Sawt Falasteen - Latinos in the US: a shifting voting bloc

It's a trend across the United States, and with a fifth of eligible voters identifying as Latino, it's one that could prove decisive in November.

"In the last election, I voted Democrat... but this year I really am in the middle. I don't know what to do," Munoz, an ex-police officer, tells AFP at his colorful Las Vegas eatery.

Joe Biden, the 81-year-old incumbent, will almost certainly go head-to-head again with Donald Trump, whom he defeated in 2020 partially by harnessing a significant majority of Latino voters.

Despite facing a raft of criminal charges, including some relating to his alleged efforts to overthrow results of the last election, 77-year-old Trump has the edge in several national polls.

That's also true in Nevada, a southwest swing state that Biden carried last time by a small margin -- and where voters begin casting ballots this week in the parties' nominating processes.

Munoz says his feeling is that Latinos in Las Vegas overall probably lean Democratic, but not like in years past.

"I have friends (who are) there in the middle like me," he said.

- Generational change -

The Latino community is one of the fastest growing in the United States, explains Mark Hugo Lopez, director of research on race and ethnicity at Pew Research Center.

While it is not a monolith -- Latinos in Florida, many of whom have family connections to communist Cuba, lean heavily Republican -- historically the community has been more favorable to Democrats, he said.

Polling data shows that is changing.

Biden won Hispanic voters two to one over Trump in 2020, but now trails among that demographic by five points, 39 to 34 percent, according to January's USA Today/Suffolk University poll.

"Our most recent figures show... 65 percent disapprove of the job he's doing and 32 percent approve," Lopez said of Biden.

That is down significantly from 2021 when most Latinos approved of Biden's performance.

Some of that is related to kitchen table issues such as inflation, but also immigration, with the widely held belief there is a border crisis that the White House cannot control.

Those on the left have made much of Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric -- such as when he said "rapists" and drug dealers were crossing the border from Mexico -- assuming this would play badly in immigrant communities.

But a changing Latino demographic means such sentiment is not always unpopular.

"In a place like Nevada... there are many US-born children of immigrant parents," said Lopez.

"But there's also a growing number of people who are third or higher generation. And they have tended to lean more Republican" than other Latinos.

It's a shift that life-long Democrats like Maria Elena Castro have noticed with dismay.

She says she hears increasingly right-wing sentiments from her son and nephews when they talk politics.

"Kids don't know much about the past, what their parents had to go through," said the 51-year-old Mexican-American.

Young Latino voters favor Republicans "due to the lack of information."

- 'Better off?' -

It is perhaps the struggle of previous generations of Latinos that is animating the community's growing animosity towards newcomers, said Jesus Marquez, a political consultant who has worked on Trump's campaign in Nevada and spoke at a recent Las Vegas rally headlined by Trump.

The constant drumbeat of right-wing media and its associated social media sphere emphasizes what is happening at the border, where thousands of impoverished people arrive daily.

Once there, they walk across into the United States and say they want to claim asylum, before being released for a court date many years down the line.

The perception that this is unfair is a powerful one, according to Marquez.

"That is something that the Latinos that have lived here for decades don't really like, because they feel that the new people are just jumping the line and getting ahead of them," he told AFP.

Ultimately, it makes less and less sense to speak of "Latinos" as a distinct community in America's ethnic melting pot, he said.

Latinos, and the working class in general, struggle with the high cost of living, Marquez said.

"A lot of Hispanics did much better during Donald Trump's years," he claimed.

"So that is the question they ask themselves: Are we better off right now or when he was in office?"

H.Nasr--SF-PST