Vice President Kamala Harris has scored a historic endorsement from the country’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights group, which could signal a significant shift in her campaign against Donald Trump, who has successfully attracted Latino voters.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, will endorse Harris on Friday through its political arm, the LULAC Adelante PAC, according to CBS. This will be its first presidential endorsement since the organization’s founding in 1929.
The LULAC Adelante PAC’s chairman, Domingo Garcia, gave a statement about the endorsement to CBS. “Vice President Harris has proven herself a stalwart ally and advocate of the Latino community throughout her career and is the right choice for the continued prosperity of Latinos in the United States and the future of our country,” Garcia said. “The politics of hate-mongering and scapegoating Latinos and immigrants must be stopped!”
LULAC’s endorsement comes just as Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, arrive in Arizona, a swing state where nearly one in four voters is Latino. The PAC’s board members are expected to join Harris before her rally in Nevada on Saturday to officially declare their endorsement.
Since the last election, the Democratic Party has lost significant ground with Latino voters. A 2020 poll showed that a significant percentage of Latino voters supported Biden over Trump, 61 percent to 36 percent.
Cut to four years later, and a recent Pew Research Poll found that the two candidates were tied among Latino voters, at 36 percent. Pew also found that nearly a quarter of Latino registered voters supported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent run for president, accounting for roughly 9.5 million votes that could potentially be claimed by either major-party candidate.
Despite Trump’s hateful rhetoric about immigrants, the former president has found inroads with Latino voters, who view him as being good for the economy, among other issues.
It’s clear that one endorsement won’t be enough for Harris to appeal to Latino voters around the country, but it marks a positive direction for Harris’s recent swell of enthusiasm and support. Harris has also gained the support of LULAC’s large grassroots network, which stretches throughout key battleground states.
For Harris, grassroots campaigning could make all the difference among this critical voting block in swing states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as Southwest states like Arizona, where Biden won by fewer than 10,000 votes.
