Can Biden's 2024 Manager Halt Trump's Success With Latinos?

• President Joe Biden has named Julie Chávez Rodriguez as his 2024 reelection campaign manager.
• In the 2020 race, Biden was criticized for doing too little, too late to reach Latino voters, while Trump outperformed his 2016 showing among these voters.
• Latino advocates are eager to see a Latina lead a presidential campaign, but they recognize that Biden's appeal to Latino voters does not end by just naming her to the position.

President Joe Biden's reelection campaign is officially underway, and early signs suggest that he's prepared to learn from his 2020 mistakes and focus on the Latino voters he didn't win over in the last presidential election.

On April 24, Biden named Julie Chávez Rodriguez, the highest-ranking Latina in the White House and a longtime Democratic Party activist, as his 2024 campaign manager.

The decision to have Rodriguez run his reelection effort has renewed hope among groups aimed at mobilizing Latino voters. In the 2020 race, these groups criticized Biden's voter outreach efforts as too little, too late.

Latinos are the nation's largest ethnic minority group, but they were the least supportive ethnic group in Biden's run that year. Only 59 percent of Hispanics backed him over Donald Trump, Pew Research Center data shows. But over 90 percent of Black voters and 64 percent of Asian American voters cast ballots for Biden.

Even though Biden's performance among Latino voters was strong nationally, in battleground states with heavily Latino areas this demographic shifted away from the Democrats to the GOP. Biden won a majority of Latino voters in Florida, but his support was down 10 percent from Hillary Clinton's in 2016.

"Voters were sending a wake-up call," Clarissa Martinez, the vice president of UnidosUS' Latino Vote Initiative, told Newsweek.

True Swing Voters

In recent years, the Latino electorate has become one of the most important voting groups for politicians. Not only are Latino voters the fastest-growing ethnic minority group in the U.S. but they are also considered swing voters.

Among national adults, Hispanic Americans are 10 percent more likely to identify as independents, a 2021 Gallup poll shows. This suggests that ties to a specific party are particularly weak. Some observers have suggested that weak political allegiance can be attributed to the fact that roughly one-third of Latinos are not born in the U.S., making it less likely for these Americans to form a partisan identity at a young age.

Rapid growth in the Hispanic share of the electorate is also particularly notable in swing states like Florida, Texas, Nevada and Arizona. These persuadable voters become even more critical in battleground states that can be crucial to deciding an election.

"Latinos are going to flex their political muscles, and it's not a for-sure thing for either party," Lydia Guzmán, chairwoman of the League of United Latin American Citizen's immigration committee, told Newsweek.

'Perfect Choice' for 2024 Campaign Manager

Many see Biden's decision to tap Chávez Rodriguez as a signal that the president is seriously thinking about where he fell short in 2020.

"We're excited to see Julie head a presidential campaign," Guzmán said. "Simply put, Julie has dedicated her life to working around issues that are important to our community. Having someone who knows our community is really going to step up participation from that community."

Guzmán, who called Chávez Rodriguez the "perfect choice" for Biden's 2024 campaign, said she wasn't ready to endorse Biden. But the president's decision to put Chávez Rodriguez at the head of his reelection effort shows that Biden is focusing on making sure Latino voters are engaged.

"Campaigns very actively pursue voters who they consider significant," Martinez said.

Matt Barreto, who worked with Chávez Rodriguez when she was a deputy campaign manager on Biden's 2020 campaign, told Newsweek that she was an "extremely important piece" of the campaign and credited her with Biden's victory in Arizona and Nevada.

"Julie took the Latino vote very seriously," said Barreto, a political consultant and president of BSP Research. "It was not an afterthought. It was at the forefront of everything she was doing in 2020."

Advocacy groups have repeatedly argued that Latinos are not a monolith and that the needs of Hispanic voters in Texas' Rio Grande Valley drastically differ from the needs of those in Los Angeles or Miami.

Nathalie Rayes, the president and CEO of the Latino Victory Project, told Newsweek that Chávez Rodriguez's ability to know the difference between these various types of Latinos will make her an asset to Biden's campaign. She added that early engagement and early investments from Biden's team will also be paramount to secure a 2024 victory, since a push to court voters in the "eleventh hour" has been shown to be unsuccessful.

Biden's 2020 Mistakes

While polling data shows that Hispanic voters' values largely align with the Democratic Party, Democrats have lost ground among Latino voters in recent years. Hispanic Americans have also been found to be more politically persuadable, Biden's 2020 performance bolsters the argument that there was not enough outreach from his campaign.

"I have yet to have my door knocked on in my life," Miami-based political strategist Franco Caliz-Aguilar told Newsweek. "You don't think that breaks my heart a little?"

Days before Election Day in 2020, data from the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) showed that 44 percent of Latino voters said they had not been contacted by either political party, a campaign or any other organization.

Disillusionment among these voters has been hard to break. An Axios/Ipsos poll conducted before the midterms last November found that nearly a third of Latinos don't think either party cares about them, and a quarter say neither party represents people like them.

While Democrats have remained "flat-footed" on investing in the Latino vote, Republicans have introduced more Hispanic candidates and continue to appeal to Latinos on top issues like the economy and crime, Domingo García, the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, previously told Newsweek.

Gaps in Democratic outreach have also worked to the Republicans' advantage. A 2020 report from Equis Labs found that among Latinos who increasingly embraced Trump during the campaign, the rightward shift was largely "among those with the lowest partisan formation."

Despite widespread Latino support for Biden, in 2020 Trump managed to outperform his 2016 showing among Latino voters. Jen O'Malley Dillon, Biden's 2020 campaign manager, defended the campaign's Latino outreach program, but she admitted Trump "increase[d] his support with the Cuban American vote."

The movement toward the GOP seemed to continue into the 2022 midterms, where Latino support for Republicans in congressional races rose from 20 to 30 percent since 2018, according to a NALEO tracking poll. And fewer Latinos reported feeling that the Republican Party is hostile toward them, a 10 percent decline from the last midterms.

Biden's 2024 Challenges

Although advocates are eager to see a Latina lead a presidential campaign, they recognize that Biden's appeal to Latino voters does not end by just naming her to the position.

"I'm excited to see how having a Latina on board will make a difference," said Caliz-Aguilar, who serves as co-director of electoral power building at Community Change Action. "How do they actually do outreach that matches the different constituencies in a way that doesn't feel artificial?"

Experts told Newsweek it will be important for Democrats to engage with Latinos on the economy, even though it's an issue that Republicans tend to perform better on. They also said Democrats need to find new ways to speak to Latino voters about immigration, which is often the only voting issue that political parties focus on when reaching out to the Latino electorate.

An NBC News/Telemundo poll conducted last October found that Latinos are divided on whether the U.S.-Mexico border is secure, with 46 percent saying yes and 44 percent saying no. Over half of respondents also said border security is more important than immigration, a trend that was echoed by a separate Axios poll from June, which found that only 1 in 5 Latinos ranked immigration as their top concern.

Biden has faced fierce criticism over the unprecedented number of migrants that have crossed the southern border since he took office. At the center of that scrutiny is his decision to roll back Trump's pandemic-era Title 42 policy, which allowed the U.S. to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants on public health grounds.

Both Democrats and Republicans have expressed concerns about whether the Biden administration has a plan to handle the influx of migrants that will be allowed into the U.S. upon the end of that policy. The Axios poll showed that the majority of Latinos support keeping Title 42 in place.

However, Biden's other policies may give him an advantage with Hispanic voters. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows that Hispanics are 17 percent more likely to have Type 2 diabetes than non-Hispanic white people. In January, Biden instituted a cap on monthly insulin prices at $35 for seniors enrolled in Medicare. His administration is now seeking to extend the price cap to people with private insurance plans.

Another way to resonate with these voters would be for Biden to use the importance that Latino families place on the American Dream.

"I know it sounds very trite and old, but it's actually the thing that people respond to," Caliz-Aguilar said. "The economy is really going through some problems, inflation's pretty high, but giving people that sense of what is still possible in this country for their family is important."

He added that what's most important for the Democrats is to provide an alternative in 2024. It's not enough for Biden to just make the case against Republicans or his GOP challengers, Caliz-Aguilar said.

"What folks out here [in Florida] are seeing is [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis going after Disney, going after books. That's not particularly popular politics out here, but the question is what are they hearing from the other side," he said.

"Both parties are going to have to do their due diligence in order to get the Latino vote," Guzmán said.