This Small Rust-Belt City Holds the Secret to Democrats' Latino Woes: Reading, PA, Latinos

[LauraInLA]

Latino voters shifted dramatically toward Trump in the last election. Reading, Pennsylvania offers a clue to how Democrats can claw them back.

During the final, frenzied week of the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both made campaign stops in a place whose significance in the election had largely been overlooked by observers: Reading, a city of around 95,000 people nestled between the Schuylkill River and Mount Penn in central Pennsylvania.

Reading does not boast many of the noncollege-educated white voters who were widely seen as pivotal to Trump’s chances. Nor is it one of the educated, affluent suburbs or large metropolitan areas where Harris had hoped to run up the immense margins needed to lift her to victory. Yet both campaigns saw Reading as strategically critical—because this little city, which is known to most people as the nineteenth-century birthplace of the Reading Railroad, ultimately memorialized in the game Monopoly, happens to be nearly 70 percent Latino.

Trump had already shocked some Democrats in Reading by contesting it with surprising aggressiveness. He held two rallies in the small city and dispatched running mate JD Vance to campaign there twice, a remarkable commitment of time and resources to a reliably Democratic stronghold filled with nonwhite voters. What surprised Democrats was the audacity of Trump’s bet on making inroads among Reading’s Hispanics—a bet that made the city a critical test case of whether Trump’s ability to move that demographic his way was more than just a fluke of 2020 and might have more durability than many Democrats expect.

https://newrepublic.com/article/190897/reading-pennsylvania-democrats-latino-voter-problem

[somsai]

1. At least they recognise a problem

If they could stop blaming Hispanic voters and start looking in the mirror they'd be on the right track. The trend with Hispanic votes is not some sudden surprise, we had counties that were majority Latino go Republican years ago. Hispanic precincts closer to NYC swung to Trump by 26 points. Passaic which is a working class Hispanic town in Jersey was Clinton by 52 points, this year Trump by 5 points, that's a 57 point swing.

It's maybe time for our party to wake up and smell the coffee. Hispanic voters are American. A helpful cultural shorthand would be to think of those folks as working class Americans, because for the most part, that's what they are.

We lost the congressional district next to mine, the heaviest Hispanic district in my state. We had a good one term congresswoman, a second gen Latina. The people in that district are getting killed on jobs. Lots of folks there work the trades. I used to live in the district. Telling people how great things are when they suck is a sure way to lose.

Trump didn't need a majority of voters to win the election, but he got them. A lot of blue precincts with lots of immigrants in CA and NY turned purple.

For something different, about how some blue districts with 70% of people have a college degree, four in ten post grad, $160K household income, and they shifted rightwards by 16 points. South Asians. https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/indian-americans-ditch-democrats?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=239058&post_id=156882379&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=6a4c4&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

When Catalist finally puts out its numbers, I'd expect some surprises.

[LauraInLA]

2. Interesting data! What is the Catalyst?

[somsai]

5. Catalist is the research firm used by the Democratic Party, more specific than Pew

though Pew is very good.
Catalist uses all available data down to the precinct level and compares them against voting lists also. They are considered the gold standard. I look at https://www.dropbox.com/s/re0gtn1o57fzwp5/Catalist_What_Happened_2022_Public_National_
Crosstab=0
For the past up to 2022. Some things to remember the numbers on the left in green are a percentage of total voters, red and blue are the percentage of Dem voters.So if 10% of voters are the Silent/Greatest generation, and 46% of those voters voted Dem, that means 4.6% of total voters were Silent/Greatest who voted Dem.

It's Catalist with an I not a Y which spell check wants to misdirect you with. https://catalist.us/data/

[LauraInLA]

9. Thank you!

[LeftInTX]

3. My husband was an election clerk. Lots of first time Indian women came to vote.

They were a group that needed help. Didn't know how to use the machine, language issues etc. Or talking loudly with their husband in the next booth. "Where's Trump?" Etc...Somehow he was able to see who they were voting for because they needed so much help. Guess who?

[LeftInTX]

4. I agree. Which district was lost, may I ask?

Last edited Mon Feb 17, 2025, 03:52 PM - Edit history (1)

I live in a very Latino area. (South Texas, primarily Mexican-American). East coast Latinos are a different culture than down here.
We don't have Puerto Ricans. (Or we have very few. A friend of mine said that PRs retain some of their island political affiliations and are "hard to read politically".)

I consider everyone pretty much "working class", even if they aren't. Even if they are above average, most come from working class roots.


My DIL recently became a financial planner and she was considering voting for Trump. (Taxes etc)

My husband told her: "You came from foster care and you are where you are because the state paid for your college education. Don't forget your roots". She voted for Kamala. She's glad that she did because she sees the disaster.

I don't know if my Latina daughter, who very likely voted for Trump knows about the "Gulf of America". (She rarely votes and is married to a tech bro) She's very apolitical and voted on election day. Her GOP hubby must have dragged her to the polls. At least that's what I think happened. She hates politics mainly because she's still rebelling against me.

Overall the Latino population is center left, but sorta conservative. They can be swayed to the right. There are also alot of veterans, border patrol, and law enforcement. Also I think all these homeless people, shoplifting gang stories, immigrant influxes worked against us.
I really think Biden let in too many. I don't support all these deportations, but we had all these immigrants from Venezuela who were sleeping in people's yards. There were so many immigrants that there was nowhere for them to go. It was really crazy.

City opens holding facility at airport as hundreds sleep outside overflowing migrant center

https://sanantonioreport.org/san-antonio-international-airport-migrant-holding-facility-resource-center-arrivals/

According to data from Catholic Charities, 7,811 migrants arrived at the MRC during the week of September 24

I've lived here over 40 years and have never seen anything like this. My friend who grew up here, drove down the street and was shocked. It sorta reminded me of after the Mexican Revolution, when thousands came escaping. Of course, I wasn't alive then.

[somsai]

6. CO 8th, it's a new district from the census, our districts are cut up on a non partisan basis

They try to group districts geographically and also culturally to some extent. The 8th starts as the industrial sector above Denver, then traditionally Hispanic towns all the way up to the cowtown of Greeley. Of course it's all filled in with houses now, part of the metro area.

A lot of the bad feelings here came from 2021 and 22 when there were many Hondurans and Guatemalans given work permits via TPS and yet there were Mexican Nationals who had been here for 25 years without any sort of legal protections. Kind of like jumping the line. Then the Venezuelans were a real mess and I feel terrible just thinking about them. No jobs, not enough shelters, night time temps here are below zero sometimes, always well below freezing. Our low places are higher than most states.

[cksmithy]

8. I read the entire article on the new republic link,

a very informative article, with lots of good information. But,I do not understand why the author described the mayor of Reading, PA as a "squat man." At least one dictionary says squat means short and thick in an unattractive way." I almost stopped reading at that point. So, instead of just explaining how peoples minds were changed to vote for trump, he still had to demean and put down the Puerto Rico born, raised in Brooklyn, mayor, as the author says. If appearance is so important to him, maybe everything the author just wrote about was about how it appeared to him and not actual facts.