The demographic revolution is also a cultural, political, and social revolution, explains Jorge Ramos, a journalist for the Univisión network, in his book “La Ola Latina”. The growth and influence of the Latino community are significantly changing the power structures within the United States and the way we live in this country.
Nothing can be foreign to the Latin presence, the future of the United States and the growth of the Latino community are inexorably entrenched.
And is that being Latino, which implies a particular way of being and thinking, is changing the destiny of the United States and even the way of doing politics in this country. You don’t have to be a political expert to understand that Latinos with their vote have the power to influence a Presidential election. The political strength of Hispanic voters lies in defining very close elections in states that have many electoral votes.
It is easy to argue that Latinos in Florida decided the 2000 presidential election in favor of GW Bush and that Latino votes in Florida, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico re-elected the same president in 2004. In the 2008 elections, the massive support of Latino voters gave Senator Barack Obama victory as the new President of the United States.
Latinos were especially influential in the last presidential elections, in which turnout increased in five swing states, they went from former President Donald Trump, in 2016, to President Joe Biden, in 2020.
However, strong Latin participation also helped Trump keep Florida and Texas, where counties with great Hispanic populations voted for Republicans in historically high numbers.
On Thursday, March 2, 2023, elected experts and officials gathered at Washington DC for an event, organized by Televisa Univision, in which it was concluded that in the United States, there are about 65 million Latinos of which 36 million will be eligible for Voting in the 2024 elections and there was talk about the importance and power of Latin vote for the next elections.
Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, from Nevada, said that she won her re-election in November 2022 thanks to the Latino vote.
As the number of Latinos who become US citizens and go out to vote increases, and in the case of those who came from children or the children of Latinos (every month more than 80,000 Latino youth in the United States reach the age of 18 and become eligible to vote) the strength of the Latino vote will take on new dimensions, each time having an important weight in the states and regions where the Latino population is historically concentrated.
In the near future, any transcendental decision that this nation makes will have to go through the irremediable filter of the Latino vote. And any politician who tries to ignore the opinion and needs of our community will run the risk of being ignored at the polls for our vote.
Larry D’Arrigo