Why Kamala Harris Is Suddenly Surging Among Latinos

One of Joe Biden’s many electoral problems before he dropped out of the presidential race was his waning popularity with Latino voters. In 2020, Republicans had made surprising inroads among this large and complex group in some states, and while Democrats had reversed many of those gains in the 2022 midterms, Biden’s unpopularity threatened the fragile status quo. Then came Kamala Harris, whose entry into the race has moved the needle among many voting blocs, but Latinos in particular. To figure out why, I spoke with Carlos Odio, a co-founder of Equis Research, a data and research firm focusing on the Latino electorate that conducts well-respected polls. Before that, Odio worked at a progressive nonprofit and in the Obama White House. We discussed why Harris has turned the tide, at least for now, among Latino voters, the effect of RFK Jr.’s exit from the race, and how Democrats abandoned “Duolingo politics.”

Equis’s most recent findings showed Kamala Harris dramatically outperforming Joe Biden’s recent results among Latino voters, while still not quite matching his final 2020 numbers. This may be a basic question, but why do you think Harris is doing so well among this bloc suddenly? Is it more that Biden was just so personally unpopular, or that younger people in general across the country are breaking for her? What do you think is the dominant reason?
When you look at who Kamala Harris picked up almost immediately, it was Democratic-leaning Latinos. Almost 60% of them had voted for Biden in 2020, and the rest had not voted in 2020. It was a younger voter: 60% of those she picked up were under the age of 40. And so you’re talking about voters who simply were not happy with the choices in front of them. A third of them were double haters — they disliked both Biden and Trump. They didn’t like the choices in front of them. It felt like a Sophie’s choice.

They had been beleaguered by crisis over the previous two years, right? You come out of the pandemic, and it’s high prices, it’s school shootings, it’s wars, and it’s a border situation that’s moving into the cities. And so they weren’t happy with the status quo and didn’t feel confident that the president was the person who could lead them out of that crisis. At the same time, they had Trump, who they had major concerns about — still do — but could say, “Well, in comparison, at least I had more money in my pocket when he was president.”

There was real cross-pressure, which meant that many of them were simply on the sidelines. Others were Trump-curious. Some of them moved all the way to Trump. But when you offer option C, which is “Let’s turn the page, let’s have a new generation of leadership,” it is an outlet, right? It is an escape. And one that brings a great relief and excitement for someone who was already more inclined to vote for Democrats.

You’re talking about turning the page, but of course Kamala Harris has been Joe Biden’s vice president for three and a half years and helped preside over many of the issues that you just mentioned that were bugging Latino voters. So I’m trying to figure out if there’s any concrete policy points she’s putting out that are winning over these voters. Or is it more, for lack of a better word, vibes? 
Yeah, look, it is vibes, but I don’t demean vibes. I just think that elections are less about values. The dirty secret of democracy is that voters — including swing voters, including swing Latinos — are not sitting down and considering two policy agendas, and then opting for the one that they prefer the most. The reality is that you’re thinking, Who cares more about people like me? Who, when it comes time to make decisions, has me in mind?

Which is something that Biden polled well on in 2020. But by now, he may be seen as too old to care properly.
Anytime you have a crisis, the natural instinct, especially among voters who are not especially partisan, is to punish the incumbent.

If they weren’t doing it to a greater extent, it’s because of concerns about Trump. But that’s a natural instinct. Punish the incumbent. In fact, a lot of what you’re seeing globally has been a movement to punish the incumbent regardless of ideology. And in addition, you had a leader who — it wasn’t just age, it was a sense of a lack of energy or vitality to be able to actually steer us out of the ditch.

He was particularly flagging among certain blocks of voters, younger voters generally, but younger Black and Latino voters especially. 
Yeah, I would say it was a kind of voter who was never especially partisan.

Not the core base.
Right. It was people who did not grow up hardcore Democrats. And I think this is a misunderstanding, perhaps, that some have about what a swing Latino is. A swing Latino is someone who, all things being equal, tends to break for Democrats, but who is open to individual Republicans because they don’t have that hardcore allegiance to the party. It’s not central to their identity.

And these voters care most about the issues general voters care most about, like the economy and immigration, I imagine? 
100%. The main thing is the economy. Of course, the economy’s never just the economy. The economy is also cultural. The economy is, “Do you understand where me and my family are coming from? Do you fight for people like me?” And so the basic snapshot that this kind of voter who doesn’t pay close attention to politics has is of the Democrats being more caring and welcoming to people like them and Republicans looking out more for the rich and powerful. But of course circumstances can toggle that a little bit.

Is this shift you’re seeing more concentrated in certain states than others, and among people who hail from particular countries more than others? Like more among Mexican Americans than Cuban Americans, for example? 
We are foremost evangelists of the idea that Latinos are not a monolith. There are so many different divisions, whether it’s country of origin, whether it’s generation, whether it’s language, that divide the community’s attitudes. But we are still a group.

The Latino identity still carries a lot of weight as you are making decisions in American politics. And the kind of movement we have been seeing in the Trump era cuts across the traditional lines of the traditional divisions. Similarly, the movement for Harris right now has cut across the demographic subgroups. It is not specific to any one place. In fact, we even see it in Florida, which is the one state where the Democratic decline continued after 2020 — whereas it had been halted in the more competitive states of Nevada and Arizona, even Pennsylvania or Georgia. Shifts right now are fairly uniform across states, across country of origin, and so on.

RFK Jr. dropped out of the presidential race on Friday. His fairly strong numbers in places like Nevada and Arizona, at least a few months ago, were one reason why Biden’s numbers in those places were so tepid. He has been declining in polls recently, and the Harris team doesn’t seem very worried about him dropping out. But do you think it’s a problem for them that he has endorsed Trump? Where do you think his support will go? 
Kennedy was polling well with Latinos at a certain point at the height of discontent. With Harris, we saw him polling at his lowest numbers this cycle.

Which is still nine percent in your latest poll. 
He’s at nine percent, that’s right. At some point, he was as high as 19. Nine percent is his lowest, but still fairly high. And he just added another element of unpredictability. In our latest poll, he was, for the first time, pulling more from Trump than Harris. But overall, if you are Democrats, you are happy to have him off the ticket because you already have enough dynamism. It was adding another element of dynamism that you didn’t quite need. You need people to understand this as a two-way choice.

Is it fair to say his popularity when he was polling at his highest had more to do with people hating the other two candidates than it did about his own appeal?
You’re absolutely right. Kennedy was an option for people who didn’t like the Sophie’s choice, with a name that felt like it was creating a permission structure for someone who is more inclined toward Democrats.

As long as they didn’t Google him.
That’s right. And in fact, once they learned more information about him, it shifted, and what was left behind was a more Trumpian vote.

Democrats have taken a lot of flack for not doing enough to reach Latino voters over the years. What have you made of what you’ve seen so far from the Harris campaign in terms of outreach so far? They’ve created a bilingual WhatsApp channel for Latino voters, I read.
So much of this is not rocket science — so much of this is getting back to basics. Winning voters is about showing up, showing up physically, something that the Harris campaign is able to do because she’s out there on the trail morning to night in a way that her predecessor could not be. She is showing up virtually and meeting people where they’re at in terms of where they get news, where they’re sharing information, whether that’s WhatsApp, whether that’s YouTube — actually, a plurality of Latinos get their news and information from YouTube more than they get it from TV.

So I would say the Harris campaign is off to a very strong start. They’ve also understood that when it comes to Latino voters, Latinos do not assume they’re invited to the party. When you put out a message, Latinos have enough of a history to know that it’s not always addressed to them. So you invite them to the party. But Latinos don’t want to be invited to a separate party, they want to be invited to the same one as everybody else. They want to be included within the larger American story. They want to lean into their Americanness. And I think that’s been one of the strengths of the Harris campaign out of the gate, and even in the speeches you saw in the convention. And even in her first Latino-focused ad, an ad that ran not just in Spanish but in English and never used the word “Latino,” but was clearly an invitation to Latinos while not being othering or exclusionary of others.

It’s not Tim Kaine speaking Spanish at rallies anymore. 
Yeah, it’s not Duolingo politics. It’s speaking with cultural fluency.

Harris has been tarred by Republicans for being the “border czar” under Biden. Do you think that could do major damage to her campaign? Views on immigration run the gamut among Latinos, as they do everyone else. 
Look, I would’ve said it was one of her greatest liabilities, if not her main liability, and yet Trump handed her a way out. Incumbents across the western world have had to deal with migration crises. It’s part of what swept the conservatives out in the UK. But Trump gave her the gift of shooting down a bipartisan border bill. We heard a lot about that border bill during the convention, because what it allowed Harris to say is that Democrats want solutions at the border. Maybe we always haven’t taken the right steps, but we have shown that we’re willing to reach across the aisle and do things even that anger our base in order to bring order at the border, something that all Americans, including Latinos want. And Donald Trump torpedoed it because he wants chaos at the border because he thinks it benefits him politically.

It’s always hard to figure out how much that Congressional stuff resonates or whether it’s just noise to people.
Yeah, I will say we’ve tested immigration messaging, and you’d be surprised.It is her most effective counter argument to this. Listen, at the end of the day, Democrats don’t want this to be a debate about the border. If it’s a debate simply about the border, it’s a debate about law and order. And that’s not the main conversation Democrats want to be having. But what they do want to do is not just walk away from the issue, but actually punch back, stop the bleeding on it, and be able to pivot to other debates, even within immigration. Part of what Trump has also done, I think, is overreached on this issue by starting to talk about the mass deportation of people who’ve been living and working here for decades. That is incredibly unpopular among Latinos.

And among everyone.
I was going to say — among Latinos and everyone else. If you’re saying “Let’s staunch the bleeding on our current issue, let’s help cities that are currently overwhelmed” — yeah, people have a different tack. But the moment you start saying, “Let’s take someone who’s been in this country working for 15 years, is married to an American, has American children — let’s rip them out of their community and send them out of the country,” there’s very little support for that. Trump is taking things that, in the hands of a more disciplined and capable campaign, might have worked, but because he empowers people like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and the Heritage Foundation, he’s coming out with these wild kinds of extreme out-of-touch ideas that are helping strengthen the Democratic case.

You said Democrats didn’t want this to be a conversation about law and order, but they leaned into the theme at the convention, which felt like an attempt to neutralize that issue.
Campaigns are about picking the right fights. When the other side punches, you punch back. But then every chance you get, you then try to pivot and pick the fight you want to have, whether that’s on healthcare, abortion, social security, prescription drug prices, what have you.

When’s your next poll coming out?
We’re in the field right now. I’d say what’s interesting for all of the movement, Kamala Harris still is not fully defined.

What makes you say that?
Well, she’s only burst into the scene in the last few weeks in a real way. She’s already captured a lot of the vote, as we’ve said. The voters who are left just simply haven’t heard that much about her. They haven’t got an opportunity, really because they’re not the ones who are going to tune in to 12 hours of a Democratic convention.

But they might see two minutes on YouTube.
They might see clips, especially if shared by those around them. There are voters who overwhelmingly take their cues from people around them because they’re not especially political. This is why Harris’ new social media dominance actually is important, because it helps shape impressions of her.

She’s still lagging behind where Biden was in 2020 among Latino voters, but it seems like there’s an opportunity to match those numbers. She’s got running room.
Oh, she still has running room for sure. And 15% of Latinos are in one of our persuadable categories, right? There’s still a lot of unknowns, like the fact that at least 30% of Latinos who vote in 2024 won’t have voted in 2020. That segment is a hard segment to pin down, especially because many of them are deciding whether to vote at the same time they’re deciding who to vote for — as much as we try to put up this false wall between mobilization and persuasion. And so you don’t know which of them are going to turn out. And they are the swingiest element of the electorate more broadly, are these low propensity irregular voters who don’t have fully formed partisan identities.

And they’re hardest to poll as well.
For sure. So there are lots of unknowns. I think so much of what you’re seeing now from her campaign really is about reassurance, because at the end of the day, voters want to be, especially swing voters at this point want to be on the side of the feel good campaign, of the hopeful campaign, of the joyful campaign, but they need to be reassured that the kind of change they’re voting for is not a bad kind of change. It’s the good kind of change.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.