For the more than 40 years he has lived in Nevada, Jose Solorio says political campaigns have never been quite able to truly crack the state’s Latino community. 

The 65-year-old lobbyist and community advocate is not the first to emphasize the well-worn bit of political wisdom that the Latino community is not a monolith, with voting behaviors differing greatly by their immigration experience, age and Spanish proficiency. But after all these years and close elections, he says political parties are still grappling with this dynamic.

“Here's the thing: People want the Latino vote, but they don't know how to get it,” Solorio told The Nevada Independent at a Hispanics in Politics event this month. “We're different. We're not just ‘Do this, and you get all the votes.’ You have to reach us in different ways.”  

Despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric and promise to launch a mass deportation campaign, former President Donald Trump’s numbers with Latino voters have remained steady this cycle. While facing attacks for the surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, Vice President Kamala Harris has continued to consolidate support from Latinos after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. 

It’s clear that any path to victory for Democrats and Republicans this November will require tapping into these voters — who make up about one in every five registered voters in the state. 

But just how politically powerful are Nevada Latinos, and has it always been this way?

To answer these questions, The Nevada Independent analyzed how population trends have changed among voting-age Latinos in Nevada, as well as the bloc’s voting behavior since 2008. 

The data shows that voting-age Latino population growth has outpaced overall population growth in Nevada — particularly in the Las Vegas Valley — while one prominent Census survey indicates that Latinos tend to register and vote at lower rates than Black and white voters, signifying their untapped electoral potential.

The analysis also highlights a political environment where the power of Latino voters in Nevada is growing, a reality that could be the deciding factor in Nevada’s typically close statewide contests (the 2022 U.S. Senate race was decided by about 8,000 votes, the slimmest margin nationwide). And with Nevada’s six electoral votes potentially swinging the presidential race, political science experts say it’s possible the Latino vote in Nevada could play a significant role in determining the next president.

As of earlier this month, Democratic groups and candidates have aired more than $17 million worth of Spanish-language ads in Nevada across the presidential and Senate races this cycle, while Republicans have spent about $2.5 million in the Senate race and $100,000 in the presidential, according to ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

But it takes more than TV ads to court Latino voters, said David Damore, a UNLV political science professor who co-authored a book on the Latino population in Nevada.

“You’re talking about months of door-to-door canvassing to engage voters, potential voters, to build their trust,” Damore said. “It's very time consuming work to do that, but this is what the Democrats started doing way back two decades ago, and that really paid off in the last decade, in moving Nevada from lean Republican to lean Democratic.”

Population growth

Fernando Romero remembers that he was one of the eight Latino students in his graduating UNLV class of nearly 450 people.  

As a university student more than 50 years ago, Romero says that Latinos faced rampant discrimination, which he described as “even worse” than his childhood in Texas. He was berated and felt isolated from his peers throughout his early years in Nevada. It was a change for Romero, who originally hails from El Paso, a Texas bordertown that has long had a majority Latino population. 

Romero, the longtime head of Hispanics in Politics, said that he didn’t see Nevada’s Latino community really boom until the late 1980s, when casino magnate Steve Wynn began developing the Mirage and various other hotels. The growing industry attracted many Latino families in search of work, but with no pre-existing Latino community, he says politically minded individuals such as him had to fight hard to make their presence known — and it hasn't always been successful.

“We've grown considerably,” Romero said. “But the thing is that politically, we have not grown in the same leaps and bounds.” 

The data backs him up.

The number of voting-age Latinos in Nevada has grown considerably in recent years, outpacing the nationwide rate of growth for Latinos, according to a Nevada Independent analysis of Census data.

It’s especially pronounced in Clark County, the state’s population center. In 2022, more than 23 percent of the county’s voting-age residents were Latino, up from about 14 percent in 2009. 

Take the maps below as examples. In 2010, Latino-dominant Census tracts — small geographical areas used for data collection — were mostly concentrated in East Las Vegas, and only six of the roughly 650 Las Vegas Valley tracts were majority Latino. 

2022 is a different story. There were more than six times as many majority-Latino Census tracts compared to 2010, and the 2022 map has a slightly redder hue, indicating the growth of the Hispanic population throughout the valley.

Lisa Sanchez, a political science professor at the University of Arizona, said there are likely two main factors driving this trend: migration patterns within the U.S. and youth “aging up” to voting age.

“There's that old statistic that says, every 30 seconds, a Latino voter becomes eligible to vote because they reach their 18th birthday. That's absolutely true,” Sanchez said. “Latinos have slightly higher birth rates, so it's a younger population, and they're coming to have more children, and those children are becoming voters.”

While the state’s Latino population has grown, its level of representation in elected office (despite bright spots like the election of the nation’s first Latina Senator in Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV)) has also lagged behind.

In 2021, Latino groups pushed to secure a majority Latino congressional seat during the redistricting process. But the new boundaries ended up dividing the Latino population across the state's four districts, diluting the voting bloc's power.

While at the Hispanics in Politics event, Norma Salgado, a 60-year-old government worker, told The Nevada Independent that she’s encouraged by this population growth. 

As a young girl, her Mexican immigrant father encouraged Salgado to take pride in her heritage and become politically active. Despite this, Salgado said she felt isolated, recalling at times seeing only one other Hispanic student in her classroom. 

Now, seeing the groups of Hispanic kids graduating from high school and college fill her with pride. 

“It’s up to us to raise up other Hispanic people,” Salgado said. 

Voting behaviors

So how does all of this translate at the ballot box?

In every presidential election since 2008, Latinos in Nevada have voted and registered at lower rates than Black and white voters, according to a prominent Census survey taken after every federal election.

Since 2008, about 70 percent of eligible Latino voters in Nevada reported registering to vote and half reported casting ballots in the presidential election, according to the Census’ Current Population Survey, which surveys thousands of Nevadans after presidential elections.

Meanwhile, about 80 percent of white Nevadans reported registering to vote and 65 percent voting during that time frame, while two-thirds of Black Nevadans reported voting while 83 percent reported registering. Asian voters often reported participating at similar rates as Latinos.

Sanchez from the University of Arizona said this data follows historical trends.

“Latinos are punching under their weight class,” Sanchez said. “They tend to not turn out to vote at the rates that we see for other groups, especially whites and Blacks in the United States, that's nationally speaking and historically speaking.”

However, there remains untapped potential among Latino voters in part because they are younger and tend to have more volatile voting behaviors, Sanchez said. 

An analysis by the Latino Data Hub at UCLA found that the median age for eligible Latino voters in Nevada was 37 — 10 years younger than the average among all racial groups. 

Sanchez said this translates into voting behaviors, with younger people more inclined to vote if a presidential ticket is energizing voters and has tapped into social media platforms preferred by younger voters, such as TikTok.

“Before Kamala Harris came in, we definitely saw sort of the everyday format of campaigning being the primary role, and people weren't energized,” Sanchez said. “We're definitely seeing these massive numbers of Latinos become more energized recently.”

Not just Nevada

Latino populations have also soared in other swing states.

Of the seven swing states most likely to determine the winner of this year’s presidential race, Nevada ranked third in growth of voting age Latinos, following North Carolina and Georgia.

In addition, four of the 10 most populous counties in those swing states more than doubled their Latino voting-age population from 2009 to 2022, with Clark County slotting in third.

The data reflects the increasing power of Latino voters in all swing states — even those not known for prominent Latino populations.

Sanchez said these population changes have the potential to “shake things up” electorally. For example, Georgia and North Carolina are historically known for having predominant white and Black populations — and that has not changed — but the rise of the Latino population could have seismic electoral effects, particularly when elections have razor-thin margins.

“When you're talking about the swing states that are deciding [elections] by 8,000 votes, like Nevada, it's going to become even more important,” Sanchez said. “[Parties] are really focusing on which ones of these votes we can shift over to our camp.”

Click here for more information about The Nevada Independent’s analysis for this story.