Latinos were the largest minority group voting
in the 2020 election for the first time ever.
In some states, they now make up more than 30%
of eligible voters.
The demographic played a key role
in a handful of battleground states.
In Florida, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Cuban Americans
helped secure the state for Donald Trump,
while in Arizona, Mexican Americans helped turn
the state blue for only the second time since 1948.
These results made many realize something
that has always been obvious for those in the community.
Latinos are not a monolith.
We don't even eat the same type of rice.
So candidates have a tendency
to oversimplify the Latino vote.
This pandemic and economic collapse
has hit the Hispanic communities particularly hard.
Over the last four years, I've been delivering
for Hispanic Americans like never before.
And the focus on Latino voters in certain swing states
has erased them from the picture in other areas
where their votes could make a real difference.
The number of eligible Latino voters
in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan,
is greater than the margin of victory in those states.
So I think candidates should learn
how to talk to Latino communities in all of these places.
Here's how the Latino vote influenced
the 2020 presidential election.
On the one hand, there's this idea told mainly
by Democrats that a record number of Latinos turned out
to help Joe Biden win in closely contested states
like Arizona and Nevada.
And then on the other side, there's a narrative that
even in places like Nevada and Wisconsin,
there was a notable move toward Donald Trump.
You can see those two narratives play out
even within one location.
For example, take Maricopa County, Arizona,
which makes up 60% of the state's vote.
Nearly a third of its residents are Latino,
mostly of Mexican origin.
Even though Biden won among Latinos in the state,
more Latinos also came out to support Trump than in 2016.
You don't get the victory that Biden has
without the victories that had been coming in 2018, 2016,
and the organizing since 2010.
And it's been that consistent investment
in our community has led to this win.
People like Tomas Robles have been trying
to flip the state blue since 2010.
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
That's when Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070,
known as the "show me your papers" law.
It let the police detain anyone they suspected
of being an undocumented immigrant for any reason.
This bill was designed to target a particular community,
and that was mainly the Latinx community.
Grassroots organizations like Tomas'
were crucial in securing Biden's Arizona victory
because the Biden campaign didn't kick-start
its Latino efforts until the summer,
just months before the election.
Latino political strategists have long said
that you can't start recruiting a community weeks
or months before a campaign and expect their support.
Biden saw the consequences of that
in Florida's Miami-Dade County, which is 70% Latino.
Trump narrowed his margin of defeat by 23 points since 2016.
After losing the county to Clinton,
Trump targeted his messaging to Miami-Dade Latinos,
more than half of whom are Cuban,
by focusing on anti-communism.
I think it's generally assumed that
that anti-socialism, anti-communism narrative
appealed exclusively to Cuban exiles,
Nicaraguans, Venezuelans,
but actually I think all Latino national groups,
conservatives in particular, have their own version
of anti-socialism and anti-communism.
Conservatives like Araceli Villanueva,
a Mexican American who runs the Miami-Dade chapter
of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly.
We are trying to rescue
the American dream that we came for.
We know what the socialist governments do to the countries,
and we don't want this to happen in the country
that we adopted as our own.
Araceli was invited to the White House eight times
during Trump's presidency.
With the RNHA, she's attended rallies, workshops,
and constitutional rights and voter registration drives.
She's encouraged new Latino voters to focus on values
when choosing a political party.
They identify themselves with the Republican values:
religious freedom, faith, family, pro-life.
We share the same values.
So I told them, you are Republicans.
And they were amazed at the revelation,
because they never thought about it.
Biden still narrowly beat Trump in Miami-Dade,
but he lost enough Latino support there to lose the state.
And while the Biden campaign's late start
with Latino outreach certainly didn't help,
there's a deeply rooted history of Republican appeal
to Latinos that can't be ignored.
This idea that Latino voters are just out there waiting
for Democrats to talk to them
really underestimates the sincere political beliefs
and political agency of Latino Republicans.
Trump's messaging on the economy, religious liberty,
and law and order had broad appeal in Miami.
And that wasn't the exception.
In places like Texas, weakening support among Latinos
in historically Democratic counties hurt Biden's chances
of victory.
Latinos for Trump!
For example, in the southern part of the state,
counties like Starr and Zapata
that are over 90% Latino moved noticeably to the right.
It's a shift that mirrors the rural-urban divide
among white voters,
and one that suggests that geography may not be the best way
to understand Latino support.
The question has been asked, for example,
about South Texas,
where Latinos are much more like white voters
in Iowa and Nebraska in the Rio Grande Valley
than like Latinos in Harris County and Houston.
You can see people like Marco Rubio taking to Twitter,
saying that what we saw in South Florida, in South Texas,
is a look at the Republican Party of the future,
that's going to be a nonwhite party
for working-class Americans.
Whether or not be these patterns stick,
Cadava says that both parties need to see Latinos
as the diverse voting bloc they are
and take them into account across the map.
Many thousands of dairy farmers in Wisconsin are Latinos.
It's just a matter of including Latinos as part of the story
in all of the states where they live.
Autoworkers of Detroit or the disgruntled Rust Belt worker
in the Midwest, or the farmer in Iowa.
We just need to complicate our understanding
of American voters and include Latinos in the story
of American voters, wherever they live.