Transcript of Understanding the Latino Vote

Usually, it's not a good idea to get into the prediction business when it comes to presidential elections. But with just 37 days to go, there are a few things we can be pretty sure about. One, we should all be prepared not to have a projected winner on election night. Rules in certain states about when officials can start processing mail-in ballots could really delay that call. Two, it appears this is going to be extremely close. Just take our most recent CNN poll from earlier this week.

Among likely voters nationwide, 48% say they support Harris, 47% say they support Trump. That's within the three percentage point margin of error. So the two are virtually tied.

But as you dig deeper, you'll find some nuance in the numbers. For example, 60% of Harris supporters say they are voting for her, then against Trump. There's some fresh enthusiasm there. But Harris still trails Trump on issues like the economy and immigration. Who do you trust to handle the issue better?

49% say Trump, 35% Harris. That's a 14 percentage point gap there.

And While polls show a majority of Latino voters still plan to vote for Harris, remember, Trump made gains with that group in 2020. So the question is, will that trend continue? Today, the nuances of the growing Latino vote, why Democrats are rethinking how they target the population, plus how community dynamics and the rhythms of reggaeton may influence the outcome. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Bryant.

And two amazing Puerto Rican musical legends, they're legends just Kylis and Unwell. Do you know who they are? Do you know who the hell they are?

Come up here just fast. When former President Donald Trump brought up those two reggaeton stars on stage at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania last month, the way he introduced them, raised some eyebrows in the Latino community. But the way he introduced an even bigger musician a few weeks later in Las Vegas was even more awkward.

Latin music Superstar, Nicki Jam. Do you know Nicki? She's hot. Where is Nicki? Where is Nicki?

That's because the she, Trump was referring to, is actually a he.

Oh, look. Come here. I'm glad he came up.

It's an honor to me to meet you, Mr. President. It really was a slap in the face.

This is Catalina Eccleston. She goes by Gata. She's a reguetone historian and creator of the platform Reguetone Conla Gata. She says it was a huge deal for Nicki Jam to embrace Trump because Jam in the past had spoken out in support of Daka recipients, the program Trump tried to end back when he was President. Gata says this touched a nerve with other Latino musicians, too, like the Mexican rock group Manna.

They pulled down a song from from all streaming platforms that they had in collaboration with Nicki Jam, and they put on social media a statement that simply said, Manna does not work with racist.

She says, To understand why this was such a flashpoint among regueton fans, you have to understand the music itself.

Regueton, the best way that I can describe it is as a fusion genre. You will hear a boom, chic, boom type of beat. Complimented by some pop, complemented by rhythms that that are more ancestral, like Bamba, which is native to Puerto Rico. You'll also hear, lyrically, a lot of hip hop. It has been used as a medium of resistance throughout the course of history of voice for the unheard. There may have been an initial mission with its creation in regards to being a medium of resistance, but since it has evolved and has reached a larger audience and you are fresher ears, this sense of community that was there in its beginnings, slowly but quickly dissipating as it becomes more popular.

That's what I was wondering. Is there any concern or tension now that it's starting to be embraced by mainstream politicians as a way to signal one way or the other on the campaign trail?

I think it's a fact. At the very least, it's very interesting. On one end, it's solidified this underground community of people who are honing in on what real reguetón is and its political meanings and things of that nature. On the other end, there's this celebration because of these new heights that it's reaching and these new barriers and the financial gain and benefit in the manner of which we're able to compete with other markets. Some people are willing to look past the political implications of endorsing political candidates like Trump for the sake of gets on growing.

Perhaps no artist is more responsible for that growth than Bad Bunny. He's one of the most streamed artists in the world. Experts say an endorsement from him would be Taylor Swift-level Seismic. But Gata says, Don't expect one anytime soon.

I can't imagine him, to be quite honest, him endorsing either candidate. I simply can't imagine it in this point in time. Why? Because of his politics. Bad Bunny advocates for a free Puerto Rico, for a Puerto Rico that is independent, a Puerto Rico that respects its residents. And to be quite honest, both parties, they have a lot of explaining to do.

That sentiment is something our reporters have heard from some Latino voters, that they are not totally satisfied from what is being offered to them or how the candidates are selling it. And while Gata won't be voting for Trump in November, she's not satisfied with the alternative either.

I'll be honest with you, David, I'm very disappointed. Very disappointed because, yes, I want to be celebrating the fact that a Black woman is a candidate. From one Black woman to the next. I feel I'm just so incredibly happy that Kamala is the candidate, but I'm also disappointed because I cannot be pendered to, yes, you have to work for not just my vote, but the vote of every single person. It is an honor. It is the highest honor to lead this country into the future, the highest honor. And it's one that no longer can be purchased with promises that are not tangible.

Will you be voting for her?

I don't think so. I hope she wins, but I don't think so. I cannot look past the detriment of what's going on in the Middle East, specifically in Palestine. I cannot.

Does that mean just not voting, not showing up on election day?

I will not show up for her now.

What do you make of this outreach to celebrities?

Yeah, the danger of Trump doing that. It's a little bit like Jerold Ford biting into the tamale with the husks still on. It's like, you don't. I don't think you know exactly who you're talking about.

This is Christina Beltran. She's an associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. I wanted to talk to her to get a better sense of this group as a whole. She says Latino voters represent a slice of the electorate that is growing super fast. In 2020, it was about 32 million people. That's expected to reach 36 million by November. It's important to remember, though, that this group is not a monolith with, and ethnic subgroups are represented in key battleground states like Puerto Rican communities in Pennsylvania or Mexican Americans in Arizona. But which party they usually vote for may be shifting a bit.

Historians Historically, about 25% of the Latino vote is Republican, and then about 70, 65, 70% voting for Democrats or solidly Democratic. For example, a majority of Latinos, around 61% supported Joe Biden in 2020, and Hillary Clinton won a little bit more of that vote. However, Clinton's share was slightly lower than Obama's. Obama won about 71% of the Latino vote in 2012. It's a historically predominantly Democratic, but not only Democratic, not Democratic in the same way as, say, the African-American electorate.

It does seem, at least going from 2016 to 2020, a slide towards Trump? Where is that coming from?

For example, when we talk about Trump, 28% of Latinos voted for Trump in 2016, and then about 38% of Latinos supported him in 2020. It It was already a surprise in 2016 that he did as well as he did because people thought, certainly in 2016, given all the attacks on immigrants, some predictions were saying he's going to get 12%. He's going to get really, really unusually low numbers. The fact that he did pretty much exactly as well as Mitt Romney did in 2012 surprised people in 2016. And then I think after four years of Trump, people thought, Oh, it's going to be worse. And in fact, he did better. I think this is for a couple of reasons that I think we haven't discussed and thought enough about.

We'll be right back. Before the break, you said there were some under-discussed reasons why Latinos may have been more interested in voting for Donald Trump in recent years. What are they?

One of them, to me, that seems deeply important is Latinos are a population that are simultaneously victims of dangerous and violent and over-militarized border security policies.

Tension in areas with high migrant populations.

. It's very stressful. It's like you have a disease that's killing you, like cancer, something that makes you feel desperation.

Immigration raids started Sunday, according to a senior administration official. Ice agents are focused on about 2,000 people who've been ordered to leave the country.

Their priorities-They experience the deportation and detention machinery of the United States in very intense ways, and it affects families and communities. But something that we didn't, I think, think nearly enough about, and that I've written a little bit about, is the fact that we also are the employees of the Homeland Security State. They have just been incredible.

The operation that they showed me is nothing less than incredible. I'll say this, it's a military operation. We have a This is like a war.

And since 2001, as the border has grown, as the border has become more militarized, as the border has become hardened and staffed by a larger and larger population of Americans working for it in the same way that as America's policing has gotten intensified over the years since 9/11, since 2001. This is having an impact on Latino populations. Latinos work for the very organizations that are doing both harm but also are servicing and serving those communities or working in the border regions. I think that's a really important issue is there are now a lot more Latinos who understand their own bread and butter, their own pensions, their own lives are connected to the border in ways that are very different than they were, say, in 1999.

That's really interesting. When Trump is promising a mass deportation program, you're saying that that may not hit quite as deep because there are people that would presumably be helping carry that out.

Yeah. I think it's a combined situation that I think sometimes we don't think about when we talk about immigration. One issue that often we talk about the importance of immigration for Latinos, it is a critical issue, and it affects different segments of this population very profoundly. But when it comes to voting, citizens are voters. So the questions of changes in immigration policy are somewhat abstract, or if not abstract, somewhat distanced from Latinos who are voters, because Latinos who vote already have citizenship. I think that when it comes to immigration, you You have people who are Latino who have family members in their own families who are non-citizens, but you also have family members who are employed in the Border Patrol, or family members who are third generation who also think that there's too much immigration or that it needs to be regularized or that think that their family members came in the right way, and people today are coming in the wrong way. You're having debates at a lot of levels. For voters, that's a discussion among people with already existing citizenship, which is a different conversation than the one that's also happening across the United States of people who are green card holders or who are non-citizens who are feeling the violence of the immigration system in different ways that are much more intimate.

Right. This has been the pitch from Democrats in years past, preaching these progressive messages to protect the dreamers and those folks. But I wanted to ask about that because there were some reporting in Politico earlier this week about how the Harris campaign wants to move away from identity politics, not explicitly talking about race and also talking tougher about border security. In fact, she visited the border in Arizona on Friday. So what do you make of that approach?

I think it's fascinating, and I think It could be potentially very smart in the sense that, as we know, Harris herself doesn't talk often about her Black and South Asian American identity. The fact that she's not talking to Latinos about that in the same way. I think that's in part because as a woman of color, she understands that people often don't like to be reduced to their racial or gender identities. We want to say, Hey, I'm more. Nobody likes to be reduced to just being their racial or gender identity. All of us are like, I'm more than that. And yet, our racial and gender identities matter in the world and to us.

We need to lower the cost of health care and continue to take on big pharma and cap the cost of prescription medications, yes, for our seniors, which we have done together, but for all Americans, because when we look at drugs like insulin, everyone here knows. First of all, Latinos are 70% more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes. And with the support of CHC, we were able to cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month for our seniors.

Finding a way to talk about that, I think, matters, and it requires not just having racial surrogates, but it requires talking to people about the many issues that exceed race, that exceed gender, that also move people. I think her own experience with negotiating identity and her staff, I think it's interesting that they're realizing that it's going to be about slicing up these electoral communities and thinking about, okay, when I go to the border, there's a political culture that has been shaped by border enforcement. I'm going to speak to those voters in a particular way.

We must also reform our broken immigration system and protect our dreamers and understand we can do both, create an earned pathway to citizenship and ensure our border is secure. We can do both, and we must do both.

That's going to be different than, say, going to Northern California and speaking to Latino voters there, which has a different progressive cultural orientation. I might need to talk to Latino voters there and talk about climate change or talk about abortion rights. Frankly, you have to start talking to Latino voters the way you talk to white voters, which involves a lot more microtargeting and a lot more specificity.

Do we have a sense in this group how many people are undecided and truly persuadable one way or the other?

Yeah, I think... I mean, some of what the polling has been showing is that the populations that are the most undecided are younger, Black and Brown, often non-college-educated. I think that those are populations that are... And that are periodic voters because they're younger voters. They're periodic voters, frankly, because neither party has invested nearly enough in the work of turning non-voters into voters.

Is that a function of enthusiasm, not being jazz or feeling like both options don't suit them? Or is it an infrastructure thing where they just don't know where the resources are to actually get on the roles and things like that?

It's a whole series of issues. It's harder to turn non-voters into voters who are young, who don't have college degrees, and poorer populations more working class populations. Those are all things that make it hard to get people to vote, and Latinos as a group fit into those populations at higher numbers. I think often there just hasn't been the deep outreach. Whereas I think if you're a voter in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin and you're Latino, you might get more efforts made to mobilize those voters. I don't think it's a lack of interest or a passivity any more than there's a lack of interest or passivity among all voters under 25 who have been feeling frustrated by the choices they've been given, really, since Barack Obama ran.

What about the Puerto Rican population? It's not a huge number, but Donald Trump has a history with that group, and they do live in areas of Pennsylvania, for example, that could make a difference.

It's fascinating because Trump was so offensive and did so much damage during Hurricane Maria and its aftermath. Now, I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you've thrown our budget a little out of whack because we've spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico, and that's fine.

We've saved a lot of lives. If you look at the- And yet, what I think surprised a lot of even Latino politics scholars was that a lot of those Puerto Ricans who then moved to places like Miami, moved to different parts of Florida, Tampa, et cetera, I remember I was thinking, Oh, this generation of Puerto Rican folks fleeing the island because of the damage done there.

These are going to be these anti-Trump voters. Right.

They'll never vote for Trump ever again.

Yeah. After what they experience, watching him throw towels at them, It was so offensive and so appalling, and materially so appalling, really thinking, Oh, these people will never vote for Trump. Then Florida, Latinos as a group, did shift over to Trump, and that was solidified again in 2022 in the midterms. I think what it teaches us is that, again, there's a lot of cross-cutting dynamics that happen to voters. I'm sure there were many Puerto Rican voters in Florida who remember Hurricane Maria and did not vote for Trump and voted for Democrats and would never vote for Trump. However, there are also a lot of Puerto Rican voters who moved to Florida. When they moved to Florida, and they're in Miami or Hialea or wherever, they enter into a conservative political ecosystem of conservative Latinos. There's a conservative political ecosystem that they entered into. That also, in the media they listen to and the cultural spaces they just end up inhabiting, those have an impact on people's politics. If a voter moves into Houston and moves into Los Angeles or San Francisco, that affects you. I often think that less ideologically attached voters are what I call political tofu.

This is true of a lot of undecided and less political voters. When they enter into a certain cultural or political ecosystem, they can start to become oriented based on the ecosystem they inhabit. Florida is a very conservative Latino cultural ecosystem, and Puerto Rican voters, I think, also got pulled into that story.

Yeah, again, just like any other group, the people you hang out with, the area of the country you're in, the social media you consume, it can all have an effect on how you feel about things. All of it.

Exactly.

Well, Professor Beltrán, this was totally fascinating. Thank you so much for your time.

Oh, sure. It was my pleasure. Thanks so much.

If you want to learn even more about the Latino vote and its role in this election, check out the whole story with Anderson Cooper, Sunday night at 8:00 PM Eastern on CNN. Cnn political commentator Anna Navarro will take a deep dive through a tour across the country. Again, that's the whole story with Anderson Cooper Sunday at 8:00 PM Eastern on CNN. One thing is a production of CNN audio. This This episode was produced by Paulo Ortiz and me, David Reind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dizula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manessari, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lanie Steinhart, Jamis André, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namarau. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. We'll be back on Wednesday. I will talk to you then.