Harris urges Latino leaders to help mobilize key voting bloc

Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday called on Latino leaders from across the country to help her mobilize Hispanic voters as her campaign ramps up its efforts to court this key demographic, which plays a pivotal role in several swing states.

“I truly believe that America is ready to turn the page on the politics of division and hate. And to do it, our nation is counting on the leaders here. Your power. Your activism,” Harris said, speaking before several hundred Latino leaders at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual leadership conference. “Each of us has a job to do.”

Latinos were part of the coalition that helped elect President Joe Biden in 2020, but the president had been facing an erosion in support among these voters before he ended his reelection bid in late July. Latino leaders say that Harris’s candidacy has provided a burst of energy in the Hispanic community, but that she still has work to do to offset the slipping support.

A recent New York Times/Siena poll found Harris leading Trump among Latinos by 14 points, as she garnered 55 percent of Hispanic likely voters to Trump’s 41 percent. In 2020, exit polls showed Biden winning this group by 33 points, with 65 percent of Latinos backing him compared to 32 percent who voted for Trump.

Any erosion of support for Harris among Latinos — who make up a sizable group in battleground states including Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania — could make a difference in a close race against Donald Trump.

Harris’s campaign has intensified its efforts to attract Latino voters in the final weeks before the Nov. 5 election, launching a Spanish-language ad blitz and planning several events with surrogates across the country. The campaign plans to devote $3 million to Spanish-language radio ads during Hispanic Heritage Month, which began Sunday and runs to Oct. 15.

On Saturday, Gov. Tim Walz will visit Allentown, Pa., a majority-Latino city, for a campaign rally. The campaign’s “reproductive rights tour” also made a stop in Allentown on Tuesday with an appearance by Republican strategist Ana Navarro, who is supporting Harris.

Biden is hosting a reception at the White House on Wednesday to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month. He will also speak at the awards gala for CHCI — the nonprofit arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus focused on developing Latino leadership — on Thursday night.

When Biden was still at the top of the ticket, Harris was in the forefront of his efforts to court young and minority voters, traveling multiple times to Latino-heavy areas in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Harris has often leaned into her background as a Californian and a daughter of immigrants when courting Latino voters. Harris’s mother was an Indian immigrant, and her father came from Jamaica.

Some of the loudest cheers for Harris during her remarks at CHCI came when she spoke about immigration, an issue where she and Biden have been closely scrutinized by both liberals and conservatives. She argued that the United States can both secure the border and act humanely toward immigrants already here.

“We must also reform our broken immigration system and protect our dreamers. And understand, we can do both — create an earned pathway to citizenship and ensure our border is secure,” the vice president said. “We can do both, and we must do both.” Dreamers refers to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

Harris slammed former president Donald Trump and his allies for their plans to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.

“While we fight to move our nation forward to a brighter future, Donald Trump and his extremist allies will keep trying to pull us backward,” she said. “Imagine what that would look like and what that would be. How’s that going to happen? Massive raids, massive detention camps. What are they talking about?”

But immigration has proved a difficult political issue for Democrats, as Trump and other Republican candidates have accused Biden and Harris of allowing the border to become chaotic and porous. Most recently, they have falsely asserted that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats, even after the account was forcefully denied by local officials.

Biden, and now Harris, have responded to the criticism by noting that they embraced a bipartisan border bill earlier this year, only to have the bill go down to defeat after Trump urged Republicans to oppose it. The measure, which included sweeping changes to the nation’s asylum system and a mechanism to effectively shut down the border if crossings got too high, had been slammed by immigrant rights groups and endorsed by the Border Patrol union.

After Wednesday’s event, Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist, said Harris’s two-pronged approach — a secure border and a pathway to citizenship — would be applauded by Latino voters. “It resonated really, really well,” Cardona said.

Harris, in her campaign events, has largely focused on border security in an effort to rebut Republican claims that she favors an open border and bears responsibility for the uptick in border crossings in recent years. In citing the need to protect dreamers, she was in a sense balancing her message, Cardona said.

“She is now going for the jugular in not just talking about border security, but going further and talking about what most Americans want and see as the real solution — Latinos as well as swing voters — which is the common-sense approach that does both,” Cardona said.

Harris also spoke at length about reproductive rights Wednesday, drawing applause when she vowed to sign into law a bill restoring the protections offered by Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion rights case overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022. She noted that about 40 percent of Latinas live in a state with an abortion ban.

Harris, who served in the Senate for four years before becoming vice president, also leaned into her familiarity with many in the crowd, saying she was in a “room of long-standing friends.” She gave a shout-out to Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.), chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), chair of CHCI.

“To everyone, happy Hispanic Heritage Month,” she said, “which in my book is every month.”