Dems, GOP intensify efforts to secure PA Latino votes

Erika Moncalvo, 33, has seen her welfare benefits dry up since she secured a $14-an-hour job as a home health aide. A single mom who grew up in Florida and Puerto Rico, she worries about special-education funding for her autistic son, a Philadelphia public school student. On a recent Saturday afternoon, sporting a “Latinas for Harris-Walz” T-shirt, Moncalvo was at a Kamala Harris campaign block party in North Philadelphia, cheering for the candidates she believed would champion her interests: the Democrats.

“Cuando luchamos, ganamos (when we fight, we win),” she cheered alongside the crowd at Izlas Latin Cuisine, in a chant led by Philadelphia City Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, voices rising over the high-decibel salsa playing through the sound system. “Cuando luchamos, ganamos! Si no votamos, no contamos (if we don’t vote, we don’t count)!”

With the election just days away, Latinos continue to be seen as one of the most dynamic and critical electorates in this all-important swing state. More than 600,000 voters who identify as Latino now call the commonwealth home; many, like Moncalvo, have roots in the Caribbean, especially Puerto Rico. As of the most recent census, Pennsylvania has the third-largest Puerto Rican diaspora presence in the United States, while Philadelphia had the second-largest Puerto Rican population of any American city.

While a significant majority of Hispanic voters still register and vote Democratic, that advantage is receding: nationwide, Latinos preferred the Democratic candidate by 56% to 37% in an October New York Times/Siena College poll, down from 62% in 2020 and 68% in 2016, according to New York Times averages of past polls. Many in this community are refugees from the natural disasters that have battered Puerto Rico in recent years, and bitter references to then-President Donald Trump's pitching of paper towels amid the devastation of Hurricane Maria are still ubiquitous seven years later. But other Latinos, especially younger men, are drawn to Trump's projection of strength and his campaign promises.

“In every election cycle, the Republican Party has gained a couple of points with the Latino community,” observed Victor Martinez, a Puerto Rico-born journalist and longtime Pennsylvanian who owns five Spanish radio stations in Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley. “For me, it’s just natural: With the growth of the Latino population in the country, numbers go up, period.”

The narrative that “Latinos are all of a sudden switching to Trump – I just don't see it,” he added. As evidence, Martinez cited the daily hour-long politics segment he recently added to his popular morning show; judging by the feedback he gets from 250,000 listeners statewide, he said, Latinos are still solidly supporting Democrats.

That was also the view of Matthew Tuerk, who, in 2022, was elected as the first Latino mayor of majority-Latino Allentown. “This is a Democratic city,” he said of the commonwealth’s third-largest burg, where the mostly Puerto Rican Hispanic population has grown from 12% in 1990 to 55% – nearly 70,000 people – in the most recent census. “Shifts on the margins are to be expected. But Republicans tend to vote Republican, and Democrats tend to vote Democrat.”

Still, the much-parsed defection of some Latino men to Donald Trump has supporters of both candidates ramping up their outreach across the commonwealth – mindful that 2024’s winner could come down to a handful of Latino votes. Two weeks before the election, as Puerto Rican-born Marc Anthony was making national headlines with a Harris endorsement and TV commercial, the Broadway actor Javier Muñoz, who originated the title role in “Hamilton,” and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive superstar, were revving up Democratic crowds in Philadelphia.

“We’ve had busloads of people coming from all over to Reading, knocking on doors,” said state Rep. Johanny Cepeda-Freytiz on Sunday, Oct. 20, the day before Pennsylvania’s voter registration deadline. In her 69%-Latino city, more than 30 bilingual volunteers flooded Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhoods, and paid canvassers were on the way. “There’s not one door un-knocked,” said the first-term Democrat, the daughter of Dominican immigrants.

But the competition is fierce – and, she said, sometimes ugly. Trump supporters booed the Democratic political delegation marching in this year’s Reading Puerto Rican parade, Cepeda-Freytiz recalled, and “Latinos for Harris” posters are regularly vandalized. Downtown, the Trump field office does a brisk business in its own lawn signs – and across the Lehigh Valley, the profusion of both Harris and Trump signs and billboards serve as evidence of just how close this race is.

“The Harris-Walz campaign has been very engaged here – all hands on deck,” noted state Rep. Danilo Burgos, a Philadelphia Democrat who in 2018 became the first Dominican American elected to the General Assembly. Shortly before addressing the crowd at Izlas alongside Lozada and Muñoz, Burgos opined that Latino male defection from the Democrats is an exaggerated narrative put forth by the Trump campaign. “I think the numbers won’t be as big as projected, and the Latino community will come out strong for Harris,” he said.

Trump has rallied in Pennsylvania with support from the Puerto Rican reggaetón stars Justin Quiles and Anuel AA – who, as young Latino men, represent a demographic Trump has been successfully cultivating.

Political observers say that the Trumpward drift is a cultural variation on a more significant phenomenon – the partisan gender gap that, according to experts, is at an all-time high. That same New York Times/Siena College poll found Trump leading among likely male voters by 53% to 40% for Harris, while Harris led among women, polling 56% nationally among that electorate versus 40% for Trump.

Among Hispanic males, community leaders say Trump’s masculine appeal is augmented by lingering cultural machismo and a corresponding reluctance to vote for a woman commander-in-chief.

At Elegancia Estilo, a Dominican barbershop on Tilghman Street in Allentown, on a block where neighboring houses sported dueling Trump and Harris signs, the half-dozen or so young men inside the shop agreed that Harris was the clear favorite in their community. But then Robert Varga, 29, began to hedge. “If you want good housing, health care, jobs, it’s Kamala,” he said. “If you want security, it’s Trump.”

Latino men in particular, he explained, are drawn to the masculine power that Trump projects through forceful diatribes against enemies and tough talk on tariffs. “I’m sorry,” Varga added, realizing how that sounded to a female reporter. “I am open-minded. I would vote for a woman. But not everybody is open-minded.”

In Philadelphia, Moncalvo has also noticed the attraction of Trump among economically struggling Latino men in her community. “They think Trump is going to be their saving grace” financially, she said scornfully. “That he’s going to mail them more stimulus checks like he did last time.”

There’s also a fundamental difference in how the campaigns direct their respective messages. Whereas the Democrats tailor outreach and, often, specific policies to specific demographics and interest groups, the Trump campaign takes a catholic approach.

“We don’t have a separate message for Hispanic voters,” explained Kush Desai, who leads the campaign’s communications strategy in Pennsylvania and other battleground states. “We don’t view them as an exotic ‘other,’ but as patriotic Americans who pay taxes … We’ve had a lot of success with this strategy.”

With a statewide cadre of door-knockers and phone bankers and a Reading-centered Latino outreach operation, “we make sure that we convey that message in Spanish as well as English,” Desai added. “But that overall message is the same. It’s one candidate, one message.”

That message leans heavily on the economy and personal finance – poll after poll shows those are the top issues both for Latinos and for Americans overall. “We Latinos are not a monolith because we all speak Spanish. We're very diverse,” observed Tuerk, who has Cuban heritage. “But we vote as Americans. And Pennsylvania is kitchen table central. The issues that motivate us to vote in Pennsylvania cities, irrespective of where our parents might have come from … are the same issues that motivate everybody: housing, economy, education.”

Some observers posit that the Democrats’ focus on abortion – which polls show is a highly successful issue for the party overall – may be less appealing to Hispanic men, many of whom are practicing Christians and socially conservative. On the Republican side, however, Trump’s immigration rhetoric can be alienating – even to Latino voters who, as citizens, widely share other Americans’ concerns about recent high numbers of migrant arrivals.

While nearly 40% of Hispanics nationally are immigrants ­­– and many more are the children or spouses of newcomers – Puerto Ricans are American citizens with full voting rights. The rhetoric around immigration, from both the right and the left, resonates differently with Pennsylvania’s Hispanic communities than in, say, border states or those with high populations of recent migrants (though Dominican immigrants make up an increasing proportion of commonwealth Latinos).

“The interesting thing is, and I noticed this with my audience, immigration becomes a big deal when Trump goes off the wheels with how (immigrant) criminals are coming out of the jails, they’re coming out of mental hospitals,” said Victor Martinez. “Even though we Puerto Ricans are not immigrants, and we don’t have to deal with the immigration process, we do feel you’re attacking one of us – the fact that you put that stigma on Latinos, painting us all with that same brush.”

“I don’t like how (Trump) talks about us,” agreed an Uber driver from the Dominican Republic who gave his name only as José. But he could overlook that, the driver added, because he liked Trump’s message about the issues that matter to him more – the economy, which he said had been better under the former president, and the migrant crisis. “I’m an immigrant, but I don’t like what’s going on at the border,” José confided.

Regardless of how the Latino vote breaks down this November, both parties view Pennsylvania as a cornerstone of a longer-term Hispanic outreach strategy. “It’s not just about showing up on someone’s doorstep and yelling, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’” noted Desai, the Trump communications director. “It’s about forming ties to the community. As a party, we’re thinking about cementing those alliances long-term.” That means not only phone banks and field offices, but also events like a recent celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, when the Trump campaign partnered with Lehigh Valley barber shops to offer free back-to-school haircuts.

Just as the political parties are focused on what this demographic is doing, the reverse is also true. “As a community, when we gather together, we are a voting bloc that is powerful,” reflected the actor Javier Muñoz in Philadelphia. “We are diverse – an umbrella of Latin people. And when we come out in droves, we can change the world.”