Why Latino Women Are Moving Back to Kamala Harris: Pollster

Latino women are moving back to supporting Kamala Harris, according to the CEO of Voto Latino.
In an interview with MSNBC, María Teresa Kumar said Latino women have moved from supporting third parties when Joe Biden was on the ticket.
“What we found when Biden was on top of the ticket was not that people were defecting to the Republican party, but more that they were interested in third parties. And it was women, Latino women, that were defecting to third parties because they were aligned with the Democratic issues, but they just felt that they needed something fresh,” Kumar said.
“And while Biden had great policy, they didn’t know his policy.”
She added that Harris is now a “blank slate,” meaning she able to define her own policies and build up her own base of support.
This “also makes it harder for the far-right and for foreign agents to define her on TikTok and on social media platforms,” Kumar said.
In June, Voto Latino published a poll of 2,000 registered Latino voters from five states— Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Texas, and Pennsylvania—which showed a significant number of Latino voters were seriously considering a third-party vote.
“One of the reasons Voto Latino went into the field to conduct this extensive poll of over 2,000 Latino voters in key battleground states, was that we kept hearing the narrative Latinos were leaving the Democratic party and going to Trump. And that just didn’t make any sense, so we dug in deeper,” Kumar wrote in a press release.
“And what we found was that while they are in support of Biden’s policies, they are not in support of his perceived handling of the economy. As a result, we find that not only were people defecting and going to a third party, RFK being the principal one, but it was women/Latinas that were doing so.
“For folks between the ages of 18 to 49, of those who said they support a third-party, 62 percentwere women,” she added.
“And that just speaks to not only the opportunity that both Biden and Harris have to talk about the issues that are bread and butter to the Latino community they care about. But also demonstrates the real frustration that the economy while for many people is doing well, for folks at the bottom, it is not.”
However, since Harris replaced Biden as the candidate, polls have shown a growth in support for the Democrats from Latinos.
The latest USA Today/Suffolk University poll released Thursday showed Hispanics, a group the Republican campaign has been cultivating, moved from supporting Trump by two points to supporting Harris by 16 points, 53 percent-37 percent, since June.
Other recent polls, including a survey conducted by RMG Research between August 26 and 28, showed 62 percent of Hispanic voters said they would vote for Harris, while 37 percent chose Trump and none chose the “some other candidate” option.
Meanwhile, a Univision poll, conducted between August 1 and August 8, showed 59 percent of likely Hispanic voters in Arizona said they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for Harris, while only 34 percent said the same for Trump.
Newsweek has contacted the Harris campaign for comment via email.
In 2020, 61 percent of Latino voters cast their ballot for Joe Biden, while 36 percent voted for Donald Trump, a narrower margin than in 2016, when Hillary Clinton beat Trump among Hispanics by 38 points, with 66 percent to his 28 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.
Before he dropped out, Biden had struggled to attract Latino voters in swing states like Arizona and Nevada, and started running Spanish-language ads early on in the campaign. “But it really wasn’t moving the numbers with Latinos, and that was the problem,” Chuck Rocha, a national Democratic strategist from Tyler, told the Houston Chronicle.
Since then, the Harris campaign has made a concerted effort to appeal to Latino voters, setting up a WhatsApp channel to reach them. The Harris-Walz campaign said the channel would be unveiled with a bilingual selfie-style video that features campaign manager, Julie Chavez-Rodriguez, and it will be run by Latino staff members within the campaign, with daily voice memos, videos and notes featuring surrogates and supporters. It will also serve as a tool to combat misinformation and disinformation, officials said.
More than half of the U.S. Hispanic population is estimated to regularly use WhatsApp.
However, polling suggests Harris is still underperforming among Latinos, according to analysis by ABC News, which showed in August that she was polling at 56 percent among Hispanics nationally compared to Biden’s 61 percent.
Meanwhile, a recent Quinnipiac University poll from August 27 showed both Harris and Trump were polling at 48 percent each among Hispanic voters.