On Wednesday, the USC Center for the Political Future hosted a webinar featuring panelists who discussed how major political parties focused on winning but ignored the economic concerns of Latine voters.
The panelists were a Republican consultant, a Democratic strategist and a nonpartisan member.
The panel highlighted that the economic experience of Latine voters carries weight at the voting booth, even if immigration policy receives more public attention.
“Certainly in the last generation of Latino politics in this country, immigration was overwhelmingly the main issue, but it’s not quantifiably as important as affordability,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant with an expertise on Latino voting trends and voter behavior. “That’s what decades of data have been telling us that [despite all] these ICE crackdowns, the economy is still in such dire straits for working class folks.”
The rising cost of living was a top priority for Latine voters in the 2024 election, according to a poll conducted by the Latino Community Foundation and BSP Research.
Heydy Vasquez, a fourth-year legal studies major at USC and director of external outreach for Trojan Democrats, mentioned the idea to USC’s Center for the Political Future to host the Latino Vote panel.
“We haven’t really been represented accurately. It’s just been like ‘We’re Latino, you know?’, bilingual content and stuff like that, not really much legislation that truly states what’s been going on,” said Vasquez.
She said local, state and federal governments need to provide the Latine population a voice in politics, given their rising demographic.
Nearly one in four of the new voters in 2024 belonged to the Latine population, playing a decisive role in shaping the outcome of federal, state and local elections.
“There was a large number of Latinos who voted for Trump because he won on one word, which was the economy,” said Vasquez. As a result, Trump won 48 percent of the Latine vote in 2024, a major improvement from 2020, when he garnered 36 percent of the voting bloc.
Cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, may have ripple effects from small grocery stores to big chain corporations. A new study by UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute revealed that in LA County, about 62 percent of CalFresh — the state-specific name for the federal program — enrollees are Latine.
Madrid expresses that his own party is making the economy worse.
“The Republicans don’t focus on it. The ICE crackdowns are certainly a part of it,” said Madrid. “Latinos are like, ‘I’m checking out. We’re not loyal to either of you guys, because neither of you are looking out for the best interest of our community.’”
Madrid said that both parties’ use of immigration to win Latine voters is a “very lazy ethnic stereotype,” and Latine populations are finding trouble with both parties amid the ICE raids.
“It’s not because we are finding the messages of either party particularly attractive,” said Madrid. “They have failed us by coming in and defining immigration as the issue that characterizes our community, despite no evidence of that being a top issue for us, even in these circumstances.”
“That allows our political media and infrastructure to talk about the issues that ‘matter to us’ in a way that don’t matter to us,” Madrid continued. “We don’t have an allegiance to either party because our political class, our political elites, Latino political elites, have not articulated an agenda that matches our people, our voters.”