Photo: Matt Tuerk, the mayor of Allentown, right, talks to a resident. He is trying to set up a direct flight between San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital and Allentown © Jennifer Huxta/FT

Kamala Harris gains ground with crucial Hispanic voters in swing state that could decide 2024 US election

By Edward Luce
Financial Times

Kamala Harris gains ground with crucial Hispanic voters in swing state that could decide 2024 US election

By Edward Luce

The Financial Times, gift link

In 2000, Hispanics — a term used for Spanish-speakers, while “Latino” includes those with a heritage in all Latin American countries — accounted for less than a quarter of Allentown’s population. Now the city is majority Hispanic, chiefly Puerto Rican and Dominican. With similar alacrity, the nearby city of Reading turned 70 per cent Hispanic.

On a walk through a heavily Puerto Rican neighbourhood, Matt Tuerk, Allentown’s mayor, was greeted every few yards by residents lounging on the stoops of neighbourhood bodegas. Tuerk, a bicycling mayor who speaks fluent Spanish, is trying to set up a direct flight between San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, and Allentown. He and Susan Wild, the Democratic congresswoman for the area, recently slept on the floor of San Juan’s airport.

“Hispanics won’t automatically vote for either party — and many won’t vote at all,” Tuerk said. “But you won’t get anywhere unless you meet them halfway.” The Harris campaign has 15 campaign offices across the state. Trump has just one, in northern Philadelphia. “Trump doesn’t seem to be making a serious effort,” said Charlie Dent, a former Republican congressman who until 2018 represented the district that includes Allentown. “The focus is still all about Maga [Make America Great Again]. But I’m sceptical that the Maga base will be large enough to win.”

Dent adds that Trump is on his own version of “a Grateful Dead tour” — replaying his big hits from the glory years. Trump may also be drawing confidence from his victory in Pennsylvania in 2016 after a campaign in which he routinely denigrated Hispanic people. He defeated Hillary Clinton in the state by 45,000 votes — a margin of just 0.72 per cent. The eight years since then have seen rapid population change. Large numbers of Hispanics have arrived to work in the booming logistics hub of the Lehigh Valley, which is close enough to East Coast metropolises like New York and Philadelphia to put 100mn Amazon and Walmart customers one truck shift away.

Many affluent New Yorkers, who tend to be Democrats, also relocated to the area during the pandemic. With its German and Czech-Moravian settler roots, the Lehigh Valley county of Northampton was once described by an eminent historian as the most conservative region in America. Now it is a mosaic. Trump was the first Republican to win Pennsylvania since George HW Bush in 1988. In historic terms, his win may have been a fluke.

Could Trump pull off another shock? Only in spite of himself, said Christopher Borick, a pollster at Allentown’s Muhlenberg College. Borick concedes that polling has not fully caught up with anecdotal evidence of Harris’s lightning switch in momentum. A month ago, polls showed Biden also losing Wisconsin and Michigan, the other two must-win swing states.

The surge in enthusiasm for Harris has brought new states, including North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia back into play. Recommended US presidential election 2024 Trump or Harris: Who’s ahead in the polls? A registered independent, Borick lives in Nazareth, a few miles from Allentown, and one of the most hotly contested townships in America. A reminder of the region’s bible-suffused early days, Nazareth is 10 miles down the road from Bethlehem, a former steel hub. In 2020, Biden won Borick’s ward, with its population of 1,000, by just three votes. This time he and his neighbours have been bombarded by Democratic door-knocking and campaign mail.

“The Trump campaign is so far missing in action,” said Borick. By the conventional calendar, Trump has 80 days to make up for lost ground in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. But in practice, early voting starts in mid-September. Roughly a third of Pennsylvanians are expected to vote by mail. If the 2022 midterm elections are any guide, these will veer strongly Democratic.

Here again, Trump is trampling on his campaign’s priorities. Republicans are trying to educate their voters about the benefits of the mail-in ballot. On the stump, however, Trump often repeats his claim that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election via mail-in fraud. In the next 30 days Republicans must somehow enthuse their foot soldiers to vote early without contradicting their leader’s stolen election theory — and his warning that 2024 will also be rigged. For true believers, this requires semantic acrobatics. Traditional Republicans can put it more bluntly. “That’s malarkey,” Montero, the lawyer based in Allentown, tells conservative voters when they express suspicion of postal votes. “We can only win by voting.”