Catherine Rusoff
The political arm of the largest Latino civil rights organization in the United States will officially endorse President Biden for re-election on Tuesday in the swing state of Arizona, CBS News has learned.
UnidosUS Action Fund will formally endorse the Biden-Harris ticket at an event in Phoenix that will also include the group announcing support for Deputy Ruben Gallego, the Democratic candidate in one of the closest Senate races in the country. Gallego is in a tight race with Lake Kari Republicanan ally of former President Donald Trump who repeatedly repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
“The choice for Latino voters is really clear,” UnidosUS President and CEO Janet Murguía told CBS News in an interview before the endorsement.
“With Biden, we can move forward and continue moving forward on the path of progress and a better future,” said Murguía. “With Trump, we’ve gone back to really extreme policies and an economy that crushed Latino families when he was in power.”
Murguía said the decision to support Biden includes policies that she says will benefit the Latino community, such as expanding the Affordable Care Act to include DACA recipients. Another factor was the threat of Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, she said.
“He’s talking about mass deportations,” Murguía said. “Not just at the border, but in every community. This would harm families, destabilize communities and have a detrimental effect on our national economy.”
Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The UnidosUS Action Fund will focus on mobilizing more than 2 million Latinos living in the swing state. In 2020, Biden won Arizona by fewer than 11,000 votes, a narrow margin in which Hispanic voters played a critical role. One in four Arizona voters in 2024 will be Latino.
According to a new poll released Monday by the New York Times, Siena College and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Biden is trailing Trump in Arizona and four other swing states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Georgia.
Although the civil rights organization aims to achieve high Latino voter turnout in November, Murguía said there are obstacles in the way, including misinformation and lack of outreach.
“One of the biggest barriers to voter participation has been the lack of investment in mobilizing Latino voters,” Murguía told CBS News.
“We saw in the last election that very few Latino voters were actually contacted by either party or the candidates to go out and register to vote or vote on Election Day.”
With the endorsement, UnidosUS also calls on the Biden-Harris campaign to expand its outreach efforts on the ground, arguing that it takes more than just traditional ads to reach Latino voters.
“It means knocking on doors and calling the old-fashioned way, getting involved in person, showing up in our community,” Murguía said.
With six months until Election Day, UnidosUS will also focus on mobilizing Latino voters through get-out-the-vote efforts such as knocking on doors, making phone calls, voter education initiatives, promoting their endorsed candidates, and even providing transport voters to the polls. on election day.
