How Biden Can Win Over Young Latinos
Roughly every 30 seconds, a Latino in the United States reaches voting age. More than one-fifth of Latinos who are eligible to vote this year would be voting in their first presidential election, and 38 percent of the Latino electorate consists of new voters since 2016. Latino youth are concentrated in the West, where they’re 40 percent of newly eligible voters across the region that includes the battleground states of Arizona and Nevada.
The possibility that Donald Trump could attract a significant share of Latino voters and shave down his margins against President Biden is one of the open questions of this election. But conservative Latino voters have taken up outsize space in the national imagination. The Biden campaign should worry less about a mass defection of Latinos to the MAGA camp than about motivating young Latinos to go to the polls. It is these youths who will determine the fate of the Latino vote. As of the 2020 Census, the median Hispanic in the United States was 30 years old.
On major domestic policy issues, polls show that most young Latinos are aligned with progressives. They believe in abortion rights, gun control and a pathway to citizenship for the longtime undocumented population. They want to stop climate change.
Latino youth are also more likely to belong to groups hurt by Mr. Trump’s policies than other voters. They’re more likely than non-Hispanic white and Black youth to identify as L.G.B.T.Q. and more likely than older generations of Latinos to be the children of immigrants. More than half have undocumented family members or close friends.
For a vast majority of these young people, voting for Mr. Trump would seem to be unthinkable. The question is whether they’ll vote for Mr. Biden, who many seem to see as disappointing and disconnected from their communities. Recently, Mr. Biden appears to be taking young Latinos seriously. His June executive actions to protect undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens from deportation and to facilitate work visas for Dreamers and others were a good start. But his failure to counter Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric during the disastrous presidential debate last Thursday may have erased any advantage he had. If Mr. Biden is to have any hope of winning in November, he must prove to young Latinos that he actually cares about their most vulnerable friends and family members, and that he has the strength to stand up for them.
In Nevada, where Mr. Biden is lagging far behind Mr. Trump, Latino youth could tip the election in Mr. Biden’s favor. Among them is the 19-year-old Berlin Butchereit, a pre-nursing student at the University of Nevada, Reno. The daughter of a single Mexican mother who washes dishes at a casino, she plans to cast her first ever ballot in November for Mr. Biden. She sees him as imperfect but preferable to Mr. Trump, who vows to launch the largest-ever deportation operation, which would fracture and financially devastate millions of primarily Latino families. Ms. Butchereit has undocumented loved ones who’ve lived here for most of their lives. They have no path to legal status because of discriminatory immigration laws. She’s voting to keep them safe from Mr. Trump. She’s also motivated by the cost of health care for ailing friends and relatives.
