In recent elections, some Latino voters are shifting away from the Republican Party. Those votes helped flip seats in Virginia and could be an important factor in next year’s midterm elections.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger is not the only Democrat who flipped a seat in Virginia’s elections this year. Democrats also won in other local elections, including by big margins in areas with significant numbers of Latino voters. Now, that’s a big change from the 2024 presidential election, when those same parts of Virginia shifted slightly toward Republicans. Margaret Barthel of member station WAMU reports on what’s behind those changing margins.
MARGARET BARTHEL, BYLINE: Virginia’s House of Delegates District 22 is about an hour west of D.C., where suburban sprawl gives way to farms. It’s a political battleground. President Trump won it in 2016 and lost it to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in 2024 by about a single point.
Last month, though, the margin between the political parties looked different. Delegate-elect Elizabeth Guzman, a Democrat, won the seat by 10 percentage points, ousting incumbent Republican Ian Lovejoy, a moderate conservative. Guzman thinks part of the reason for her win is the district’s Latino voters – some of whom supported President Trump just last year – are now wary of giving their vote to a GOP candidate again. That’s something she heard out door-knocking.
ELIZABETH GUZMAN: The first thing, they would look at me, it’s like, you a Republican or Democrat? And I said, I’m a Democrat. OK, because we don’t want to vote for any more Republicans anymore. They betrayed us and we are not happy.
BARTHEL: Data shows 14% of the population here identifies as Hispanic. The shifting opinion Guzman heard on the campaign trail is reflective of what happened in other major races in November, and it comes at a moment when 70% of Latinos disapprove of the job Trump is doing. That’s according to a recent Pew Research poll.
GUZMAN: No. 1, we are under attack here.
BARTHEL: Guzman, who is a social worker in her day job, says the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement is causing widespread fear where she lives, including in her own family. She said she’d made sure that her kids had real IDs to prove that they are citizens if they get stopped by ICE. Republicans ignore those worries at their own peril, she says.
GUZMAN: Our president is hurting the country and is hurting us. And none of them wanted to recognize that.
BARTHEL: In neighboring Loudoun County, voter Jose Ramiro Cruz has similar concerns.
JOSE RAMIRO CRUZ: I am really upset about the label that we Latinos have been given in terms of being criminals or being, you know, uneducated and all that.
BARTHEL: Cruz said he volunteered this year for Democrats because of his anger at Republicans for that rhetoric. He’s also worried about the economy. Marvin Hernandez managed the Virginia campaign for CASA in Action, a progressive national political group that organizes Black and Latino voters.
MARVIN HERNANDEZ: We came across some voters that they said, they stated – right? – I voted for Trump ’cause I thought that the economy will improve. But that hasn’t changed.
BARTHEL: Hernandez said CASA in Action and other Democratic-aligned groups capitalized on voter frustrations with Trump, spending money on Spanish-language ads. Srilekha Palle, a conservative political consultant in Northern Virginia, admits that investment paid off.
SRILEKHA PALLE: I think what Democrats does well is they would go to, let’s say, Telemundo and advertise like there is no other day. Republicans will not even have one ad in there.
BARTHEL: She says her own party missed an opportunity to emphasize Virginia’s economic strength under a Republican governor. Sam Shirazi, a Virginia political analyst, points out Democrats’ focus on affordability as the core of their campaign comes just a year after Republicans did the same thing to win the presidential race.
SAM SHIRAZI: We’re kind of entering an era where perhaps some of those voters will go back and forth and they aren’t necessarily loyal to either party.
BARTHEL: But for now, Shirazi said the swing left among Latino voters in Virginia is a warning sign for Republicans in the midterms next year.
For NPR News, I’m Margaret Barthel in Arlington, Virginia.
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