Latino voter turnout dropped sharply in Pa.’s midterm election

Three months before the midterm elections, Rafael Collazo saw something foreboding: More than half of Latino voters in Pennsylvania said they hadn’t received any outreach from any political candidate or party.

Collazo, head of UnidosUS Action Fund, a national Latino advocacy organization, grew up in Philadelphia and has long pushed for earlier outreach to Latino communities, where turnout has historically lagged other parts of the state.

This year’s gap was even bigger than usual. An Inquirer analysis of Pennsylvania’s elections, based on precinct-level results from 60 of 67 counties constituting 97% of the overall vote, showed steep turnout declines in Latino and Hispanic areas.

• The larger the Latino population in a precinct, the sharper the turnout decline from 2020 to 2022.

• Precincts where Latinos are the largest ethnic group plummeted 47% in votes cast between the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 U.S. Senate election. The turnout decline across the rest of the state was about 22%.

• Precincts that were less than 10% Hispanic or Latino saw turnout drop about 21%. Precincts that were 75% or more Latino saw a 53% drop.

• The drop is particularly clear in Pennsylvania’s heavily Latino mid-sized cities, such as Allentown, Reading, Lancaster, and York. In these cities, the neighborhoods with the largest Latino populations saw the largest dips.

• There was no broad statewide relationship between a precinct’s turnout decline and the size of the Black population, with some exceptions such as in Pittsburgh. Statewide, the whitest precincts had the smallest drops.

• Heavily Latino precincts tend to have higher poverty rates and lower rates of college attainment, but poverty, income, and education don’t fully explain the drop. Latino precincts saw turnout declines even after accounting for socioeconomic factors.

“The parties and the political class just need to do a much, much better job of engaging Latino voters,” Collazo said. “And there must be a lot more investment and respect for where Latinos are on the issues and speaking to those issues.”

Latinos in Pennsylvania voted by high margins for Democrats — in precincts where Latinos are the largest group, Democrats won 77% of the two-party vote. But turnout fell so sharply in those areas that Democrats received a far smaller share of their overall votes from them than in 2020.

“In the aftermath of every election cycle there’s a tendency to look at support for Democrats or Republicans,” said Michael Jones-Correa, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Turnout gets overlooked … and there is a very large percentage of people who don’t turn out to vote. And who those people are matters.”

The voter turnout drop is particularly clear in Pennsylvania’s mid-sized Latino cities

While Philadelphia contains just over a fifth of the state’s Latino population, another fifth lives in a group of smaller cities: Latinos make up a majority of adult residents in Reading, Allentown, and Hazleton; they’re the largest single ethnic group in Lancaster, Lebanon, and York; and they’re a sizable minority in Scranton and Bethlehem.

In many of those cities, the Latino turnout dip is particularly clear. In Allentown, for example, every precinct that was more than 50% Latino saw a larger drop than every precinct that was less than 30% Latino.

Political observers and organizers said candidates spent far more time in Philadelphia than in those smaller cities.

Berks County Commissioner Michael Rivera, a Republican, said state Sen. Doug Mastriano came to the area once during his GOP campaign for governor, and he rarely saw Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz there. Berks County is home to Reading, whose population is 69% Latino. Rivera said his party’s positions and messaging around family and religion resonate with the Latino community, but that the GOP doesn’t do enough to reach those voters.

“It’s not a homogenous group, there’s all different sorts of backgrounds, economic levels, nationalities,” Rivera said. “But most Hispanics have the same concerns – education, jobs, the economy. Parties have to do a better job messaging on those issues. … I think the Democrats do a much better job than what we do.”

Earlier outreach, more resources

Diana Robinson, political director for Make the Road Action PA, a Latinx advocacy organization, has been calling for years for earlier outreach.

Robinson helped lead a get-out-the-vote campaign starting four months before Election Day, but she said most other efforts didn’t start until about two weeks before polls opened.

“They are a group of voters that need to be persuaded” to vote, Robinson said. “We’ve seen throughout the years that Latina voters themselves feel like an afterthought.”

Outreach — such as Spanish-language mailers and radio and TV spots — costs money, and several organizers pointed to a lack of investment in an often unpredictable voting population.

“There’s a fallacy in like, ‘Well, those folks don’t vote, so we’re not gonna spend our resources there,’'' Robinson said. “But the reality is folks aren’t turning out to vote because they don’t feel equipped with the tools.”

Jones-Correa, the Penn professor, said the emphasis on reliable voters misses the potential power of more sporadic ones.

“The reason super voters are super voters is that they’re already motivated,” he said. “You'd think campaigns would spend money on the people just one step down.”

Democratic candidates did some Latino-focused outreach — Democrat Josh Shapiro’s winning gubernatorial campaign had several events. Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman, along with his wife Gisele, who is from Brazil, did a few events in Philadelphia on the way to his victory. But observers said it never felt like a big push.

“At the end, we finally got Gisele in the Latino community, but I think what we saw across the board really speaks to the last-minute campaigning vs. full-throttle engagement, which is missing,” said Maria Quiñones Sánchez, a former city council member representing North Philadelphia who is now running for mayor.

Reaching voters can be difficult, she said, when those voters tend to be more transient due to poverty and displacement.

“People are moving constantly, particularly people in poverty,” Quiñones Sanchez said. “In the 19th Ward [in North Philadelphia] you could pick up any division and there’s 2,000 people registered, but you walk the division and half those houses don’t exist.”

Quiñones Sanchez noted that some of the areas where the Latino population is most concentrated are also where poverty is highest and where neighborhoods have been hardest hit by the pandemic and the opioid crisis.

Still, poverty didn’t account for all of the drop. Many neighborhoods with large Black populations in cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh also have high poverty rates. But many of those neighborhoods didn’t see the same kinds of turnout declines.

Candidates and parties could do a better job of appealing to Latino voters on issues, organizers said.

There are certain issues, such as Puerto Rican statehood, that can be catalysts for engagement among particular groups, said Vanessa Graber, an organizer with the Puerto Rican advocacy group Philly Boricuas. And there are issues that galvanize other voters but might not be as much of a factor in some Latino communities. Jones-Correa, of Penn, noted the emphasis on abortion rights may not have been as motivating among conservative Latinos.

“Latinos, like African American voters, are more socially conservative and more religious,” he said, “and I think they’re deeply ambivalent about abortion. So that kind of messaging probably didn’t resonate very well.”

Graber said candidates don’t do enough to connect political rhetoric with actual policy plans. As varied and diverse as interests can be among Latinos, polling shows this year the top issue was the same: the economy. But even on that point, she argued, messages weren’t connecting with voters’ individual situations.

“When they’re seeing these pitches, they’re not hearing specifics or how it applies to their neighborhood,” Graber said. “Because what Puerto Ricans are advocating for in North Philly might be different, needs-wise, than Mexicans and Central Americans in South Philly.”