After a week of scary headlines about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton being tied both nationally and in swing states and reports that Team Clinton is already looking into how to peel off some Republican voters, it’s the perfect time to revisit the lessons of 2010 and 2014: it’s all about the base. Make whatever arguments you want about the presidential vs. midterms, but you neglect the base, you get trounced. One thing Obama did extraordinarily well in 2012, was court the base.
In an election year with two candidates who already have sky-high negatives and a contest that promises to get downright nasty, turnout will likely be depressed. So Democrats need to court voters who, above all else, won’t be dissuaded no matter what. Perhaps more than any other single Democratic constituency in 2016, Latinos are likely to go to the polls in droves, and Hillary Clinton stands to gain far more votes by mobilizing them on immigration issues than she does by peeling away a trickle of fickle GOP “Stop Trump” voters.
I checked in with Dr. Sylvia Manzano, a principal at the polling firm Latino Decisions (Manzano has no affiliation with the Clinton campaign though two of her colleagues do), and here’s five reasons that Latino voters could be the single most powerful voting bloc in 2016 and that immigration might perhaps be the single most penetrating progressive issue of the election—IF Democrats play their cards right.
1. They’re one of the largest new voter pools around
Parties are always looking for new voting pools and one of the biggest increases in voters who have never voted before comes from Latinos. Between Latino voters who have aged-in to eligibility since 2012 and those who have newly naturalized, you’ll be hard pressed to find any other single constituency that offers a bigger influx of new voters who can be cultivated by focusing on a singular message: immigration. Here’s a look at the uptick in overall citizenship applications.
According to the most recent national statistics, more than 185,000 citizenship applications were submitted in the final three months of 2015, up 14 percent from the year before and up 8 percent compared with the same period ahead of the 2012 elections.
2. Latinos hold prime swing state potential
The Center for American Progress Action Fund projects that Latino voters will make up the largest share of eligible voters of color in 2016 in the following states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, and Nevada. Critically, Latino voters could help secure Florida, which Obama won in 2012 and is virtually a must-win for Republicans. They will also have a strong influence on outcomes in Colorado and Nevada. But Manzano adds that Latino voters might help turn Arizona blue and could be consequential in second-tier states like North Carolina and Virginia.
“Latinos are a much smaller proportion of the electorate there,” Manzano says of the two states, “but if we expect that they will be close, within 2 to 3 percentage points, if Latinos vote in a very cohesive way—80/20 or 85/15 in the Democrats direction—then they can become decisive.”
3. It’s personal
Trump made this election deeply personal for Latino voters literally from day one of his campaign. His all-out attack on the character of Mexicans and repeated promises of mass deportations have drawn into question the very existence of Latinos in this country, even for those who are citizens and legal residents.
As both a Mexican-American who grew up in Texas and a political science researcher, Manzano says she has never seen any one topic or public figure dominate the Latino perception of politics the way Donald Trump has this year. After conducting focus groups for several clients, she was struck by the fact that no matter what question she asked or where the conversation started, the discussion always came around to Trump.
“It was like trying to talk to the NRA about something, and the answer is always ‘more guns,’” she says.
Latino Decisions conducted a baseline test of Latino voter motivation nationally for the group America’s Voice in mid-April and found Latino voters already feel far more motivated about voting in 2016 than they did in 2012. Indeed, 48 percent said they feel more enthusiastic to vote in 2016 than they had in 2012 (compared to 31 percent saying they were more enthusiastic in 2012).
By comparison to the 2012 cycle, in late August, just 37 percent said they felt more motivated to vote that year, while 40 percent said they were more motivated in 2008. Latino Decisions asked the question every week leading up to Election Day in 2012 and, as one might expect, motivation grew as the election neared, reaching 47 percent the day before the vote. In other words, this year Latino voters already feel more motivated by mid-April than they did one day before voting in 2012.
Once more, of the nearly 50 percent who say they are more enthusiastic to vote in 2016, 41 percent named Donald Trump as the reason. That inquiry was asked as an open-ended question rather than giving voters a list of suggestions to rank. In other words, voters named Trump all on their own.
4. Immigration resonates with numerous constituencies for varied reasons
Immigration as an issue that has two advantages over other progressive issues in terms adding sheer numbers to the Democratic electorate in that it’s both targeted and resonates broadly. When you’re trying to motivate women, for instance, they could be animated by anything from Paid Leave to electing the first female president to reproductive rights.
But for Latinos voters, emphasizing immigration is somewhat of a catch-all that can mean anything from stopping Trump to keeping families together to the policies themselves, such as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA).
“For some people, it means feeling welcome in a country you already felt you belonged to—an acknowledgement of your citizenship,” Manzano says. For others, “it’s about a pathway to citizenship at most, but at least, not repealing DACA and DAPA.”
Manzano adds that while “immigration” means many things to Latino voters, the issue also pulls in a broader constituency, from other immigrant groups like the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) population to the tech sector in Silicon Valley, which wants more H-1B visas to be available for hiring talent overseas.
“The business community—hi-tech, agro, organized labor or people doing construction and housing—it can pivot into being lots of different things for different people who have a really big stake in it,” she says.
5. They’ll never forget
So what if Trump miraculously managed to control his impulses for six months and shed all talk of immigration/Latinos now that he’s moved on to the general election: “Would the matter diminish in potency for Latino voters?” I asked Manzano.
“No,” she said with a brief chuckle at the notion. Then again, “No.”
It almost verbatim matched one of my favorite tweets of the week from Gabe Ortíz at America’s Voice. Responding to reports Thursday that some GOP leaders said they thought the “Mexicans are rapists” and “Muslim ban” rhetoric was behind them, Ortíz tweeted:
Um, yeah. It’s so not going away.
“The way people talk about Trump,” says Manzano, “people have a real sense of fear about what his presidency would mean and a real sense of worry for the country.” She says many Latinos feel they did everything they were supposed to do—learned English, became citizens, etc.—but there’s just “a dramatic lack of respect.”
“It’s not the way we’ve heard people talk about Mitt Romney or George Bush or John McCain,” she explains. “The way in which this is personalized is extraordinarily different for a presidential campaign.”