SUMMARY
Latino voters in the United States, almost 36 million people, will be decisive in the upcoming elections on 5 November in many swing states. Polls on the direction of their vote so far favour Kamala Harris. However, the Hispanicness population is not a monolithic bloc supporting a single party and many will decide their vote according to the economic offers made by the candidates. Polls only reflect the moment in time. The reality, full of hoaxes, could be different given the media’s excessive focus on polls while leaving aside the political message.
Robert Valencia / Instituto Franklin
On 18 September, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris gave a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in which she warned that a presidency under three-time Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would mean mass deportations and separation of families – as many of them experienced under his administration. Meanwhile, in a post on his Truth Social account, Trump accuses Harris of wanting to kill ‘Spanishness heritage’ without offering further context.
As the US enters the final stretch of the presidential election, both candidates are seeking to profile themselves within such an important voting bloc as the Latino electorate and its nearly 36 million eligible voters, all within the framework of Hispanicness Month. As Axios points out, the Latino vote will be decisive for both candidates in ‘swing’ states -that is, states that can swing to either political party- such as Nevada and Arizona.
It is a fact that Latinos represent a huge socio-economic force in the US. Earlier this year, a report by the Latino Donor Collaborative found that this group contributes almost 80 per cent of the growth of the US labour force. At the same time, the report noted that by 2021 Hispanics reached $3.4 billion in purchasing power, an economy larger than France. Hispanic power is such that it managed to keep the US economy afloat during the worst stage of Covid-19, despite suffering poor working conditions and low wages, as a document from the United Economic Committee of the Senate revealed.
Not surprisingly, the most important issues for Hispanics have to do with the economy – including the cost of housing, jobs and inflation – followed by health, safety and immigration and border security. It is now common knowledge that Hispanics are not a monolith and vote for the candidate who has the best proposals for their most pressing issues. So far, and after the Democratic campaign’s U-turn in selecting Harris as its presidential candidate, the current vice-president is beginning to gain ground among Hispanic voters: according to a report by Equis Research in August, 55% of these voters living in swing states would vote for Kamala Harris compared to 37% who favour Trump.
Toss-up election
While the polls currently favour Harris, the reality is that many of them only reflect the trends of the moment, as any event can tip the balance in either direction. Spanishness voter preferences aside, the race is a toss-up when the margins of error in each of the polls are taken into account. A RealClearPolitics website average, as of this writing, gives Harris a slim 0.1 percentage point lead in swing states, and a national voter average of 2.1 (remember that the candidate does not win by popular vote but by the number of Electoral College political representatives per state).
However, the over-coverage of polls and prediction platforms such as Polymarket has been heavily criticised by academics such as Jay Rosen, Professor of Communications at New York University, and journalists such as Aaron Rupar. Although polls are important for measuring the pulse of the voter, it seems to be the only thing that takes precedence when it comes to analysing or predicting who will be the winner in November. In other words, in Rosen’s words, there is a lot of talk about the roller coaster of the polls and not about what is at stake.
Rosen points out that the media are consumed with news about who is rising or falling in the polls, but there are few reports that talk about policy proposals and their effects around the world. While Harris has promised normativity during the debate and in subsequent speeches, Trump has expressed his interest in ‘being a dictator for a day’; he continues with his anti-immigrant rhetoric focused on the Haitian and Venezuelan communities; he promises that mass deportations will be a ‘bloodbath’ and has hinted that he will imprison his political rivals.
It is at this point that the media is at a crossroads. In their eagerness to be impartial, they have fallen into false equivalencies, as the Columbia Journalism Review points out. In this article, Rupar’s phrase ‘sane-washing’ is coined. This term could be translated as ‘sanity-washing’, meaning that the media normalises (intentionally or not) erratic, racist, anti-immigrant and meaningless language such as Trump’s. Unlike Biden, these critics argue, the media seem to pay little attention to Trump’s coming of age or his apparent cognitive decline.
The Hispanic media are no exception to this phenomenon. At the end of 2023, the Univision network interviewed Trump for an hour, in which, in good old-fashioned fashion, he spelled out falsehoods. Trump said that Mexico had paid for the border wall and that former president Barack Obama had initiated the separation of children from their migrant families. The interviewer at the time, Enrique Acevedo, never stepped in to correct his inaccuracies.
Unfortunately, a large proportion of Latinos are subject to online misinformation. As some analyses present, the vast majority express that they do not have ‘enough independent news sources to make informed voting decisions’ and have complained that they do not have enough information in the run-up to November. The numbers presented in this article demonstrate that Hispanics are eager to be part of this democratic exercise and express their interest in issues that affect the country. Therefore, it is imperative that analysts and consumer media counteract fake news or misleading equivalencies with a focus on what the future holds for the Latino community.
Robert Valencia
Journalist
He is a member of the Connectas.org network and served as deputy international news editor of Newsweek magazine. He recently formed the group of young Hispanic leaders of the Spain-USness Council Foundation in 2023.
