Political organizations supporting Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are touting both campaigns’ messages of “freedom” as they woo Latinas, a key voting bloc.
Hispanic women is the female racial or ethnic group that grew the most in the 12 years from 2010 to 2022, according to the Pew Research Center, growing by 5.6 million and numbering about 22.2 million as of last May. They make up about 17% of the nation’s adult female population.
They also turn out to vote in larger numbers than Latino men.
While Latinas have seen gains in education and employment, they still struggle with lower pay and disproportionately live in states with abortion bans.
So it was no accident that Harris, in summarizing her “fight for freedom” platform at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute conference last Thursday, included, along with freedom to vote and freedom to be safe from gun violence, “freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not having the government telling her what to do.”
Also last week, two Trump-backing Republican political action committees launched “Latinas for Freedom,” an initiative to reach Hispanic women about the economy and the Harris agenda, which they’ve dubbed as “socialist.” The GOP PACs behind the initiative are CPAC Unidos, the Hispanic arm of the Conservative Political Action Committee, and Bienvenido Action PAC.
The freedom messages come amid a tight race in key battleground states. Against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump won just 28% of Hispanic women voters compared to Clinton’s 67%, according to Pew. But in 2020, Trump’s share among Latinas rose to 37% compared to President Joe Biden’s 61%, Pew found.
Harris’ support among Latinas in 13 battleground states was at 60% in August, compared to Trump’s 34%, according to a poll by Equis Research, a Democratic polling firm that focuses on Latinos.
Stephanie Valencia, a founder of Equis, told 19th News that Harris is doing 13 points better than Biden with Latinas under 40.
Also, at least 13 states saw increases in Latina voter registrations when Biden left the race and endorsed Harris, according to TargetSmart CEO Tom Bonier.
Comparing the week of July 21 of this year to the same week in 2020, registrations by Latinas 18-29 rose 149.7% and were up 78.3% for Latinas of all ages.
Reproductive rights as ‘freedom’
Freedom to decide whether to have an abortion, use IVF or other reproductive concerns is a key issue for Democrats, while Republicans have downplayed the issue.
Republican Mercedes Schlapp, one of the “Latinas for Freedom” organizers, said the issue of abortion is one for states to decide. Harris and Walz are “extreme on abortion. It’s just not where the majority of Americans are, who believe it should be 15 to 20 weeks,” she told NBC News.
But close to 7 million Latinas ages 15 to 49 live in states with abortion bans — including a near-total ban in Texas and a ban after six weeks in Florida — or live in states that are considering bans. In Texas, the number of women who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care, according to an NBC News analysis, including an increase in the number of Latina deaths.
Texas also saw its teen fertility rate rise for the first time in 15 years, largely because of a disproportionate increase among Latinas, which experts ascribed to the state’s imposition of a six-week abortion ban.
An Associated Press-NORC poll done Sept. 12-16 found that around 6 in 10 Hispanic Protestants and about two-thirds of Hispanic Catholics say abortion should be legal in most or all cases.
Soon after Harris launched her campaign for president, Ingrid Pino Duran, co-founder of PODER PAC, and other Latinas — urged by Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-N.Y. — organized “Latinas for Kamala” Zoom calls, following the lead of Black women supporters.
On the calls, many women have discussed the fact that their daughters will have fewer reproductive health rights than they had as young women, because the Supreme Court has overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights, Duran said.
“It’s beyond just an abortion. It’s about not having the government tell you what to do with your body,” she said.
The Harris campaign focused on protecting the right to IVF treatments in a new TV and digital ad featuring a young woman identified as Yesenia, who says she and her active-duty military husband “are patriots and we go where assigned.” She asks: “What if we end up in a state that is no longer legal?”
Harris and Democrats have attacked Senate Republicans for twice blocking a vote on IVF protections. Trump has said he would protect access to IVF and make government or insurance companies pay for it, but he also has said he will vote against a Florida ballot measure overturning the state’s six-week abortion ban.
Touting freedom against ‘socialist’ policies
The thorniness of IVF and abortion for Trump and Republicans have led the party to focus on the economy, a stronger area for Trump.
Schlapp said the PACs that organized “Latinas for Freedom” seek to “educate voters about what a Kamala economy looks like,” pointing out that Latinos’ main concern right now is the economy.
The group is defining freedom for Latinas as freedom from economic policies they say are “socialist.” Socialism is often used by Republicans to reach Latino voters who experienced authoritarian or socialist dictators in their homelands or the countries of previous generations of their families.
“We need to make sure we don’t increase taxes. We need to make sure that there’s less regulations so that small businesses can prosper. We need to make sure that we don’t keep increasing corporate taxes because that means all that cost keeps going down to the consumers, and then corporations leave this country,” Schlapp said.
She cited Harris’ proposed ban on price gouging by food suppliers and grocery stores as a way to control inflation and reduce the cost of living. Schlapp said it “is something that is very much what you see in socialist countries.”
However, anti-price gouging laws already exist in several states and are often used in times of disaster. At the federal level, bills have been introduced or passed addressing such things as ticket price and gasoline price gouging.
Although Latinas currently head 27% of all Latino-owned businesses, they’re starting businesses at a faster rate than male Latino-owned and white male and female-owned businesses, according to a 2023 report by the Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative at Stanford.
But Latina and other women entrepreneurs face challenges in growing and sustaining their businesses, including lack of access to financing and gaps in winning government contracts, the report found.
Duran, from PODER PAC, noted that Harris is proposing a $50,000 tax credit for every small business startup.
“When we started our business 20 years ago, $50,000 would have been a huge help for us,” said Duran, who owns a political and business consulting firm. “We started with nothing. Something like that could have a major impact … it’s a game changer.”
Both sides stressed that Latinas are vital to the election outcome.
“We make a lot of these financial decisions and obviously they’re a very strong constituency in this election,” said Schlapp, a senior fellow at the Conservative Political Action Conference and a former Trump White House adviser.
Duran emphasized the influence Latinas often carry in families. “Latinas are the ones who drive things in the family,” she said. “If the mom says this is what we are doing, then this is what we are doing.”
