With the release of her first funded advertisements for the 2022 election season, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto and her supporters made it obvious who they were targeting: the state’s quarter-million Latino voters, who are a vital swing vote.
Siga Protegiendo” — “Keep Protecting,” according to the slogan of Majority Forward, the nonprofit arm of the Senate Democratic super PAC. The commercial will broadcast on Telemundo in Las Vegas under the slogan “Keep Protecting.” It praises Cortez Masto for her efforts as Nevada’s attorney general and as a member of the Senate to “combat sex trafficking networks” and “defend our children,” among other accomplishments.
The “Lead the Fight” advertisement has Cortez Masto conversing with Gladis Blanco, a Las Vegas hotel employee, in another scene.
“When Covid initially struck, there was a lot to be concerned about,” Blanco explains as she pushes a trolley full of clean towels along a corridor. “My first and foremost concern was the safety of my family, and I was quite concerned about earning a livelihood.”
It is not the first time that Democrats in Nevada have placed a high premium on the Latino population. Historically, Latino voters in the state have served as the backbone of the political machine constructed by Harry Reid, the late Nevada senator and former majority leader, who died in December of cancer. In addition to tourism, the state’s large service-sector labour organisations are intimately tied to Latino political organisations.
Allies of Cortez Masto, the first Latina to serve in the United States Senate, also point out that reaching out to Latino voters at this early stage in an election cycle is unusual for politicians. Their experience, they claim, demonstrates the necessity of delivering compelling arguments to members of the Hispanic community throughout a campaign — rather than simply at the conclusion.
According to Arturo Vargas, the chief executive of the NALEO Educational Fund, a national civic engagement group, “Nevada is a place where you need to have a multilingual strategy,” he stated. He pointed out that employees in the service sector had been hit particularly hard during the Great Recession, and that they had suffered again at the height of the coronavirus outbreak, when Las Vegas casinos were forced to close their doors. He said that it was only natural for Democrats to address their economic issues.
Republicans, on the other hand, see a chance to take away a significant number of those votes, and they are doing it in a manner that might have national political ramifications. According to the most recent Wall Street Journal survey, this may be the case. According to the survey, Republicans had a 9-point edge over Democrats in the so-called congressional generic ballot among Latino voters – which means that respondents indicated they would prefer to elect a Republican to Congress by a 9-point majority if they had a choice.
There are many reasons to be dubious of these precise figures, including the following: The survey included just 165 Latino voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 7.6 percentage points. The poll was conducted online. In addition, Latino voters are not a homogeneous group; for example, the anti-socialism arguments that have resonated with Cuban Americans in Florida are very different from the ideas centred on employment and health care that have resonated with Mexican Americans elsewhere.
Other evidence, on the other hand, shows that Democrats should be worried…. Hispanics, according to John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster who worked on The Journal’s survey as well as a previous one in December, are “a swing vote that we’re going to have to battle for.”
According to a poll conducted last year by the Democratically connected business Equis Labs, Democrats have lost support among key Latino areas during the 2020 race. Exit polling data from the 2020 presidential election revealed that Donald Trump had made gains among Latino voters in Nevada, despite the fact that he had lost the state in that year’s presidential election. Moreover, our colleague Jennifer Medina recently observed that the Republican Party’s advantage among Latino voters in South Texas has maintained its momentum.
“It’s not in doubt that the Democrats will win a majority of the Hispanic vote in 2022 and 2024,” said Fernand R. Amandi, managing partner of the Miami-based polling company Bendixen and Amandi. “It’s not in doubt that the Democrats will win a majority of the Hispanic vote in 2022 and 2024,” he said. “Part of the Democratic Party’s issue is that they keep leaking oil against Republicans, and I believe that this is a tendency that has been confirmed over the previous five years.”
