The Boston Globe highlighted findings from a UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute (LPPI) report that identified the complex dynamics of the Latino vote in the 2020 elections, with lessons for campaign strategists in this fall’s midterm elections. Latino voters are the new swing voters, but the Democratic Party seems to be in denial about this insight, the Globe columnist wrote. Researchers found that Latino voters split their ballot at a significant rate in 2020. “They are convincible, you can go out and reach out to them, and they’ll think about their vote carefully,” said Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas, LPPI’s director of research. “They will eventually make a decision based on what resonates the most with them, but also on who engages them the most.” Dominguez-Villegas said some Democratic campaigns still use an outdated, one-size-fits-all approach to Latino engagement without recognizing inherent differences between, say, voters of Venezuelan descent and second-generation Mexican-Americans.
The pivotal role that Latino voters played in this year’s battle for the White House provides a roadmap for engaging with the diverse and growing constituency in decades to come.
To chart the way, experts from UCLA and elsewhere are digging into data from the 2020 vote to find answers to questions still lingering after Election Day.
Which issues resonated with Latino voters from state to state, in urban and rural communities, and from different ethnicities and age groups? How did President-elect Joe Biden build a winning coalition — and why did President Donald Trump make unexpected gains among the Latino electorate?
“Latinos want to feed their families, they want security, they want a president who’s going to deal with this pandemic, and we saw that in our polling across the board,” Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told the virtual audience.
But the panelists emphasized that the biggest takeaway from 2020 is that Latinos do not vote with a single mind.
‘The youth in our community is transforming our electorate, and so we need to reach out to them, get them engaged.’ — UCLA Professor Matt Barreto
“There are things that bind us together, but our politics are unique,” said Matt Barreto, a UCLA professor of political science and Chicano/a studies who advised the Biden campaign. “At the end of the day, Latinos want to be engaged, as Latinos but also as Americans.”
Finding ways for candidates to connect with this complex electorate is a top priority given its rapid growth — more than 16 million Latino votes were cast this year, compared to about 7.5 million in 2004, Barreto said. The trend will continue, he noted, saying that in Arizona alone, 175,000 U.S.-born Latino high school students just missed the chance to cast a ballot this year but will be eligible to vote in 2024 and beyond.
“The youth in our community is transforming our electorate, and so we need to reach out to them, get them engaged, let them feel heard and massively target voter registration campaigns,” said Barreto, who also serves as faculty co-director of LPPI, which is based at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
One notable trend in 2020: Trump’s campaign message that the U.S. economy would be stronger under his watch hit home with both the white, non-college-educated males who formed his base as well as with U.S.-born Latino males under 40 — but “Latinas were not having any of this nonsense,” said Mike Madrid, former political director for the California GOP and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, which was launched by disaffected Republicans working to unseat the president.
“Trump had stronger numbers than anybody anticipated, and we’ve got to recognize that if we’re going to be honest about what’s happening in the community,” said Madrid, who remains a member of the Republican Party.
Broadcast journalist María Elena Salinas, the moderator, said that several other GOP analysts were invited to participate on the panel but declined.
Madrid said the conservative economic, foreign policy and moral platforms that originally drew him to the Republican Party have been replaced by “white identity grievance politics.”
“I believe that the majority party in the next 20 years will be the one that captures the economic aspirations of a multicultural middle class,” he said. “The Republican Party has a significant problem with that because they’re not interested in a multicultural anything. The Democratic Party, I think, really needs to refine some of their economic messages.”
That messaging was met with skepticism on rural stretches of the campaign trail, said panelist Rudy Soto, a Democrat who lost his recent bid to win a congressional seat in the red state of Idaho.
He recounted one conversation with a Latino father and son who asked, “ ‘Why are you pushing to give everything away for free?’… That doesn’t represent what we are actually about,” Soto said.
“In rural America and much of suburban America, where Hispanic communities are at the forefront of growth,” Soto said. “We’re seeing a lot of struggles when it comes to the Democratic Party’s message connecting with people,” Soto said.
Perez predicted that the Biden administration would be quick to enact policies that benefit the Latino community, building support for the Democrats’ agenda.
As the record turnout in this year’s race showed, “Latinos are difference makers across the country,” helping to tip the scales in tight races from Arizona to Wisconsin to Georgia, he said.
During this election cycle, Democrats used sophisticated modeling tools to tailor messages to multiple Latino audiences, a strategy that has long been used to parse the white electorate.
“For the better part of the 21st century, campaigns have had efforts to micro-target and understand different segments of the white vote: suburban women, non-college-educated men, young, sort of hipster Portland types, whatever it is,” Barreto said.
The Biden campaign used the same technique — massive sampling and community-driven outreach — to zero in on issues important to diverse Latino segments, he said.
U.S.-born children of immigrants who are voting for the first time likely have different priorities than families rooted in their communities for several generations, he said. And voters with ties to Cuba, Venezuela, Central America, Mexico, Puerto Rico and elsewhere bring their own lenses to the American experience.
Democrats are now studying the lessons of 2020 to position themselves for future engagement with the Latino electorate, the panelists said. This includes building up the infrastructure to more aggressively combat misinformation, lobbying for fair maps in the next round of redistricting, and grooming Latino candidates for office up and down the ballot.
“Latinos, like other voters of color, cannot be taken for granted by either party, candidates or campaigns,” said LPPI Executive Director Sonja Diaz in remarks ending the webinar. “The campaigns that inspire Latino turnout will be rewarded with winning margins.”
The UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative and Aspen Institute Latinos and Society Program launched a partnership to highlight the importance of the Latino vote in 2018, following the U.S. midterm elections. Read more.
With Election Day just over a week away, two Republican insiders who broke from their party to take up the fight against Donald Trump will soon learn the fate of a president they view as “an autocrat who is unfaithful to the American republic’s ideas and ideals.”
Those biting words came from longtime GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, who shared his assessment of Trump’s presidency and the state of the Republican Party in a rousing conversation launching the 2020-21 UCLA Luskin Lecture Series.
“We should be honest with each other about this season of insanity and chaos because we have to figure out how to fix it,” said Schmidt, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, launched by disenchanted Republicans in late 2019 to defeat Trump and his allies.
Joining Schmidt at the Oct. 21 event was leading conservative voice Sarah Longwell, who said she was compelled to swim against the Republican mainstream by “this once-in-a-lifetime threat to democracy.”
“It was going to be a lot harder to keep my mouth shut,” Longwell said of her decision to break ranks early in Trump’s presidency. “I have found it to be much more shocking that other people haven’t spoken up.”
‘More and more Republicans every day are coming through that breach line and saying, “You know what? We’re just not doing this for four more years.”’ — Steve Schmidt, co-founder of the Lincoln Project
UCLA Luskin Dean Gary Segura guided the virtual conversation, pressing the guests — who each spent several years shaping Republican campaigns and communications — about the role they have personally played in creating today’s GOP.
“I’ve never taken an oath to the Republican Party,” Schmidt replied. “I always fought for the side of the Republican Party that believed that the freedoms of the country, the ideas and ideals of America, were for everybody.”
Longwell, former national board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans, said she joined the conservative movement for its “big ideas and sensible policies,” then watched as it was contorted to fit into a populist, nationalist frame.
“When you say Trumpism, I’m not sure that people have a great sense of what that means other than the roiling morass of the last three years,” she said.
Schmidt is a communications and public affairs strategist who has worked on political campaigns for former Republican officeholders such as President George W. Bush, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arizona Sen. John McCain. He and Longwell place themselves on the center-right of the political spectrum, but each has a distinct interpretation of what lies ahead for the GOP — including predictions for future presidential candidates.
Schmidt forecast a Republican “bloodbath” on Nov. 3 and was unabashedly pessimistic about the party’s future.
“The Republican Party will not reform in defeat. It will get crazier,” he said. “It will become more extreme, more insular, and that’s the death spiral of the national party.”
In Schmidt’s view, the front-runners for topping the GOP ticket in 2024 are two Trump loyalists: Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Longwell, in contrast, envisions a candidate who attempts to fuse the Trump and establishment wings — a candidate such as Nikki Haley, former U.N. ambassador and governor of South Carolina.
This would create a dilemma for conservatives, she said: Do you support a compromise Republican candidate such as Haley, who has one foot in the Trump camp? “Or do you help Democrats try to annihilate that thing altogether until it’s root-and-branch done with, and an entirely new generation of politicians rise up to take the mantle?”
Not until the Trump era has completely run its course does Longwell see a true revival of the Republican brand.
“It is possible that Donald Trump is like the Iraq War,” she said. “It was very popular for a period of time, and now you can’t find a single person who ever supported it. … It is possible that he goes down in flames and nobody wants to touch him again.”
Schmidt said the nation’s political future hinges on which faction of the Democratic Party takes hold.
“If the choice is between a socialist party and a nationalist party … the nationalist party will beat the socialist party for at least the next three elections in this country and maybe longer than that,” he said.
For the current election cycle, Longwell co-founded Defending Democracy Together, a nonprofit aimed at turning red votes blue to put Democrat Joe Biden over the top as president. Key to Longwell’s campaign is the dissemination of personal testimonials from ordinary citizens who plan to switch sides for the first time.
“So many of these people tell really deeply moving stories. They talk about being really religious or deeply pro-life and why they voted Republican all their lives … and why they had to vote against Donald Trump in 2020,” she said.
Longwell held out faith that under strong, decent leadership, Americans can bridge their divide.
“There are actually a bunch of places where there’s broad consensus among the American public … places where there are pragmatic solutions that politicians for a long time have had every incentive to keep us from achieving because they’d rather have the issue than the solution, to keep jamming us further and further apart.”
Schmidt said he helped launch the Lincoln Project political action committee after watching with alarm last fall as Democratic primary contenders battled each other instead of focusing on Trump.
“It was our point of view that no one had fought Donald Trump effectively for many, many years. No one had drawn blood on him,” he said.
The Lincoln Project boasts a sophisticated data operation that targets swing counties and precincts across the country. But it’s better known for its ads skewering Trump’s record.
Now, said Schmidt, “More and more Republicans every day are coming through that breach line and saying, ‘You know what? We’re just not doing this for four more years.’ ”
Once the 2020 election cycle is complete, the Lincoln Project plans to set its sights on GOP lawmakers who closed ranks under the Trump presidency, particularly as COVID-19 savaged the nation.
“The fight will continue past this, because the consequences of what happened to the country is something we’re going to be digging out of for the next 10 years,” Schmidt said. “And the people responsible for it are not just named Trump.”
The Luskin Lecture Series enhances public discourse on topics relevant to the betterment of society. The 2020-21 series at the Luskin School will continue on Nov. 10 when Neera Tanden, a UCLA alumna and the current president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, joins Segura online for a post-election analysis. Register here.
View a video of the Oct. 21 UCLA Luskin Lecture “Voices of Dissent.”
UCLA’s Voting Rights Project (VRP) scored major court victories in Texas and Pennsylvania in its fight against attempts to suppress the voice of voters in this critical election year. In Texas, a federal judge blocked Gov. Greg Abbott’s attempt to limit ballot drop boxes to one per county. VRP, part of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA Luskin, partnered with the League of United Latin American Citizens to sue Abbott. Chad Dunn, VRP’s director of litigation, argued the case in federal court on Oct. 8. The following day, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman struck down Abbott’s order, finding that it resulted in substantial confusion, created burdens on disabled, elderly and minority voters, and “likely violates their fundamental right to vote.” To support the case, Matt Barreto, VRP’s faculty director, co-authored an expert report with research fellow Michael Rios MPP ’20 and political science doctoral students Chelsea Jones and Marcel Roman. They documented that Abbott’s rule would force some voters to travel more than 90 miles round-trip to a downtown ballot return center, as opposed to a satellite county office within five miles. The research also found that many voters preferred using official drop-off sites rather than mailing in their ballots due to concerns about Postal Service slowdowns. In Pennsylvania, a U.S. District Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by President Trump’s reelection campaign that sought to place several restrictions on voting, including prohibiting voters from submitting ballots in drop boxes. VRP submitted an expert report documenting the importance of ballot drop boxes and the need to prevent voter intimidation. In the event these rulings are appealed, VRP is ready to file an appellate brief to defend every citizen’s right to vote.
Update: On Oct. 27, the Texas Supreme Court upheld the governor’s order to restrict the state’s counties to only one drop-off site for mail-in ballots.
As the2020 presidential campaign enters its final stretch, several media outlets have sought out the expertise of Sonja Diaz, executive director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA Luskin. News broadcasts on KTLA and Al Jazeera featured Diaz’s analysis of the debate between Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, which she said was really about driving voter turnout since “we have so many barriers at the ballot box, particularly for Black, Latino and Asian American voters.” Diaz told NBC News that neither major party is doing enough to connect with Latino voters, and she weighed in on voter suppression, both overt and indirect, in an Elite Daily article. “Absentee voting and the use of mail-in ballots has now been weaponized by conservatives in the Republican Party to be the new vehicle for ‘voter fraud,’ ” she said, calling this a deliberate attempt to suppress minority voters in the midst of COVID-19.
The Los Angeles Times spoke to Public Policy Professor Mark Peterson for a story about new strategies local candidates are using to get out the vote during a time of pandemic. Many candidates have replaced door-knocking and big rallies with virtual town halls and car caravans with signs and honking. Instead of traditional campaign stops, some have hosted community service projects, such as handing out food, diapers and masks emblazoned with the candidate’s name. Peterson said that it’s unclear how the ongoing pressures of the pandemic will shape decisions about local candidates, including whether voters will hold incumbent politicians accountable for L.A.’s handling of the COVID-19 threat. He also noted that the campaign timetable has been affected by the push toward early voting due to postal delays. People “may vote quite early, before you’ve even had a chance to reach them,” Peterson said.
NBC News spoke to Research Professor Paul Ong for a story on prospects for an Asian American political awakening fueled by the Nov. 3 election. Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has called on Asian Americans to vote, donate, volunteer and run for office in order to “realize our place in this country and our potential,” the story noted. No single candidate can mobilize an entire voting bloc, Ong said. But he added that Asian Americans are confronting surging unemployment and discrimination and “they cannot ignore that President Trump is a driver of the anti-Asian narrative.” Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, was also quoted in another NBC News story on polls showing that the fast-growing Asian American electorate favors Democratic candidate Joe Biden, although the support among younger voters is not enthusiastic.
Sonja Diaz, executive director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA Luskin, offered commentary on the Democratic National Convention as a political analyst on KTLA News. Diaz joined a panel of experts who provided live commentary during the convention broadcasts over four evenings this week. On the final evening, when Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden delivered a key speech, Diaz noted, “Over the course of the last four years, we have seen more job losses than we have ever seen in American history. If Joe Biden can talk about two things, it’s health and jobs.” She added, “Vice President Biden has to talk about what America will look like in January 2021 and tell us about a future that does not have Americans dying unnecessarily and losing shelter with foreclosure on the horizon, but a future of prosperity and opportunity.” Diaz will also provide live commentary on KTLA during the Republican National Convention from Aug. 24-27.
Zev Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin, joined KCAL9 News as nationwide returns from Super Tuesday came in. The evening’s big surprise was the campaign comeback of former Vice President Joe Biden, said Yaroslavsky, a longtime public servant and political analyst. “This sudden change, this reversal of fortune at the presidential candidate level, is unprecedented,” he said, especially since the Biden campaign has been relatively low-budget. “As a politician, I used to dream of being able to win elections without spending a nickel. Biden did it nationally,” he said. But he cautioned, “Let’s not write off Bernie Sanders and consign him to the graveyard. Things, as we’ve seen in the last 72 hours, can change very quickly.” Yaroslavsky also said former President Barack Obama is wise to hold off on endorsing a candidate, as he may need to unite the Democratic Party in the event of a brokered convention. And he said Los Angeles County must overcome problems with its new balloting procedures before November. Otherwise, he said, “Democracy loses, because if people have to stand in line for two, three hours, it’s going to discourage people.”
As Super Tuesday drew to a close after 72 hours of campaign twists and turns, Public Policy students and faculty flocked to a watch party at the Luskin School for pizza and political talk. The contest for the Democratic presidential nomination as a two-man race came into focus as returns came in from across the country. In addition to weighing the merits of Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden, students talked about state and local races and the new voting centers rolled out by Los Angeles County for the March 3 primary. Many in the room wore “I Voted” stickers after casting their ballots at Ackerman Union. The crowd also included half a dozen international students who were fascinated by the political process unfolding before them. Professors Martin Gilens and Mark Peterson provided context and commentary as hosts of the event. They were joined by Associate Professor Wesley Yin and Visiting Professor Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic nominee. Dukakis and his wife, Kitty, shared their own unique perspectives with students at the watch party.
