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