Why Latino Men in Arizona Are Holding Out on Harris

Before the fight began, Rep. Ruben Gallego was testing his form against a boxing dummy for an audience on TikTok. Nearby, aspects of his biography (“El Marine”) and attacks on Kari Lake, his opponent in Arizona’s Senate race (“La Mentirosa” — the liar) were rendered in the form of colorful loteria cards — a Mexican answer to Bingo — scattered on folding tables in the corner of a massive strip mall parking lot.

It was a Saturday night in the heavily Hispanic Phoenix suburb of Glendale, Arizona. A mostly male crowd sat on plastic chairs and coolers facing two large screens, eating tacos and and listening to a mariachi band as they awaited the start of a prize fight featuring the Mexican middleweight boxer Canelo Álvarez. Gallego’s “Fighting for Arizona” signs covered the windows of the boxing academy hosting the event, but there was not much else to signal this was a campaign event.

Gallego, who’s represented this area in Congress for a decade, argued to me that many of the men who showed up at an event like this are unlikely to absorb political information through traditional channels. Instead, they get much of their news filtered through messengers hostile to the Democratic Party: their co-workers, and often, their bosses. “Who do you think working-class Latino men work for?” he asked. “Working-class white men are Republican, and they’re hyper-political.” Gallego is trying to counter this lunchbox politicking from the other side — putting on a non-political event where his brand of Democratic politics can seep through. His campaign picked up the tab for the tacos. But he did not make a speech. “It’s a very soft sell,” he told me. “If you speak, they’re going to get turned off. They’re not going to listen.”

Janette Flores, sitting in the last row with her husband, told me the difference in how the two of them approach politics is straightforward. “Men think in terms of being business owners,” she said, “whereas for me, I know we’re a working middle-class family.” She clarified: Flores, 34, votes for Democrats, and her husband, 39-year-old Armando Villegas, generally supports Republicans. Flores smiled and looked at Villegas. “We get along,” he said.

Arizona boasts the largest Latino population of any swing state, and Hispanic voters are poised to account for roughly a quarter of the electorate, more than double their share a generation ago. Latino men in particular may prove to be especially important in this election, as the group that is most up for grabs and the most unpredictable in terms of turnout. Latina women have consistently chosen Democrats by wider margins than their male counterparts, and they’ve also turned out to vote at higher rates.

And with 10 days to go before the election, it is becoming clear Latino men are also a particular vulnerability for Vice President Kamala Harris. Though Harris led former President Donald Trump by nearly 20 percentage points in a recent Suffolk University/USA Today poll of Latino likely voters in Arizona, Latino men under 50 leaned heavily in the other direction, supporting Trump by 51 percent to Harris’ 39 percent among 18- to 34-year-olds, and by 57 percent to 37 percent among 35- to 49-year-olds. “Looking at the data, it was all about inflation/economy and immigration,” said David Paleologos, who led the survey. Paleologos sees that frustration with the Biden-era economy creating a vulnerability for Harris that is especially pronounced with Latinos in the state. “She’s 7 percent shy of where she needs to be,” he said.

Winning over Latino men in Arizona, then, and perhaps across the country, could come down to which candidate they trust to take the helm of the economy after years of high growth and low unemployment, but also bruising price increases that have made people yearn for the days before the pandemic. Harris’ pitch to these voters focuses on housing affordability, college affordability and pledges to crack down on corporate price gouging — a forward-looking policy pitch anchored by her personal story of a middle-class upbringing that included a summer working at McDonald’s.

The Trump campaign is betting on connecting voters’ frustrations over the cost of living to Harris’ record as vice president — and reminding them of how their wallets felt in 2019, eliding the crash that accompanied the pandemic in his last year in office.

For Trump, landing an economic appeal may depend on keeping the other parts of his record out of the frame. Though both Flores and her husband plan to vote in November, he’s the only one who’s still undecided. “I always thought of my issues as Republican issues,” Villegas told me, citing gun rights and support for veterans. He said Trump’s conduct after losing the 2020 election had made it hard to weigh his candidacy based on anything else. “I wanted to vote Republican, but not Trump,” he says. “I just kind of got tired of hearing about ‘that stolen election.’”

More than one Democratic pundit I spoke to cited “machismo” in answer to questions about Trump’s appeal among Latino men. It’s a retreat to fuzzy cultural explanations that Geraldo Cadava, a historian at Northwestern University whose books include The Hispanic Republican , called lazy. “I think the bottom line is, Democratic consultants, Democratic politicians, they just have such a hard time accepting that Latinos can just be conservative,” said Cadava — favoring charter schools or lower taxes or Republican leadership on the economy for the same reasons as many white voters. Likewise, he sees the most compelling explanations for the Latino gender gap in basic structures of American society, like educational attainment (more Latina women attending college), or in the fact that Latino men, especially in a state like Arizona, are over-represented in professions that are especially friendly to Trump — military, police, border patrol and construction.

Some polls of a Biden-Trump rematch earlier this year suggested Trump was on track to accelerate shifts among Latinos in battleground states, reaching 41 percent support to Biden’s 46 percent, for example, in a May survey of battleground states by Equis Research. Biden’s withdrawal and Harris’ entry into the race seemed to undo much of that shift. A July survey of the same states showed Harris with a 19-point advantage over Trump among Latinos, similar to Biden’s margins in 2020. Part of this reversal owes to the now-altered contrast between candidates — with Trump now on the wrong end of comparisons of age and vigor. Fernand Amandi, a Miami pollster who has conducted polls in battleground states for both parties this cycle, also cited the Harris campaign’s aggressive focus on reaching middle- and working-class voters with a commitment to “make sure that things are done in the economy to help them, whether it be on prices, affordability of housing or opportunity.”

Parables about “the American Dream” abound in presidential campaigns, and never more so than when courting the votes of naturalized citizens or the children of immigrants. From the debate stage in September, Harris described how her immigrant mother “worked and saved and was able to buy our first home when I was a teenager.” Following the debate, I called Gerald de la O, a two-time Trump voter who manages a hotel outside Phoenix, whom I’d first met in July, days after Harris entered the race. At the time, de la O seemed to view the vice president as a caricature of a California Democrat, running on attack lines to fire up the base — “‘Republicans, all they want to do is burn books and take your abortion away,’” he said. But he told me he’d been surprised by Harris’ level of preparation and overall coherence onstage. “Her economic plan to give the middle class their money back sounded pretty good.” More broadly, Harris’ efforts to reach out to Latinos in battleground states have included a slate of events where allies like Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra have made the case for her.

Bettina Nava, a former aide to Senator John McCain now working with Republicans for Harris, said she’d seen a version of this shift with a number of undecided voters, who didn’t have much exposure to Harris before she entered the presidential race this summer. “The Latino men I’m talking to have now started to use terminology like, ‘I see her as someone who could be commander in chief,’” she said. She also credited the Harris campaign’s work to undercut Trump’s claims about his economic record. “Those myths seem easy to understand — they’re here to help small businesses. They tout that the economy was better and the Trump tax cuts were for working people. They weren’t.”

Still, these appeals are proving insufficient to undercut Trump’s appeal in Arizona with Latino men, and young Latino men in particular. Cadava noted that some voters may not hear a vast difference between Harris’ messaging about Latino upward mobility and Trump “in full pandering mode.” Whatever the vitriol and incoherence of much of Trump’s rhetoric, when it comes to Latinos and the economy, Cadava said there’s a trope he’s come to expect with every presidential campaign. “At the end of the Trump years, Trump was saying, ‘Latino unemployment went down, Latino median income went up, rates of homeownership went up. … Latinos were the fastest growing group of business owners in the country.’ And I feel like every president says that four years on, and you know, now Harris is saying it.”

Some pundits have argued , too, that Harris’ outreach to Latino men is too late. Earlier this month, her campaign announced an Hombres con Harris initiative that would have her meet with Latino men at Latino-owned businesses, union halls and community venues in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. The plan drew comparisons to Gallego’s own outreach to Latino men, but also criticism for coming just one month before the election.

The fight night watch party is, in some ways, a version of the strategy the Trump campaign used heavily in the early stages of this cycle. “The Trump campaign was making extraordinary, Herculean efforts to cultivate Hispanic male voters,” Amandi said, both through outreach at MMA fights, crypto and video-gaming events, where Hispanic men are overrepresented, and in campaign messaging framed around the idea of strength vs. weakness: “Trump was vital. Biden was frail.” The longtime Arizona Democratic political strategist Mario Diaz compared Trump to the allure of a big red pickup truck — the promise of power by proxy.

Jaime Florez, Hispanic communications director for the RNC and the Trump campaign, came to Phoenix in September on the heels of a sweep through Nevada, wearing the same daily uniform: a crisp white button-down embroidered with the logo of the Trump campaign. “You have no idea how many thumbs up people have given me,” he said, pointing to the all-caps “TRUMP” above his heart in red and blue thread. Florez said the campaign’s pitch to Hispanic men is much the same as it is for the rest of the electorate, reprising Ronald Reagan’s famously devastating line from a 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” But he also repeated the now-familiar argument that Latinos’ religiosity and commitment to family offers a natural pull toward the Republican party.

“Hispanic men,” Jesse Romero, who runs the group Catholics for Trump, told me, “want to be able to work. They don’t want government overreach. They want to be left alone.”

Of course, it’s hard to explain badgering the Fed chair or instituting across-the-board tariffs as features of fiscal conservatism and government restraint. But to the extent Latino men see a freer path to prosperity under Trump, it may also be bolstered by the endless malleability of Trump’s in and out groups: He’s for you, as long as you support him.

Trump’s own references to Latinos often alternate between line items in his economic record (“We achieved record Hispanic unemployment”) and a winking distinction between the voters who might support him and the immigrants supposedly terrorizing their neighborhoods. “Arizona’s got tremendous problems with illegals coming in from all over the world and just pouring in and you know, by the way, taking Hispanic jobs,” he said at a recent rally in Tucson, before pivoting to rehash a debunked talking point about gang activity at an apartment complex in the Denver suburbs. “When you look at Springfield, Ohio, when you look at Aurora, in Colorado,” he said, “the Venezuelans have taken over.”

When I asked Florez how communities with often intimate, and recent, experiences of immigration would respond to similar rhetoric, he dismissed concerns about the impacts of Trump’s promised “whole of government” deportation force. “The first group that is going to be benefited by a mass deportation resolution to the immigration problem are the Hispanics that have been in this country legally for the last 40, 50 years,” he said, in fluid English that still bore the traces of his native Colombia, echoing Trump’s Tucson speech. “We all know that I’m an immigrant, right? I understand when the president [Trump] is talking about immigrants, he’s not talking about me.”

Whom, exactly, is he talking about?

The overwhelming majority of U.S. Latinos are native born, including many with no direct connection to immigration beyond the borderlands aphorism that “the border crossed us.” And yet, there’s some evidence that Trump’s gains among Hispanic voters from 2016 to 2020 came disproportionately from a different group, with more recent ties to immigration.

“I can tell you that, like, every Latino Republican I’ve talked to feels the way that Jaime Florez does,” Cadava told me. For all the coverage of Trump’s anti-immigrant statements, going back to his 2015 campaign announcement (Mexico’s “not sending their best”), there’s another, more aspirational line in that speech that isn’t as often remembered: “They’re not sending you,” Trump said twice, pointing at the crowd.

The surest way to get out of Trump’s “them” is to see oneself in his “us.”