our community relies on this information to be truthful. They rely on this source that has been trusted by the Latino community for many, many generations,” she said. “They should have done a better job of making sure that our community is not lied to.”

    The Congressional Hispanic Caucus plans to send a letter to the television network requesting a meeting with its chief executive, Wade Davis, and calling for stronger guardrails against disinformation, according to a draft copy of the letter reviewed by The Times.

    More than 70 organizations — including prominent Latino groups such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, America’s Voice and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights — signed an open letter to Davis and other TelevisaUnivision executives, sharply criticizing the interview.

    The letter, first reported by the Post, asks that the network “conduct a thorough internal review, take corrective measures, and reaffirm its commitment to unbiased reporting and to keeping the Latino community informed and up-to-date with facts and truth,” according to a copy reviewed by The Times.

    The controversy is more complicated than what it seems, said Mike Madrid, a GOP political consultant who has a forthcoming book called “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Shaping Our Democracy.”

    Madrid, who is a vocal critic of Trump, said the objections to the interview are reflective of how the Democratic Party and other left-leaning organizations have taken Latino voters for granted — and relied on the television network to promote their candidates and policies for decades.

    Since the late 1980s, Democrats have banked on Latino voters to win elections, Madrid said. But over the last decade, Democrats have begun “hemorrhaging” second- and third-generation Latino voters who are U.S.-born and English-dominant speakers.

    Madrid doesn’t dispute that the interview with Trump may have been biased or too cozy, but he said it demonstrates the media company’s shift toward the middle and, therefore, a new Latino audience.

    “Where were they for the past 30 years when the Democratic Party was getting softball interviews? The Democrats have taken this base vote for granted. They assumed it was there and Univision would always be in their corner, would always be championing them and advocating for their candidates and policies,” he said. “When you’ve been the beneficiary of media bias, objectivity sounds like betrayal. That’s what’s going on.”

    Instead of promoting a boycott of the network, which Madrid called “absolute madness,” Democrats should adjust their strategy and start courting Latino voters on a variety of issues, such as the economy and jobs, rather than just immigration.

    “The Democrats have to figure this out very quick that going to war is not in their best interest,” he said. “They are going to have to learn to fight for this vote, when they haven’t for decades. … And they have less than a year to figure this out.”

    Times staff writer Stephen Battaglio contributed to this report.

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    Hannah Wiley, Julia Wick

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