Latino voters could flip Arizona from red to blue
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Politico Magazine reported that a new POLITICO/AARP poll shows Democrats ahead by 7 points in generic ballots in both the governor’s and Senate races in Arizona. But to actually win statewide elections in this highly ethnically polarized state, Democrats will need to juice turnout among Latinos, who have tended to vote at lower rates than other voters. And not just in purplish Arizona: All across the U.S. Southwest, Latino voters could be the key to flipping Republican strongholds from red to blue, if only the Democratic Party can figure out how to get enough of them to the polls. Solve that mystery, and even a GOP-dominated state like Texas could suddenly be in play.
One answer to the Democrats’ puzzle, says Joseph Garcia, director of the Latino Public Policy Center at Arizona State’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy, is that many Latinos don’t realize their potential power at the ballot box. Latinos think of Arizona as a red state, “so they’ve tended not to vote,” Garcia says. The question, in the Trump era, is whether that assumption is safe any longer.
Yet even as Latinos now make up an increasingly large percentage of the population in Arizona (currently estimated at 30 percent), their participation—and representation — in politics has lagged. About a quarter of Arizona’s registered voters are Latino — and, in most elections, only 18 percent to 20 percent of ballots are cast by Latinos.
Activists and Democratic partisans are counting on young Latinos to spur their older counterparts to visit the voting booth—in many cases, for the first time. Take “Dreamers,” the young people who were brought to the country illegally as children. They, of course, can’t vote—they’re not citizens. But Joseph Garcia of Morrison Institute says they’re very politically active, pleading with older Latinos in their community to register and then vote.
So Arizona does look increasingly like a battleground after years of wishful thinking on the left, and all it took was the surprise election of a certain Manhattan real estate mogul. But it’s going to take an unprecedented amount of Latino turnout for Democrats to win the big statewide races, and it’s likely to get ugly.