Pennsylvania with its growing Hispanic votes to test both Harris and Trump – Firstpost

The sun was creeping over the horizon on a morning in Pennsylvania’s former steel country, but in a house next to two radio towers, Victor Martinez stood with a microphone, ready to deliver his views to thousands of Spanish-speaking listeners.

“Señores, abran los ojos,” Spanish for “Gentlemen, open your eyes,” he said after playing a recent interview in which former President Donald Trump suggested he could use the U.S. military to deal with to deal with the opposition. “Three weeks before election day, this guy has the nerve to say we should use the army to put what he calls ‘crazy Liberal Democrats’ in prison.”

Arguably the most hotly contested state, Pennsylvania happens to have one of the fastest-growing Hispanic communities in the country, in the so-called 222 Corridor, after the highway that connects small towns west and north of Philadelphia. It’s fertile ground for both Democrats and Republicans to test their strength among Latinos in a state where small majorities decide who gets 20 electoral votes. It’s a place where Democratic nominee Kamala Harris can prove her party still commands a large chunk of popular support and where Trump’s campaign is working to gain ground.

“This is the epicenter for Latino voters in Pennsylvania,” said Martinez, who is of Puerto Rican descent and lives in Allentown and broadcasts his show there. “I like the fact that Kamala Harris has to keep sending people here to listen to us and talk to us. I like it. I like the fact that JD Vance has to keep coming back. I like that because it means they have to pay attention to us.”

According to the Latino Data Hub at the Latino Policy & Politics Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, the number of Latino eligible voters in Pennsylvania has more than doubled since 2000, from 208,000 to 579,000. The population in cities like Allentown and Reading is now more than half Hispanic, with the majority of Puerto Rican ancestry and a significant portion of Dominican ancestry.

Martinez also streams his show on YouTube and Facebook and uses a large screen with an image of the White House as the backdrop for his segment on politics, which has become the highest-rated segment of his four-hour radio show.

Despite his public stance against Trump, Martinez says he simply wants more Latinos to get out and vote to start building a more influential bloc, just as Cubans did in Florida, where he used to live and where he expressed his political views shaped. He says he liked former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, both Republicans.

“I don’t want politicians to think they have us in their pockets. No, they should fight for us,” he said. “I am from Florida and am well aware of the power that Cubans cultivated in South Florida. They have this power because they vote.”

In Pennsylvania, about half of all requested absentee and absentee ballots had been cast as of Monday. Of those, 63% were returned by Democrats and about 27% by Republicans, according to Associated Press election research. In recent elections, Democrats have been more willing to vote in advance, while Republicans have preferred in-person voting on Election Day.

Democrats are also returning more mail-in and absentee ballots in the two counties that have the most Hispanics in the state. In Lehigh, home to Allentown, Democrats accounted for about 62% of mail-in and absentee ballots returned, while Republicans accounted for 27%. In Berks County, home to Reading, Democrats made up about 60% of the total, while Republicans made up about 31%.

The Trump campaign opened a Latino outreach office in the area and gained the support of popular Puerto Rican reggaeton artists such as Anuel AA and Nicky Jam.

“President Trump has always been about influencing the Latino population. It’s not the usual, ‘Oh, we need Latinos.’ He values ​​our work and sees our potential,” said Marcela Diaz-Myers, a Colombian immigrant who is leading a new task force the Pennsylvania GOP created to target Hispanics to carry out public relations work.

Trump lost Pennsylvania to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 after winning the state and the presidency in 2016. About 6 in 10 Hispanic voters nationwide supported Biden in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, a comprehensive survey of voters.

Harris’ campaign hopes that her network of surrogates, including Martinez, Puerto Rican artists and other popular Latino figures, will help them maintain Biden’s Latino lead or at least slow Trump’s efforts to gain a foothold within that group.

Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk has been knocking for the Democratic vice president and sees Harris’ campaign resonating with older Latino voters, particularly women, who often tell him things like “I’ll vote for ‘la mujer.’ Spanish for “the woman”.

Tuerk, who is of Cuban descent, said the Trump campaign believes it has some appeal among younger Latino men, and he warned the Harris campaign that he is hearing more of Trump’s digital ads appearing in the city’s barbershops would be broadcast where they played bachata and merengue musical genres from the Dominican Republic.

One of Trump’s most popular Hispanic surrogates is Robert Unanue, the CEO of Goya, which makes many foods that are considered staples in Latino households. Unanue is courting Latino voters in swing states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina.

Unanue said some Latinos oppose the high number of immigrants because many have struggled for years to legalize their status and have spent effort and money to become U.S. citizens. He said many don’t believe Trump would deport those who have been here a long time and have no criminal records, even though the Republican nominee has promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.

“Trump will not deport la tia, la sobrina or la prima,” Unanue said, using the Spanish words for aunt, niece and cousin. “He’s going to focus first on the criminals and second on the criminals, people who come into this country to take away from us who work hard.”

Trump regularly rails against immigrants, saying they take away jobs and bring violent crime to the United States. He said those accused of murder had “bad genes.” He has indicated he would use the National Guard and possibly the military to deport between 15 million and 20 million people, even though the administration estimated that 11 million migrants were living in the U.S. without permanent legal permission in 2022.

Along Seventh Street in Allentown, called Calle Siete by locals, there is a mix of Latino-owned restaurants and grocery stores, as well as Dominican beauty salons.

Franklin Encarnacion, 58, of the Dominican Republic, said he sees a lot of support for Harris in this neighborhood.

“She is a woman. She knows what we need in our home. She knows things are going to be expensive,” Encarnacion said, adding that he felt Trump was too focused on saying he wanted to deport immigrants.

In the same commercial, Miguel Cleto, a pastor from the Dominican Republic, said he believes Democrats have mishandled immigration and are on the wrong side of the abortion issue.

“Donald Trump is the only solution for this country to get back to where it was,” he said.