Maricopa County, Arizona, has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1948. Bill Clinton won the state in 1996 and still lost the county. But with 60 percent of the state's population centered in Maricopa, it's usually the make or break county, which is why a coalition of more than a dozen nonprofit groups called One Arizona, most of them Latino and immigrant focused, have trained their sights on registering as many as 120,000 new Latino voters there. Daniel González writes:
The push to register Latino voters in Maricopa County mirrors drives taking place in counties around the country with significant and fast-growing Latino populations. Among them: Clark County, Nev.; Marion County, Ore.; Adams County, Colo.; Kane County, Ill; Hampden County, Mass.; Prince William County, Va. [...]
Based on data from TargetSmart, shared by One Arizona, 224,129 Latinos in Maricopa County are eligible to vote but are not registered, while another 352,553 are registered. That means about 61% of the 576,682 eligible Latino voters in Maricopa County are registered, compared with 74% of the eligible non-Hispanic whites, according to the TargetSmart data.
A concerted effort also is under way to register Latinos who reached voting age since the last presidential election. Approximately 96,000 Latinos in Maricopa County have turned 18 since November 2012, according to Dan Hunting, senior policy analyst at ASU’s Morrison Institute, based on census data he analyzed from the American Community Survey.
In 2012, Latinos accounted for only 14 percent of the total votes cast in the county even though they make up about 30 percent of the overall population, according to TargetSmart. That voting rate mirrored almost exactly the Latino voter participation rate nationwide, which was 48 percent. By comparison, blacks voted at a rate of 66.6 percent and non-Hispanic whites at a rate of 64 percent.
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The USA Today reporting included some personal anecdotes from new Latino voters, several of whom tagged Donald Trump as a huge motivating factor for their registration.
Whether states like Arizona and counties like Maricopa actually vote blue in 2016 remains to be seen. When I interviewed Sylvia Manzano of the polling outfit Latino Decisions earlier this month, she expressed skepticism about whether Democrats were pouring enough resources into Arizona to really be competitive there. Versus another traditional red state—North Carolina—where Hillary Clinton seems to be putting on a full court press in terms of staffing, offices, and time spent there.
But one thing is for sure: Donald Trump's misguided and frightening campaign has launched a nationwide registration effort among Latinos that could forever change the makeup of the electorate.