Matt Rourke/AP Photo
OLD THORNTON, COLORADO – “I have folks who don’t trust the government, don’t trust politics, and don’t trust that their voice is even going to be heard,” said Vallerie Bustamante, a campaign fellow for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition (CIRC) Action Fund. I shadowed Bustamante as she canvassed voters in the working-class Latino neighborhood. As I previously reported, Old Thornton is located in one of the most competitive congressional districts in the country, newly created by the post-2020 redistricting, that pits Latina pediatrician and Colorado state representative Dr. Yadira Caraveo against Colorado state senator Barbara Kirkmeyer.
But today’s canvassing wasn’t for a particular candidate. Bustamante explained that she was “deep canvassing,” going door-to-door asking voters about what issues concerned them most. “We meet them where they’re at. We go to their houses, events, radio stations, carnivals, neighborhood block parties, whatever it is,” she said.
In between conversations with voters, Bustamante shared with me that politics wasn’t something she always wanted to do. Bustamante reflected on how she originally wanted to work in finance. “Growing up in a Latino family,” she wanted to “make sure you bring in money to provide for your family and have food on the table.” She added that maximizing future income is increasingly difficult to achieve in families with mixed legal statuses.
As of 2019, 20 percent of Colorado’s 5.4 million residents were Latino. Among those 1.1 million Latinos, 80 percent are native-born to the Centennial State. According to the Latino Leadership Institute, just 5 percent of Latinos in Colorado are immigrants, equal to some 55,000 residents.
The reality of Bustamante’s parents’ legal status hit her as a kid. Following the Great Recession, rumors circulated about a pending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid at the factory Bustamante’s mother had worked at for 16 years, leading to her dismissal. In the end, ICE actually did raid the factory. After getting laid off, her mother returned cans and bottles for deposits, babysat kids, and sold tamales and burritos on the side for extra cash to help her father with the piling bills. Her older brother, around 17 or 18 years old at the time, also picked up multiple jobs to fill lost monthly income.
At most of the doors we stopped at, voters expressed concerns over the lack of good jobs, rising cost of living, climate change, crime and policing reform, growing homelessness, and deteriorating infrastructure incompatible with the growing Denver suburbs. While many said they didn’t believe that Republicans were up to the challenge of addressing such issues, nobody really enthusiastically talked about voting for Democrats in the fall either. Most viewed Biden as feeble and Trump as a manifestation of the worst impulses in American politics. State and local politicians were viewed in a much more positive light, contrary to the mantra that all politics is downstream from the national climate.
Meanwhile, one of the most jaded voters we spoke with saw the entire political system as corrupt, instead praising people like the Mexican drug lord El Chapo as being a ruthless figure to Mexico’s elite, but a benevolent one for the country’s poorest. Even though this was the only instance I saw of such remarks, Bustamante explained that it’s a common refrain she’s heard in her work.
While only 50 percent of Latino voters nationwide actually voted in 2020, in Colorado, that figure was 70 percent.
Praising a drug lord who has unleashed violence across Mexico, in addition to transporting drugs into the United States that fuel the drug war and destroy communities through overdoses, might seem paradoxical at first glance. But for Bustamante, such cases are raw, authentic expressions of rage against the current political order, a downstream effect of the lack of engagement of Latino voters in politics. It’s why Bustamante reiterated the importance of engaging with Latino voters over a sustained period of time and not just as a last-ditch get-out-the-vote effort in the week leading up to an election.
Balancing those contradictions is difficult. “It’s kind of sad,” Bustamante said, “the heroism when it comes to El Chapo and just any drug cartel.” The family she still has in Mexico has dealt with cartel shootings over territorial feuds in the last couple of weeks. Still, she remarked that such open conversations with voters were “beautiful,” because they offered the opportunity to speak freely.
WHEN I SPOKE TO CARLOS VALVERDE, the southwest regional director for the Working Families Party, he outright rejected narratives that Latinos were shifting to the Republican Party. “There is not a single state in 2020 in which Latino voters lost the election for Democrats,” he said. “Now, that’s not to say, though, that we’re not seeing subtle shifts, especially in certain areas of the country, where Latinos are beginning to maybe vote more Republican.”
Reporting from the Democratic firm Catalist showed an eight-point swing to Republicans among Latino voters in 2020, buoyed by large shifts in South Florida and South Texas.
One factor that makes Latino Coloradans distinct from other Latino voters is their higher voter turnout rates. While only 50 percent of Latino voters nationwide actually voted in 2020, in Colorado, that figure was 70 percent, something Valverde attributed to mail-in balloting. Since 2013, every eligible voter in Colorado receives a ballot at their home. “We make it very, very easy for our communities to drop their ballot off in a drop box. They don’t have to put a stamp on it. They can just take it to the corner drop box, and make sure that the ballot is delivered.”
Valverde attributed Latino voter shifts at the margins to Trump moderating his immigration rhetoric as he campaigned in 2020. In addition, Trump focused on tying Democratic proposals to socialism, which resonated among Cuban American and Venezuelan American voters in Florida. Those twin efforts layered onto low levels of unemployment through the Trump years, which boosted his approval on handling the economy, even if it departed from overall approval ratings. Taken together, this created a compelling message, particularly among Latinos who consistently rate the economy as their foremost concern.
Republican operatives took notice. In April, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) announced “Operación ¡Vamos!” a seven-figure investment in Hispanic field and communications programming in nine key states, including Colorado. The NRSC’s press release said, “Republicans are betting Latino voters will play a key role in their efforts to retake the Senate in November,” by assigning 20 NRSC staffers to work “door knocking, canvassing and other targeted programming” focused on border policy, the economy, and education.
Other efforts have been under way for years. Founded in 2011, The LIBRE Initiative is a nonprofit whose early funding came from Koch brothers–run entities like the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce and the now-defunct TC4 Trust. The initiative aims to “empower Latinos to achieve the American Dream” through economic prosperity, education, faith, and family.
Most recently, the LIBRE Initiative hosted a family resources and school fair earlier this summer at a high school in the Denver suburb of Commerce City, located in the toss-up congressional district where Caraveo and Kirkmeyer are contesting.
A COGENT MESSAGE TO LATINOS, according to Valverde, is one that focuses on the impact of corporate power on the lives of everyday people. “When I talk to Latino communities, and I remind them, and they all know this, about oil and gas companies making record profits in these times,” said Valverde. “While those of us in the working class are struggling to make ends meet because of rising costs, the wealthy and well-connected, they are the ones who are price-gouging for things like gas, groceries, health care costs, and prescription drugs.”
Valverde asks voters who they believe represents the wealthy class. He said, “They know it’s the Republicans.” Still, Valverde said that in many cases Latino voters are ambivalent toward the Democratic Party. “At the same time, when you ask [Latinos], well, what about Democrats? By and large, a lot of Latinos are saying, ‘I agree with Democrats more. They just don’t deliver.’”
In addition to narratives about corporate power, Valverde suggested that Democrats ought to not only lean into messaging about representing the working class, but actually listen to organized labor at the state and local levels. “The Democratic Party really appreciates organized labor and the labor movement. But that appreciation doesn’t always result in tangible improvements in people’s lives.”
Instead of first asking what the business community thinks about policies like paid sick leave, family leave, and minimum-wage increases, Valverde said, local Democratic officials should be asking the local labor unions and labor federations that supported their campaigns and helped them get elected about how to implement such measures.
According to polling from UnidosUS, among Latinos in Colorado, the most important identities after Hispanic and Latino/a are working-class and middle-class, far outpacing identities such as person of color, brown, Latinx, and BIPOC.
Unlike when Valverde first started community organizing and election work 20 years ago, he said that the increase of Latino-focused polling firms such as Equis Research provides information and statistical analyses on the Latino electorate that inform outreach strategies. The most important insight has been to not necessarily view Latinos as a population, or, in campaign lingo, “a turnout universe.” In the past, the extent of Latino engagement was just about getting them to the polls. Instead, Valverde explained, the research indicates that Latinos should be seen as a part of the persuasion universe. In short, Latinos are swing voters and should be engaged as such.
Valverde likened Latino voters to the way political operatives view white suburban women. Both parties know they need to keep white suburban women engaged over a sustained period of time, not just as a group that’s reached out to in the final weeks and days before an election.
When I asked Valverde about the Democratic Party’s cultural competency with Latino voters, he said, “The [2020] Bernie Sanders campaign ran an amazing voter outreach program here in the Southwest.” In Nevada, where Sanders overwhelmingly won the Latino population, Valverde credited two components for their success: establishing campaign offices in Latino neighborhoods and hiring Latino staff who then hired Latino canvassers.
But such strategies haven’t fully entered the Democratic Party’s mindset. Valverde expressed that he felt at the national level, some Democratic Party operatives “maybe devalue the [Latino] community,” because they feel that the vote is not large enough in the area they are overseeing. “So they kind of sometimes let it slip through the cracks.”
He said that Republican operatives likely took notice of the Sanders campaign’s strategies, pointing to the recently opened Hispanic Community Center that I previously reported on, which had a Latino field organizer on-site. “[Republicans] know they need to have that visual presence in communities to start to win over Latinos’ hearts and minds.”
