Pennsylvania's Latinos could be key to deciding who wins the presidency

PHILADELPHIA — Rafael Collazo has been working in Pennsylvania politics for a long time. In that time, he’s tried to elevate the importance of a key voting bloc that he says is often ignored in national politics: the state’s growing Latino population.

This year, he feels like campaigns are finally getting the message.

“I was telling some people the other day that I'm going to be 50 years old in two months, and it took almost 50 years for the Latino vote of Pennsylvania to be sexy,” said Collazo, the executive director of the UnidosUS Action Fund and Action PAC, which seeks to boost Latino interests.

“You know, it's clear the Latino vote of Pennsylvania is going to determine who wins this election,” he said.

According to some estimates, there are roughly 580,000 Latinos who will be eligible to vote in this year’s presidential election. That’s about seven times President Biden’s margin of victory in the state in 2020.

And that means even a fraction of this swing state’s Latino voters could be decisive in what’s expected to be a close election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

The Puerto Rican vote

One positive for Democrats: The overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania’s Latino population is Puerto Rican, according to Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas, the director of research at UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute.

“Puerto Rican voters across elections have shown to be much more supportive of Democratic candidates,” he said.

Collazo explained the party’s deep ties in the community this way: “The initial families that came here [to Philadelphia] were with labor unions. They were big city Democrats. So, the orientation for the Latino voters at that time was more homogenous and more