Libre has become adept at two critical skills: figuring out which Latino voters it wants to cast ballots and persuading them to do so. In both cases, it relies on a sophisticated voter database that it has been improving for more than a decade through petitions, surveys, classes and mailers. If most Latino voters regularly went to the polls, it would be harder for Libre to play the margins in a tight race. As it is, Latinos’ low turnout, large numbers and complicated political views make them a perfect electorate to cherry-pick for desired results.
Going into the 2020 election, progressives still cherished the fantasy that Latino voters across the country would line up behind Democrats en masse. Several Southwestern states with large Latino populations — Arizona, California, Nevada and New Mexico — did give their electoral votes to Biden. In Arizona, Democrats flipped a Senate seat. Even in Pennsylvania, Latinos’ nearly 300,000 votes might have been decisive in Biden’s win. But in several states where Democrats thought they would get a boost from Latino voters, they lost. Florida and Texas each went to Trump, just as they did in 2016. In Florida, Republicans also gained two House seats.
Matt A. Barreto, a co-founder of Latino Decisions, argues that Trump’s increase in Latino support was really a function of his exceptionally poor performance among Latinos in 2016. Trump’s anti-Mexican remarks and his scorched-earth tactics against two Cuban-American senators, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, during the Republican presidential primary alienated many Latino conservatives. The so-called surge in Latino votes for Trump in 2020 has simply put him back in line with the average performance of previous Republican presidential candidates.
Even so, the result offers clear evidence that Republicans were able to bring Latinos back into the fold during Trump’s time in office — a possibilty that Garza noted to me during our first meeting, shortly after the 2016 election. At the time, this seemed like a counterintuitive prediction, to say the least. But over the years, as I observed Libre’s work in several states, I saw how it was accomplished. Libre has been playing a long game: training activists, building relationships and nurturing a new generation of conservative Latino leaders. “This is a battle of ideas,” Garza told me, “because ideas have consequences, and the consequences can be devastating.”