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This story was produced in partnership with Quiet Pictures, Voices: Latino Vote 2024 streams on pbs.org, beginning on Oct. 2, followed by a national PBS broadcast on Oct. 22.
“Is this about politics? I’m tired of it.”
In a majority-Latino neighborhood on Las Vegas, Nevada’s east side, a man, looking worn out from a day’s work, stepped out of his pickup and pleaded, “Please get out of here.”
It was hard to tell if he was speaking to the group of organizers standing in his driveway from Make the Road Action, which seeks to build long-term political power in working-class Latino communities in five states, including Nevada, or to our documentary crew, which was trailing them with cameras and a boom pole. The organizers, who were door-knocking for Democratic candidates, moved on to another house, and we followed.
This was months before President Joe Biden made way for Kamala Harris, and the mood among the group was grim. “Folks were just not excited to vote for Joe Biden,” Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who was an architect of the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and who co-hosts a podcast on the Latino vote, explained.
It was a far cry from the palpable excitement that our documentary crew captured four years earlier, when Sanders won the Nevada caucuses, propelled by record turnout among Latino voters in the state. “It was the biggest mobilization that I had ever been a part of in an election year,” LaLo Montoya, civic engagement director for Make the Road Action Nevada, said. “It was citizenship for all, and it was health care for all. … We had already lived through what a Trump presidency was like and how we could not afford another term.”
“Our community feels really disenfranchised from the way, every two to four years, organizations and political parties come in to the community, telling them how they should vote — like we’re just kind of a pawn in this big political game.”
This spring, when we documented Make the Road Action Nevada and other organizers around the region working to mobilize voters ahead of the Democratic primaries, we saw the enthusiasm gap among younger Latino voters. That changed dramatically on July 21, when Kamala Harris announced her candidacy for the presidency. “The moment that Kamala Harris went on the ticket,” María Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino, a national organization that seeks to register young Latino voters, explained during the Democratic National Convention, “we went from registering 60 to 100 voters a day to, that first week, registering 8,000 voters a day.”
This November, a projected 17.5 million Latino voters are expected to cast a ballot in the presidential election, according to one estimate. In Nevada, a battleground state, Latinos comprise 1 in 5 registered voters, making them a much sought-after commodity. In early August, the powerful Culinary Union, which represents 60,000 hospitality workers in Las Vegas and Reno, more than half of them Latino, endorsed Harris. And in its first-ever general election presidential endorsement, Make the Road Action endorsed Harris for president.
“Our community is very disillusioned because this administration has left so much on the table. But we are in the long game here. There is no shortcut to building power in our state. So members of our community have committed to making sure that people really care about their vote.”
For many of the organizers we interviewed, though, the endorsement is complicated. Latinos make up nearly a third of residents in swing states like Nevada and Arizona and have the potential to wield tremendous power, but organizers say both parties’ policies often fall short of meeting the community’s needs. While former President Donald Trump’s pledge to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history” strikes fear among many, actions such as Biden’s executive order restricting asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border have prompted feelings of betrayal. But, Montoya said, “we are in the long game here.” Organizers and community members are committed to going out and talking to people, to making sure that they know how much their vote matters. “There is no shortcut to building power in our state.”
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This article appeared in the October 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The Latino swing vote.”
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