Latino rights group breaks with its history to endorse Harris-Walz ticket

Washington: The League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organisations, said Friday that it supported Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the first formal endorsement of a presidential ticket in the group’s 95-year history.

Leaders of the group, known as LULAC, acknowledged that it had previously refrained from endorsing political candidates but said that members were stirred to action by concerns over the potential negative impact on Latinos if former President Donald Trump were elected again.

The endorsement was carried out through the group’s political action committee, the LULAC Adelante PAC, after internal conversations and a unanimous vote. Leaders said they decided to endorse Harris and Walz because they were better equipped to address the issues facing Latino communities.

“We can trust them to do what is right for our community and the country,” Domingo Garcia, chair of the PAC and a past LULAC president, said in a statement.

Latinos, a multiracial and multiethnic slice of the electorate that made up 10 per cent of American voters in 2020, tend to vote Democratic.

But they have been at the center of a tug of war between Democrats and Republicans since Trump improved his standing with Latinos in 2020 compared with his 2016 campaign. As Trump and President Joe Biden appeared to be headed for a rematch in the 2024 presidential election, a significant number of Latinos had been considering a third-party option.

Latino rights leaders and elected officials have quickly coalesced behind Harris since she replaced Biden at the top of the ticket. They said Trump’s pledges to cut low-income assistance programs and enact hard-line immigration policies would hurt Latino communities across the country.

Leaders of LULAC and similar groups said Harris’ candidacy had shot new energy into their outreach efforts. Some early polling has captured higher enthusiasm for her than Biden among Latino voters, but reliable data since the switch is limited.

LULAC, founded in South Texas by a group of mostly Mexican American veterans of World War I, has traditionally taken more conservative stances than other Latino rights groups. Its endorsement will allow its councils, which function as local chapters, to register voters and knock on doors in battleground states, particularly Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The organization has 535 councils nationwide and 140,000 members, 86% of whom are registered to vote and more than 75% of whom voted in the 2020 election, its officials said.

In a statement, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Harris’ campaign manager, called the endorsement an honor. “The stakes of this election require Latinos to unify and organize together like our lives depend on it,” she said.

The Trump campaign said that the LULAC endorsement came as no surprise. In a statement, Jaime Florez, the campaign’s Latino media director, argued such groups were out of touch with Latino voters, saying their lack of interest in what matters to Latinos had caused many to leave the party behind.

Until now, the closest LULAC had come to endorsing a presidential candidate was in 1956, when Felix Tijerina, then the group’s president, personally backed Republican Dwight Eisenhower. (He wore an Ike pin on his lapel, according to news coverage from that time.) Some members of the group were also active in clubs boosting John F. Kennedy in 1960, and others have supported local candidates, including Raymond Telles, the former mayor of El Paso, Texas.

Trump now points to the Eisenhower administration’s mass deportations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans as a model that his own administration would follow as he promises to undertake the largest deportation effort in U.S. history.

In an interview, Juan Proaño, LULAC’s CEO, said the group’s values had evolved since the 1960s, when fierce wage competition and divisions between Mexican and Mexican American laborers initially put the Latino rights group in favor of Eisenhower’s mass deportations. The organization reversed its stance when it was no longer possible to ignore the devastation that the deportations inflicted on Mexican American neighborhoods and border regions.

Before its endorsement, LULAC released an analysis of Trump’s promises. It cited a range of his proposals that would hurt Latinos, including cuts to education budgets and social safety net programs, and policies that would shut down the border, undo birthright citizenship and roll back protections for young people brought into the country illegally as children.

“We can’t risk mass deportations, we can’t risk family separations,” Proaño said.