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LPPI Team Finds Mobilization of Latino Vote

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Sonja Diaz, Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas and Daisy Vazquez Vera of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative joined Latino Rebels Radio to discuss the findings of their new report on the role of Latino voters in the 2020 election. In a path-breaking study building on research from 2018, the LPPI team collected and analyzed precinct data, which represents actual election results instead of polls or predictions. The LPPI report estimated that a historic 16.6 million U.S. Latinos voted in the 2020 election, a 30.9% increase from 2016. “Either by themselves or in a multi-racial coalition, Latinos delivered many states for Joe Biden, including Arizona and Georgia,” the report’s authors found. The team explained that Latino voters have historically been “invisible for a variety of structural reasons,” and they aimed to find empirical evidence of the impact of Latino voters across the country with the quantitative report.

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Latino Voters Were Decisive in 2020 Presidential Election

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A new report by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative shows that Latino voters were decisive in sending President-elect Joe Biden to the White House. Researchers analyzed votes cast in 13 states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin — that collectively are home to about 80% of the Latino electorate. Researchers estimated that nationwide Latino voter turnout increased 30.9% compared with the 2016 presidential election. Among voters of all races, turnout was 15.9% greater. The impact of the growing Latino electorate was evident in battleground states. In Arizona, where Latinos represent 25.2% of all registered voters, the electorate’s size and turnout helped secure Biden’s victory. Even in Wisconsin and Georgia, where Latinos make up less than 5% of registered voters, their strong support of the Democratic candidate helped tip the scales to victory by margins of less than a single percentage point. The report also provides context for a prominent post-election talking point. Many observers said that results in Miami-Dade County, Florida — where Trump got support from a majority of Latino voters — was evidence of a wider Latino swing toward the president. Trump did win the state, but the UCLA report found that in all Florida counties outside of Miami-Dade, Latino voters favored Biden by a margin of 2 to 1. By looking at votes cast and demographic data at the precinct level, the report offers a more accurate analysis of the impact of Latino voters than other studies that have relied on exit polls, which do not capture enough Latino voters.

Essential Workers Don’t Want to Be Heroes, Diaz Says

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Sonja Diaz, executive director of the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, was featured in an NBC News article about the impact of COVID-19 on Latinos in Los Angeles. More than 1 million COVID-19 cases have been reported in Los Angeles County, with a disproportionate effect on Latinos. While they make up about half of the county’s population, Latinos are hospitalized three times more often than white people, the article said. Across California, Latinos make up 40% of the population but account for 55% of confirmed COVID-19 cases and 47% of deaths. Many essential workers must report to work despite the increased risk of exposure to the virus. Black and Latino neighborhoods with high density, lack of green space and few grocery stores are particularly vulnerable. “People go to work not to be heroes but because they need money to exist,” Diaz said. “They’re more likely to live in communities that are not resilient to overcoming or surviving a pandemic.”

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Diaz on Informing Latino Communities About Vaccine Safety

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Sonja Diaz, executive director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, was featured in a Sacramento Bee article discussing many California Latinos’ hesitations about receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. While vaccines approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have been shown to be safe and effective, a history of deceitful government practices involving communities of color has left many hesitant to receive the inoculations. “There’s been a storied legacy of the way that the U.S. government has rolled out medical and scientific experiments on non-white bodies,” Diaz said. Recent allegations of forced hysterectomies at an immigrant detention center in Georgia have contributed to the erosion of trust between communities of color and government institutions, she said. “More must be done to ensure these communities, who are overwhelmingly on the front lines of this pandemic, have accurate and culturally tailored information to trust that the vaccine is indeed something that will make their lives and their communities safer.”

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COVID-19 Doesn’t Only Threaten the Elderly, Reber Says

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Associate Professor of Public Policy Sarah Reber spoke to the Dallas Morning News about the disproportionate toll of COVID-19 deaths on Latino and Black communities in Texas. While many believe that COVID-19 threatens just the elderly, working-age adults in Texas’ Latino and Black communities are dying at rates many times higher than those of whites, according the the story, which was reprinted nationally. “That discussion of ‘Oh, it’s all the really old people’ — that’s a white people’s story,” Reber said. The disparities in COVID-19 deaths have gone largely underreported because health experts were not initially focused on them. However, there are significant differences in the death toll when separated by age and ethnicity. In Texas, the COVID-19 death rate for Hispanics among those ages 25 to 64 is four times as high as that of non-Hispanic whites. Furthermore, Blacks in that age group are dying at more than twice the rate of white people.

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Diaz on Becerra’s Nomination to the Biden Cabinet

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Sonja Diaz, founding director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA Luskin, spoke to KPCC’s Take Two about California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s nomination as U.S. secretary of health and human services in the Biden administration. Becerra has “the dynamism and also the experience to get us through the pandemic,” Diaz said in an interview beginning at minute 10:30. “As much as health care is a policy, it’s also politics,” she said, noting that Becerra fought to protect the health of his constituents both as the state’s chief law enforcement officer and during his long tenure in Congress. Diaz earlier wrote a Univision opinion piece calling on President-elect Biden to build a Cabinet that reflects the face of America. “In 2020, it’s no longer acceptable to build a senior team or Cabinet without including Latinos in a meaningful way,” she wrote. “The lack of representation at the pinnacle of the country’s leadership … sends a message to the Black, Brown and Native American communities that power the economy as essential workers and serve as the core of the Democratic Party that their contributions are not valued.”

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Diaz Debunks Myths of the Latino Electorate

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Sonja Diaz, director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, joined an episode of Latino USA to discuss the role of Latino voters in Arizona. For the first time since 1996, Arizona flipped blue in the 2020 presidential election. Diaz pointed to Arizona as an example for campaigns to follow on “how to recruit Latino voters and why they need to start today.” While the Latino electorate is often misconstrued as a monolith, Diaz explained that “the 2020 election brought to bear the diversity, the complexity and the myriad of interest groups that characterize the Latinx electorate.” She criticized “political pundits [who] continue to act like they know about these voters who they deem Hispanic” when in fact “Latinos are both mystic and incomprehensible to all of them.” Diaz concluded, “The victory on Nov. 3 was because of the work of Latino mass mobilization in response to failure of policy in so many key states.”

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Segura and Diaz Weigh In on Influence of Latino Vote

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UCLA Luskin Dean Gary Segura spoke to El Diario about the impact of Latino voters on the outcome of the presidential election. Segura noted that Latino participation was “very strong” in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Colorado — states that were crucial in Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. According to Latino Decisions, a political opinion research firm co-founded by Segura, Biden had particularly strong support among Mexican and Puerto Rican voters. The pandemic, which disproportionately affects Latinos, and the economy were important factors in mobilizing the Latino vote. “Work has become the most important thing for the community, and not the political parties,” Segura said. El Diario also cited Sonja Diaz, executive director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, which is researching Latino engagement in the election. “In counties with high Latino density, many of them key in this count, Latino voters opted for Vice President Biden,” Diaz said.

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Diaz on the Increasing Influence of Voters of Color

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Several media outlets have called on Sonja Diaz, executive director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA Luskin, for insights on election-related issues including the presidential debates, voter suppression and the important role of voters of color. On ABC7’s Eyewitness Newsmakers, beginning at minute 16:35, Diaz addressed misconceptions about the engagement of the Latino electorate, noting that younger voters do not turn out at the same rate as older Americans. She added, “Our studies show that 30% of Americans that will cast a ballot on Nov. 3 are non-white. This is really important and will only continue to increase for foreseeable generations.” On WHYY’s Radio Times, Diaz said some states are instituting “arduous hoops to overcome the ballot box … at a time when we are still not over the hump with this pandemic.” She concluded, “I think that this election is a lot about whether or not people are going to be able to cast a ballot without risking their lives.” 

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Diaz Weighs In on the 2020 Race

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As the  2020 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.

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