Hispanic voting advocates say their voters can be engaged — but the clock is ticking for campaigns to do it

The Latino vote splits 52 percent for Biden and 39 percent for Trump among registered voters in Florida. And Biden leads Trump among Latinos with 61 percent to the president’s 34 percent among registered voters in Arizona. (The number of Latino likely voters in the polls is not large enough to be broken out.)

Some broad political conventional wisdom assumes Hispanic Americans are more likely to be less engaged in voting than some other groups. But experts who work in Latino voter outreach said if engaged and motivated to register, Latino voters will show up. Getting them there could make a difference in a tight election — and there’s only a little time left to do that effectively.

Clarissa Martínez-de-Castro, deputy vice president of policy and advocacy at Unidos US, one of the country’s largest organizations advocating for increased Latino civic engagement, said writing Latino voters off as a demographic uninterested in having their say in the upcoming election could be disastrous for campaigns.

“Latino voters aren’t apathetic. They are unconvinced,” said Martínez-de-Castro.

Connecting with voters has been a challenge for nonpartisan organizations and campaigns alike given the pandemic. Biden visited Florida for the first time since becoming the nominee last week — the beginning of National Hispanic Heritage Month — with reaching out to Latino voters being a top priority for the visit.

The Post reported that while Biden is faring slightly worse with Latinos than Hillary Clinton was in 2016, he is still expected to win their vote. The question at this point is the size of his margin. Recent polling shows Trump making inroads with Latino voters in states such as Florida, and the campaign is also hoping to put a dent in Biden’s support with Latino voters in other battleground states, including North Carolina.

The number of Latinos eligible to vote this fall is about 32 million, but only half of them are registered, according to Unidos US. Once registered, the trend has been that eight out of 10 who are registered vote in a general presidential election.

“Voter registration is such a critical component, but unfortunately when you get into campaign strategy, voter registration is very seldom a part of that equation,” Martínez-de-Castro said. “It’s usually left up to groups and nonpartisan organizations to do that work, and we’re one of the groups that does that work.”

Another crucial piece of engagement is to build inroads with community leaders who have existing relationships in that community. Deploying local surrogates who can speak on behalf of campaigns to the issues that are most relevant to a particular Latino community is essential given the diversity of the electorate and how differently some demographics within the Latino bloc view matters.

María Teresa Kumar, president of Voto Latino, a nonprofit focused on registering young Latino voters, said police violence among Black Americans resonated with many Latino voters who have experienced it in their own communities. Communicating that the issue is a political one allowed Voto Latino to register far more voters per month after the May police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, than in the previous months.

“The issues that we know are mobilizing Latinos are health care, jobs and the economy because of covid, and racial and inequality among Blacks and Latinos, which among young people is the number one thing that is encouraging them to vote,” she said.

Democratic campaigns often take Latino voters for granted, assuming they will automatically vote for the liberal candidate, while GOP campaigns often choose not to invest their time connecting with Latino voters for the same reason, political experts said.

But with less than six weeks until the election and voter registration deadlines coming up in many states, groups focused on Latino voter outreach argue that there is still work to do if the campaigns want to see Latino voter participation reach its full potential.