Keyes, California, is not the typical town in which a Republican spends the precious final days of a close campaign. It is a working-class community of fewer than 6,000 between Merced and Modesto where about two-thirds of people are Latino and 6 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree.
Yet six days before the election, John Duarte, the incumbent Republican member of Congress, was going door to door there to make his case to voters of both parties. Duarte was hoping to capitalize on what polls have shown is a startling decrease in support for Democrats among California Latinos. The largely positive reception he got at the doors suggested he was right to try.
In 2020, pre-election surveys and exit polls showed Biden winning Latino voters in the state, the large majority of whom are of Mexican ancestry, by about 50 points. Three recent polls in a row from the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, including one released on Friday, show Harris up by less than 25 points among Latinos.
“This year is different,” Mark DiCamillo, the IGS poll director, explained about California. “It used to be that Latinos were reliably Democratic in just about all elections with 70 percent or more [support].”
As a result of Democrats underperforming in the state in 2020 and 2022, there are five toss-up seats in the House held by Republicans; Latinos account for a significant share of the population in all five districts. In two, the 13th and the Central Valley seat immediately to its south represented by Rep. David Valadao, they constitute between about 50 to 60 percent of eligible voters. Winning back some of these seats will likely be essential for Democrats to take back control of Congress.
In 2022, Duarte—a farmer of Portuguese and Swiss ancestry whose family runs one of the largest plant nurseries in the country—won by just over 500 votes. He now has a rematch against Adam Gray, the former state Assembly member he defeated two years ago.
Covering large swatches of the San Joaquin Valley, the heart of the United States’ fruit and nut industries, the district voted for Joe Biden by 11 points in 2020. This year’s face-off should normally be an easy Democratic pickup in which higher presidential election turnout carries Gray to victory.
But everyone I talked to considered the Gray-Duarte race essentially a coin flip.
For Latino voters in California, “We are seeing voting trends and registration move in a rightward direction that I have not seen in 30 years,” Mike Madrid, a co-founder of the never-Trump Lincoln Project and a former political director of the California Republican Party, told me.
Polls continue to show a clear majority of Latino voters backing Democrats statewide, and Madrid cautioned that polling during the failed 2021 effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom showed a drop off in Latino support that proved to be a “mirage.” But something does seem to be changing. “As somebody who watches this like a hawk,” Madrid emphasized, “I’ve never seen it before. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t snap back.”
One person who appeared less concerned was Gray, Duarte’s opponent. When we met at his Merced campaign office this week, I asked him what he makes of the signs Democrats in the state are losing significant support among Latino voters. Gray brushed off the question. “I think it’s a Washington conversation,” he told me of the concerns.
None of the Latino elected officials and political consultants in California I interviewed responded similarly. They said they have seen firsthand that many fellow Latinos, particularly men, appear more willing to vote for Republican candidates this year. The most recent IGS poll showed Harris winning Hispanic men by only about 10 points, compared to 36 points among women. (It also showed a major drop in Democratic support among Asian American voters since 2020.)
Pedro Ramirez, a Democratic political consultant and community leader in Fresno, warned that the first question heard from younger Latino Democrats contacted by local campaigns was often: Who is the candidate supporting for president? They were hoping to hear Trump’s name. It happened so often that Ramirez started to think there was an issue with their data and they might not actually be talking to Democrats.
“We look and, no, they’re not. The data is fine,” Ramirez added. “It’s that some of these folks have moved more to Trump.”
As he knocked on doors, Duarte’s pitch to voters was fairly simple: I’m your congressman. I’m a farmer. I want to make gas and groceries cheaper. He was hitting the right message, even if Donald Trump’s promised tariffs and mass deportations would likely exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis. Across party lines in the Central Valley, the increased prices of gas, food, and housing were by far the most important issues mentioned by the voters and Latino political experts I interviewed.
“People are frustrated, rightfully so,” Assemblywoman Esmeralda Soria, a Democrat who represents much of the area Duarte does, told me. “People are struggling. Everything’s much more expensive. Wages haven’t kept up. I think that that’s what’s going on. People don’t feel that either party is doing it for them.”
The basic act of Durate showing up clearly resonated as well. “So, you’re just going around?” a surprised woman in her twenties asked Duarte. “That’s really cool. I like that.”
Soria said the congressman has worked hard to win support in small communities in the district. “People have not knocked on their doors. They haven’t been reached out to,” she explained. “The congressman made a very intentional decision to engage some of these small city mayors early on and he got them earmarks.” The result is local leaders who are endorsing Duarte over Gray, while also backing Soria, their Democratic state representative.
At another door, an older woman told him that she used to work for Duarte’s plant nursery. She added to me in Spanish, which Duarte largely doesn’t speak, that she had traditionally voted Democrat but backed Duarte during his first run for Congress in 2022 and that she was planning on doing so again because she wanted to support her old patrón, her boss.
“There are five votes in that house,” Duarte told me as we walked away. “They’re voting for me because she worked for me.” It didn’t surprise him. It happened pretty often, he said.
The exchange reflected something that Gustavo Arellano, the Los Angeles Times writer well known for his old OC Weekly “¡Ask a Mexican!” column, had told me about the neighboring 22nd District, the other tossup race in the valley in a majority Latino area. The incumbent Republican is Valadao, another farmer whose ancestors are from the Azores. His challenger, Rudy Salas, is the son of a farmworker and a former Assembly member.
“It’s like, yeah, [Valadao is] Portuguese. But he’s a farmer, which means he’s a person who ostensibly knows how to run a farm, at least in the minds of voters,” Arellano explained. Salas comes from a farmworker family. “So, implicitly, it’s like, ‘He’s just a worker. Well, we don’t need workers. Having a worker is not going to better our lives. We need someone who has experience.’ It’s kind of fucked up but we’ll see [what happens].”
Mayor Victor Martinez is one of the Democratic elected officials who have endorsed Duarte. Mendota, the city of about 12,000 he represents, is in the more isolated western end of the valley. Like many in town, he is a Salvadoran immigrant who initially did farm labor with his parents after arriving in the country as a child.
“I think that people are tired and finally figuring out how government affects their day to day,” Martinez said about the shift he sees away from Democrats in his community. “It’s not a lie that gas prices are way up. It’s not a lie that a lot of these business policies in place to protect the environment are choking small businesses.” He owns a small trucking business and fears what will happen if California forces people like him to buy expensive electric trucks. “Who can afford to do that?” he asked. “Huge companies. Corporations. Not us.”
“Our people are very hard-working people, but I think they’re getting tired of what’s going on,” he continued. “So, I’m a Democrat. But I decided right now I’m not going to be a sheep anymore.” He saw Democrats as too often treating Latinos as victims instead of empowering them.
Martinez credited Duarte with securing $5 million to repave the roads in his city. At the same time, he is splitting his ticket by supporting Soria in her reelection bid. “I’m going to support those that have common sense policies that will support our people,” the mayor explained. “And not just make people happy by just bringing them a food bank, and then more food banks. Killing jobs. And then more food banks.” He preferred not to discuss who he was voting for in the presidential race.
Jesús, a Mexican immigrant from Jalisco who works in construction, answered one of the last doors Duarte knocked. He told the congressman that he used to be a Democrat but was now a committed Republican. After Duarte and I parted ways, I went back to talk with him some more.
He told me that he’d crossed the border illegally in 1986 on the day he turned 18, then later gained legal status—and eventually citizenship—from the amnesty Ronald Reagan signed into law that year. He recalled that his father-in-law and others he knew voted Democrat: “So I said, ‘Yeah, okay, I’m gonna give them my vote.’” But, in 2020, he voted for Trump. He liked his economic record and concluded that Republicans’ values aligned more closely with the ones he holds as a devout Christian.
His 25-year-old son, Zadrac, was at the house that night. He has an MBA, works as an accountant, and finds himself unsure about how to vote. “A couple of years ago, I was like, ‘I’m never going to vote for the Republicans,’” Zadrac explained. “But I know this upcoming election, I’m more on the fence about it.”
Like his dad, he felt that Democrats often did not share his Christian principles. Still, he was concerned by some of the supporters Trump attracted. “The people that are going for him, they seem kind of racist,” he explained. “They may be opposed to people like me. So it makes me wary. Why would you vote for someone if the people that are supporting him don’t seem to care about you?”
Zadrac’s attitude was common. Many of the Latino voters I spoke with who are considering voting Republican were aware of the nativism—and sometimes overt racism—of MAGA. Even if they are Mexican American, they don’t like seeing Puerto Ricans being called “garbage.” But for many, other issues seem more important this year.
Duarte has gone out of his way to differentiate himself from Trump to allow Latinos to move to him. His rhetoric is nothing like the former president’s, and he supports a path to citizenship for Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants. I told Duarte I was skeptical that right-wing Republicans, who have tanked multiple bipartisan immigration reform bills in recent decades, would ever allow such a path. “I can’t convince them,” Duarte said of his colleagues. “Donald Trump can.”
“I think as he turns a lot of Hispanic votes this time, he’s going to say, ‘This is a durable majority if I address their needs,’” the congressman said.
Ramirez, the Fresno-based political consultant and community leader, said messaging about Trump’s promises about mass deportations and other immigration crackdowns often does not resonate with the Latino voters in the area. Many believe Trump is talking about other people, or thinks that he won’t actually follow through on his campaign promises.
He tries to explain that Trump’s immigration agenda was often blocked by Congress or the courts, and that a second term would be different. “Nah, I think he’s saying it just to get elected,” Ramirez, who is himself undocumented, said about what he hears in response. “You’ll see, once he gets elected, he’ll be fine.” Many of these voters want progressive immigration reforms but they’ve lost faith that Democrats will ever get them done.
More surprisingly, Ramirez said some of the Latino voters he talks to even respect Trump on immigration despite not liking what he did. “They might not agree with what he did in terms of the deportations and enforcement mechanisms. [But] people will say at least he actually acted on what he said he was going to do,” Ramirez explained. “Whereas again, the Democrats have yet to deliver on immigration.”
In 2022, Duarte and Valadao’s districts had some of the lowest turnout in the country. Only about 100,000 people voted in the Valadao race, compared with more than 350,000 in the nation’s highest-turnout congressional races. (Members of Congress each represent nearly 800,000 people, although the number of eligible voters varies by district.) And of the 25 races with the lowest turnout, Duarte and Valadao were the only Republicans who won two years ago.
In an effort to boost turnout, Grita Canta Vota, a nonpartisan campaign, organized a free concert in Visalia on Thursday. It was part of a well-funded and highly produced national tour called Vota Palooza that has been coming to Latino communities where there are close races. Los Tucanes de Tijuana, a veteran norteño act with a major following, was the headliner. Thousands attended.
Outside the venue, organizers had set up a little plaza featuring mariachis, food, and lowriders. Most of the people I talked to, particularly women and those who were older, supported Harris and fellow Democrats. The disgust with Trump I heard from one of them, a Latino man originally from Oakland, was visceral.
But Sara, a 38-year-old life insurance agent originally from Mexicali, was at the other end of the spectrum. Her husband couldn’t understand why but she was voting for Trump. She said the economy was by far the most important issue for her and she thought Trump would handle it better.
Inside the venue, the crowd filled in as Lupita Infante and Grupo Control opened for Los Tucanes. In between the sets, speakers tried to make sure they planned to vote. One of these exhortations came via a video message from Dolores Huerta, the legendary labor leader who helped to organize the era-defining 1965 grape strike with Cesar Chavez in nearby Delano. “If we vote, we can prevent that horrifying future,” Huerta, now 94, stressed in Spanish wearing a flat-brim hat. “Because we’re the winners: Latino people, people of color, all the young people fighting for a better future.”
Most of the people in attendance had not been born when Huerta and Chavez became icons. In many cases, neither were their parents. The movement Huerta emerged from is increasingly distant.
I ran into Ramirez, the political consultant, later that night. When we’d spoken earlier in the week, he’d stressed the potential electoral consequences of Latino voters in the area struggling to get by. “That’s really what most voters are looking at right now is that: their actual bank account,” he said.
He has a master’s degree in public policy and runs a nonprofit when he isn’t being paid to elect Democrats. But the issues aren’t abstractions for him. “Honestly,” he explained about his own life. “I’m trying to buy a house, and it’s like, I can’t even afford it.”
