Come every election season, there’s always a lot of talk about Latino voters — and for good reason. Not only do Latinos make up a significant share of the U.S. population at almost 20%; they’re also the second fastest-growing racial and ethnic group in the nation. According to Pew Research Center, about 1.4 million Latinos in the U.S. become eligible to vote every year. This election, an estimated 36.2 million Latinos will be eligible to vote, an increase from 32.3 million in 2020.
But while many people understand the importance of Latino voters in theory, efforts to mobilize them, especially through a staunch partisan lens, often fall short. However, that isn’t necessarily the case when it comes to philanthropy-backed nonpartisan voter engagement, which has done a lot to mobilize Latinos and other people of color and bring them to the polls in recent years. As the pressure mounts this year to establish and grow that organizing ahead of November, some funders are increasing their efforts to support that work.
The Latino Community Foundation (LCF) is one such funder. Since its inception in 1989, the San Francisco-based grantmaker has focused its work on the Golden State, with a mission to “unleash the power of Latinos in California.” Now, for the first time ever, it has expanded its grantmaking outside state lines to Arizona and Nevada, concurrent with an announcement that it’s awarding $800,000 in grants to 19 Latino-led organizations working to mobilize Latino voters ahead of the general election.
“These are states whose demographics look a lot like California with a large Latino community,” said LCF’s new CEO, Julián Castro. “These are states that are going to be crucial to what happens in the presidential race, and we want to make sure that voters there are engaged, that they’re well informed, and that they’re mobilized to show up in November.”
Castro, who succeeded longtime CEO Jacqueline Martinez Garcel in the role this year, will be familiar to anyone following national politics. A Democratic presidential contender in 2020, Castro served as U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during Barack Obama’s second term, and was mayor of San Antonio, Texas before that.
“Latinos have so much at stake in this election,” Castro said. “No matter what happens, we want to make sure that their voices are heard [and] that the community is not overlooked. We want to make sure that the Latino community is a community that every single elected official has to reckon with, has to listen to, a community that has power through its voice at the ballot box, that translates into policy that serves the community well.”
LCF’s recent voter mobilization grantees include Arizona Center for Empowerment, The Unity Council, TODEC Legal Center, Make the Road Nevada, North Bay Organizing Project, CHISPA Education Fund, Brown Issues, Hispanas Organized for Political Equality and Valley Voices. To date, LCF has invested a total of $1.4 million in grassroots organizations working to mobilize voters.
The grants are also part of the All By April campaign, an effort initiated by the Democracy Fund earlier this year in which donors pledge to make all or most of their election-related grants by the end of April to ensure that civic groups have both sufficient funding and time to do their work. Signers include Open Society Foundations, the JPB Foundation, AAPI Civic Engagement Fund, Crankstart, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, the Four Freedoms Fund, and the Libra Foundation, among many others.
Expanding into Arizona and Nevada
According to Castro, LCF has two big goals for 2024: To go deeper with its grantmaking in California and to expand its work into states that have large Latino populations and can make a big difference during the upcoming elections.
Arizona and Nevada both fit the bill. According to data from the U.S. Census, Latinos make up 32.5% of Arizona’s population and 30.3% of Nevada’s population. For comparison, Latinos make up 40.3% of California’s population. In all three cases, the major difference Latinos can make at the ballot box is pretty clear. An analysis by NALEO Education Fund predicts that Latinos will “play a decisive role” during the election, and cites both Arizona and Nevada as key states. (The other states are California, Florida, New Jersey, Georgia, New York and Texas.)
But as big of an impact as Latinos can make come election day, it’s imperative to mobilize potential voters first. While there’s a lot to be said about politicians’ ineffectiveness in reaching out to Latinos, much less winning over their votes, the same cannot be said about organizers on the ground. Nowhere is there a better example of how successful this work is than in Arizona, where nonprofits were able to register more than 600,000 voters, organize against xenophobic and anti-immigrant legislation, and build power for Latinos across the state.
Given Arizona and Nevada’s sizable Latino populations and their geographic proximity to California, LCF’s investment in these states is a natural progression. They’re also typically a lot more contested than deep-blue California.
“We want to make sure we’re doing our part to strengthen our democracy, and that means two states like Arizona and Nevada that are battleground states with large populations — we see them as very important to invest in,” Castro said. “We couldn’t sit on the sidelines and not make investments in places like Arizona and Nevada.”
Castro added that after the election, LCF will have the opportunity to step back and put together a strategic plan for LCF’s future expansion, but this election cycle is “a crucial time” to engage with voters.
Supporting the underfunded Central Valley
In its home state, LCF is also ensuring that it provides support to organizations working in areas that are often overlooked and underfunded. While places like the Bay Area and Southern California are home to lots of well-heeled donors and receive a significant amount of funding from philanthropy writ large, the Central Valley, which covers more than a third of the state, sees far less support.
LCF is looking to rectify this. Of the 19 organizations that received grants, eight of them are located in the Central Valley. The grantees are the Dolores Huerta Foundation, Valley Voices, Community Water Center, Poder Latinx Collective Fund, LOUD 4 Tomorrow, Mi Familia Vota Education Fund, Radio Bilingue, and Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network.
With razor-thin margins determining who holds power in the House of Representatives, California’s toss-up districts are increasingly important. Two of these districts — Districts 13 and 22 — are located in the Central Valley and have large Latino populations, at 66.5% and 74.1%, respectively.
Voter turnout in these districts can have major implications not just for the state but for the nation. “Kings County has historically had one of the lowest voter turnouts in the state,” said Ruth Lopez, director of Valley Voices, in a press release. She added that her organization will be expanding its team and enhancing outreach efforts thanks to LCF’s grant. “This investment will enable us to bolster engagement in areas with similarly low voter turnout rates, like the unincorporated areas that border Fresno and Tulare counties.”
“Invisibilized or taken for granted”
It’s become altogether too common that after every election cycle, politicians and pundits mourn what could have been had Latino voters turned out in greater numbers or voted for a different candidate. But these postmortems often fail to acknowledge that outreach for Latinos is often lacking, uninspired, or left to the last possible moment.
“I believe that sometimes the Latino community is invisibilized or taken for granted,” Castro said. “The community has so much power through its numbers and through the way that it contributes through small business, through its labor, as consumers, as homebuyers. In every single way, this is a community that is crucial to the success of the United States, and we want that felt at the ballot box, and most importantly, in the policy that comes out of elected officials.”
Castro hopes that LCF’s investments lead to greater mobilization at the polls so more people can make their voices heard. “That’s going to translate into better resource investments in Latino neighborhoods. It’s going to translate into policies on housing, on healthcare, on education, on small business, on immigration, that help the Latino community, and that’s going to make, across the political spectrum, the voice of Latinos carry the kind of weight that they should carry in this country based on the numbers.”
While the voter engagement LCF’s backing is nonpartisan, the elephant in the room when it comes to racial equity efforts in the civic sphere is the degree to which they tend to lean in a certain ideological direction — the mostly progressive tone of these grants and other efforts we’ve written about like LCF’s Latino Power Fund, for instance, is unmistakable. That exposes them to potential critique from the right, but also doesn’t change the fact that Latinos and other people of color have long been underrepresented — invisibilized, to use Castro’s term — at the polls. In any case, Latinos in the U.S. are also hardly an ideological monolith.
It’s clear that given ongoing attacks against democracy and civil rights, both at home and abroad, this election is more important than ever, for Latinos and for the rest of the nation. “The destiny of the United States is tied to the destiny of the Latino community like never before. Only if the Latino community prospers can America prosper in the years to come,” Castro said, citing the size of the Latino population in the U.S. “You can’t have a successful America unless you have a successful Latino community.”
