{"id":44035,"date":"2025-11-25T09:23:40","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T09:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/44035\/"},"modified":"2025-11-25T09:23:40","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T09:23:40","slug":"latino-voters-could-determine-who-controls-congress-after-next-years-midterms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/44035\/","title":{"rendered":"Latino voters could determine who controls Congress after next year\u2019s midterms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Juan Ojeda, attends a grand opening event at the ‘Latino Americans for Trump’ office in Reading, Pa., on June 12, 2024.Joe Lamberti\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

Sitting in the Caribbean restaurant she owns on the main street of Reading, Pa., Democratic state legislator Johanny Cepeda-Freytiz recalls how Donald Trump<\/a> made inroads with Latino voters last year.<\/p>\n

There were the promises to lower prices and return to the prepandemic economy, which resonated with people in this working-class, majority-Latino city of 95,000. There was his opposition to abortion and attacks on transgender rights, which played well with culturally conservative Catholics.<\/p>\n

Republicans also organized a competent ground game, operating a \u2018Latino Americans for Trump\u2019 office down the street from Ms. Cepeda-Freytiz\u2019s eatery and setting up voter registration tents throughout the city. \u201cThey were definitely intentional about how they spent their time here,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Johanny Cepeda-Freytiz said circumstances have gotten worse for Latino voters since Donald Trump was elected.Adrian Morrow\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

But over the past year, things have gotten worse for Latinos, she said. Not only has Mr. Trump failed to lower prices, he\u2019s pushing some of them up with his sweeping tariffs<\/a>. His cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and refusal to extend health insurance tax credits will further ramp up the cost of living.<\/p>\n

And his immigration raids<\/a> have people limiting how much time they spend outside the home, afraid they will be grabbed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are in fear,\u201d Ms. Cepeda-Freytiz said. \u201cOur whole downtown, fewer people are going to church, fewer people are going out to hang out, to eat.\u201d <\/p>\n

The first signs of a Latino electoral backlash against Mr. Trump\u2019s party were felt earlier this month, when Democratic candidates for governor won by landslides in Virginia and New Jersey. In California, voters overwhelmingly endorsed a plan to gerrymander the state in the Democrats\u2019 favour to fight back against a Texas gerrymander demanded by the President. Exit polling in all three states showed Latinos voting Democratic by margins of about two-to-one, reversing Mr. Trump\u2019s 2024 gains.<\/p>\n

Democrats make gains in U.S. state and local elections in sharp rebuke to Trump\u2019s Republicans<\/a><\/p>\n

With the ground shifting rapidly among this growing demographic, Latino voters may ultimately determine who controls Congress after next year\u2019s midterms.<\/p>\n

Nilza Serrano, chair of the California Democratic Party\u2019s Latino Chicano Caucus, said one of her party\u2019s mistakes in 2024 was on voter outreach: More than 40 per cent of Latino voters were not contacted by anyone from either party that year, according to polling by the media company Entravision. She tried to fix that by hosting phone banks with volunteers across the country this year ahead of the gerrymander.<\/p>\n

The Democrats also framed the California referendum as a message to Mr. Trump on his deportation program, which has seen mass raids at farms, restaurants, factories and Home Depot parking lots. \u201cPeople see the videos of mothers being separated from their children, agents breaking windows and pulling people out of their cars,\u201d Ms. Serrano said.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

U.S. federal agents detain a man during an immigration raid in Cicero, Ill., on Nov. 8.Carlos Barria\/Reuters<\/p>\n

In September, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower-court order<\/a> that had prevented ICE in the Los Angeles area from using broad criteria such as race and speaking Spanish for detaining people and demanding their immigration papers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have to drive around, I kid you not, with my passport in my glove compartment,\u201d Ms. Serrano said. \u201cThat is stuff that you hear about happening in other countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Passaic, N.J., a majority-Latino town, Mayor Hector Lora said many Latinos understood Mr. Trump\u2019s campaign promises of deportation to apply only to violent gang members. They did not expect him to target everyone in the country without legal status. <\/p>\n

Democratic governor-elect Mikie Sherrill\u2019s campaign provided a template for the party to follow by focusing on the same themes of affordability that once worked so well for Mr. Trump. \u201cPeople need to get back on message about being the party of the working class,\u201d Mr. Lora said.<\/p>\n

The view from this Pennsylvania county a year after its voters helped bring Trump to power<\/a><\/p>\n

Carlos Cruz, a New Jersey Republican strategist, pointed to basic tactical campaign decisions \u2013 such as producing Spanish-language advertisements \u2013 as the starting point for the Republicans to recapture gains among Latinos. Ms. Sherrill ran targeted advertising and get-out-the-vote operations to win back Latino voters, he said, while the GOP did not.<\/p>\n

Latinos remain very much in play, Mr. Cruz said: Even outside of the wide swings of the last two elections, Republicans have made steady gains with them over the past decade. He said this has to do in large part with Democrats prioritizing \u201cwoke\u201d issues such as diversity, equity and inclusion programs over bread-and-butter economic messaging.<\/p>\n

\u201cOccasionally, a football player will drop the ball before they cross into the end zone. Democrats who say \u2018we fixed it\u2019 after these most recent elections are risking that,\u201d said Mr. Cruz, who worked for a campaign group backing Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Attendees gather at the opening of the ‘Latino Americans for Trump’ office in Reading.Joe Lamberti\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

Some Latinos are willing to overlook the broad reach of Mr. Trump\u2019s immigration raids in order to stop mass migration across the U.S.-Mexico border.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t rejoice over families being broken apart, but we also don\u2019t rejoice over the disorder and chaos that ensues when you open the gates and let your house be flooded,\u201d said Frank Dole, 40, a Reading voter who immigrated from Cuba in 2004 after winning a green-card lottery. <\/p>\n

\u201cI went to Washington, D.C., a year ago and I couldn\u2019t go to the Abraham Lincoln Memorial without all kinds of immigrants selling products there. Who gives these people the right to take over a space?\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Pastor Tony P\u00e9rez, who leads a Hispanic Baptist church in Reading, said if Mr. Trump could create an exception for undocumented people who have been living and working in the U.S. for years without trouble, he could lock down Latino votes for the Republicans. \u201cThose who have been here 20 years or 15 years and are still illegal, if they\u2019re productive, give them some kind of status,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

So far, there is no sign the President is about to moderate his long-promised campaign to round up all undocumented people. And among Latino voters in Reading, Mr. Trump\u2019s repeated assurances that the cost of living is better than people think aren\u2019t getting much traction.<\/p>\n

Mikey Cabrera, a 42-year-old Uber driver and immigrant from the Dominican Republic, said Mr. Trump promised to fix the economy \u201cbut it\u2019s more expensive than the devil.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThings just keep going up and the money isn\u2019t moving, either,\u201d Mr. Cabrera said as he played dominoes with a group of friends on the sidewalk. \u201cNow, he wants to take away Medicaid from people. It\u2019s a disgrace, because poor people will die.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Juan Ojeda, attends a grand opening event at the ‘Latino Americans for Trump’…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[15462,128,130,129],"class_list":["post-44035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-pleasemod","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}