How will Latinos vote in upcoming elections?

Young Hispanics are the country’s youngest demographic and millions of them will be eligible to vote by 2024, for the first time. Most are under the age of 30 and are becoming more involved in politics as the news outlets and online content continue to blast Republican’s harmful policies on immigration, women’s health, DACA, student debt forgiveness and almost everything else.

In a nutshell, Republicans have no policies that are attractive to Latinos.

Even though Latinos helped Democrats win narrow House seats across the country in the 2022 election, the margin should have been wider. Why was that not the case? Young Latino voters are highly supportive of Biden’s progressive policy agenda that he will embrace in 2024, so should we expect a slam-dunk this time around? Not necessarily, and this is why. Latino voters are highly misunderstood, and always have been, mostly because they are ignored by politicians, pollsters and the media outlets. For instance, many still believe that all Latinos are all Catholic and against abortion rights. Perhaps this was true 5o years ago, but not today. The modern, young Latino is progressive, well-informed and very sympathetic to the plight of all minorities including the LGBTQ population. So, why do Latinos turn out in such small numbers, election after election?

It’s the messaging dummy!

I work as a volunteer writer to help get out the vote in my mostly Latino prescient in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and year after year we get more and more Latino voters. But it is not without constant bickering with my partner (a white woman) about my style of writing, she often thinks that I’m too harsh. I write our pamphlets with conviction and anger, and I wrote about abortion rights! We helped Trump lose, and helped Gabe Vasquez win with my raw messaging style.

Another huge misconception about Latinos is that we are weak because we are polite, especially Mexicans. Yes, Mexicans are very polite, but make no mistake, we are not weak. We come from a country that pounces on the poor and offers little to no opportunities for everybody else, except for the 1%. I often say that in order to make real money in Mexico you either sell Time-Shares or drugs. So, it is no wonder that the new, young Latino voter is all in for a better life in the USA, after all that’s why we all came here in the first place.

But the problem is that Democrats never really speak to these voters until weeks before an election, and that is often too late. The other messaging issue with the Dems is that they don’t brag enough about what they have already done to help the Latino communities, and they do not use harsh enough language to describe the Republican’s harmful policies’, and both of these issues will continue to make the Latino voter complacent come election time.

If the Democrats make these slight changes, there is little doubt that they could easily convince many more Latinos to turn out to vote for Democratic candidates.