How Harris is changing the way Democrats target Latino voters

Kamala Harris doesn't talk often about her Black and South Asian American identity. She's not talking to Latino voters about theirs either.

It's a major shift in how Democrats are targeting Latino voters this cycle — and a rebuke of the belief long held by many Democrats that overt appeals on race and progressive policies on immigration are key to winning Latino votes.

But after Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos over the last decade, Harris is attempting to chart a path away from identity politics, including in the way she's courting Latino voters in states like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

In those battlegrounds, Harris campaign ads targeted at both English- and Spanish-speaking Latinos talk about the economy, high drug prices and crime. Harris, in a Spanish-language radio interview that aired earlier this week, stressed her support for stationing more immigration agents at the border and cracking down on the flow of fentanyl into the U.S.

"The Harris campaign understands what we've been saying about Latinos for a long time, which is that we're not a monolith," said Matt Tuerk, the first Latino mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania, a predominantly Latino community that was a recent stop on the campaign's bus tour highlighting abortion rights. "We're all Americans, too. We have a lot of the same basic values that every American has."

Latino strategists on both sides of the aisle said the strategy reflects the diversity of Harris' staff, which includes campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez, who is the granddaughter of the labor leader and civil rights activist Cesar Chávez. They say it also reflects a candidate who has a first-hand understanding of what it means to be defined by others on the basis of race or gender. And then there's the politics: Immigration is one of Democrats' weak points, and Harris has adopted tough-on-the-border rhetoric as a counter to the immigration-focused attacks that Donald Trump has made a hallmark of his political campaigns since his first run for president in 2016.

"There is no question that this campaign is 180 degrees different with Latino voters than any other Democratic candidate in history," said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who focuses on Latinos and was a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. "The great irony — and I think it's a beautiful one — is that it took a Black woman to help the Democratic Party break its headlock they'd put themselves in on identity politics."

The strategists said the campaign's approach demonstrates a nuanced understanding of the Latino diaspora in the U.S. — which they argue has long been missing in Democratic politics — and how to message to various facets of it, from Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in Pennsylvania to Mexican Americans in Arizona and Nevada. For instance, the campaign recently cut an ad with Puerto Rican radio host Victor Martinez, who is from Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, that will air on TV and radio in Spanish, but only in the Philadelphia, Allentown and Reading media markets.

"They care about the diasporas and looking at this from a diaspora strategy, as opposed to just an overall, monolithic strategy that we often hear discussed and unfortunately played out in a lot of different areas," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO. "So I think that as time goes on, we're going to see the results of that more refined approach."

Harris' shift away from progressive messaging on the border is in part a continuation of President Joe Biden's approach. Following the failure of a bipartisan border security bill in Congress, he infuriated many progressives with executive actions to clamp down on migrants seeking asylum .

But Harris has been even more strident in her tough rhetoric on the border. Her stump speech touts how she "took on transnational criminal organizations" as the attorney general of California, a border state, and she often talks about her support for the border security bill Trump's Republican allies in Congress scuttled. One of her first ads , "Tougher," promises she will hire "thousands" more border agents if elected president.

It has come at a cost. Some Latino activists on the left are frustrated by Harris' border rhetoric and don't believe she has defined clearly enough what she plans to do on immigration reform beyond an "earned pathway to citizenship." And they warn it has the potential to damage her at the ballot box.

"The Democratic Party has backslid into this neocon conversation on, 'Immigrants are bad and they bring drugs.' At this point, there is very little difference on Democrats and Republicans when it comes to immigration, and I think it is a drastic misstep for Democrats up and down the ballot," said Leo Murrieta, Nevada director for the immigrant rights group Make the Road Action, which has endorsed Harris. "Quite frankly, this rhetoric on the border dampens that excitement. It won't put out the flame, but it's definitely not feeding the fire."

Harris is still laboring to make up ground with Latinos, after Trump made inroads with them in the last presidential election. Though she has greatly improved her standing from where President Joe Biden was with Latinos before he dropped out of the race, she still trails Biden's 2020 numbers, including in a Entravision poll released Wednesday that found Harris leading Trump 55 percent to 33 percent. In 2020, 61 percent of Latino voters cast ballots for Biden, and Democrats did even better with Latinos before that. Hillary Clinton carried 66 percent of the Latino vote in 2016, while Barack Obama won more than 70 percent of the Latino vote in 2012.

Harris does talk about immigration on the campaign trail. And when she does, it tends to be in front of Latino audiences. During an interview on Spanish-language radio that aired on Tuesday, she decried former Trump's family separation policies while promising to "take care of" Dreamers and "provide a pathway to citizenship for those who have earned it." And on Wednesday, in a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute in Washington, D.C., she laid into Trump over his call for "mass deportations."

Carlos Odio, co-founder of Equis Research, said it's reflective of the "more balanced" approach to immigration Harris is trying to take that is "about acknowledging both the need for order at the border and a humane, practical approach to dealing with people who are already here."

"[It] contrasts well against Trump's more blustery proposals, especially when you come to like mass deportation of people who have been working and living here for decades," Odio said. "Those are incredibly unpopular."

Odio said there is a "narrow but critical" group of persuadable Latino voters that are "softly choosing one side or the other" but are being "heavily cross-pressured" by the campaigns.

And a Harris aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about campaign strategy, said those persuadable Latinos want to hear more on border security.

"Just based on the data I've seen, you still see a fairly high percent of Latinos who are still getting to know her," said Harris pollster Matt Barreto. "The longer that campaign goes on and she takes her case to the Latino community, I would expect we'll continue to see two to three point increases every two to three weeks."

This weekend, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris' running mate, will be in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley at a Latino-focused rally with actors Anthony Ramos and Liza Colón-Zayas. It's a continuation of the campaign's Hispanic Heritage Month events, which also included Chavez Rodriguez, Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) attending a super middleweight fight between Canelo Alvarez and Edgar Berlanga in Las Vegas.

The Harris campaign is devoting $3 million to new ads on Spanish-language radio over the next month. And it is specifically focusing on sports programming, which is where the campaign believes it can best reach a portion of persuadable Latino voters that are not yet engaged, the campaign aide said. And the campaign also recently launched a "Latinos con Harris-Walz" WhatsApp channel.

"The campaign calls all the time and says, 'Where can you go? When can you go? We want to send you out there. We want to make sure our surrogates are on the road,'" said Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-Calif.). "For Latinos, it's all about touches and outreach."

Still, Harris allies in Congress acknowledge Harris has a difficult balance to strike in courting the Latino vote.