Latino males are an important bloc in Arizona's US Senate race. Here's what to know
One look at Albert Inclan’s bruised hands and scar-flecked face might suggest — correctly — that he is a fighter whose focus is on the challenge right in front of him.
Politics isn’t the usual concern for a man who installs granite and is a bare-knuckle boxer.
That changed, at least for a few minutes last week, when U.S. Senate candidate Ruben Gallego talked to Inclan about his own interest in boxing during a campaign stop at JL Boxing Academy in Glendale.
For Inclan, a 29-year-old who said he was homeless for a time, it was a chance to think about housing policy and his political preferences.
Inclan favors former President Donald Trump to incumbent President Joe Biden. Similarly, he prefers Gallego, a Democrat, to Republican Senate front-runner Kari Lake.
But the real question is whether Inclan will vote at all. He never has.
“I think it’s between not voting and Ruben,” Inclan said in an interview. “Not Kari.”
Inclan, whose family roots are in Mexico, is part of an elusive Hispanic demographic that defies easy political labels. Collectively, they vote for Democrats, but in smaller numbers than other racial and ethnic minority groups.
The NALEO Educational Fund, a nonpartisan Latino rights organization, estimates that nearly a quarter of Arizona voters this year will be Hispanic. That’s about 855,000, a 57% increase since 2016, the group said. Hispanic voters are a growing bloc of the Arizona electorate, but one still wooed by politicians in uneven ways.
Pollsters see Trump showing uncommon appeal with Hispanics, especially men.
A Republican consultant not involved in the Senate race but familiar with Arizona polling said that Lake isn’t doing as well with Hispanics as Trump. GOP polling shows Lake trailing Gallego in a race still expected to be within a few percentage points. It underscores the importance of a group that has been historically overlooked and voted in relatively small numbers.
Gallego is doing notably better than Biden with Hispanics and the gender gap is narrower, too.
Polling in the presidential race makes clear that Biden sees work to be done to win over Latino votes, especially from men. It is a group he targeted in a recent ad playing in swing states, including Arizona. Trump’s campaign held several events targeting the demographic in his 2020 run in a sign that he viewed the group as a key source of votes.
Gallego, who is the son of Hispanic immigrants, has made a point of reaching out to Hispanic voters in his bid for the seat held by the retiring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz.
In October, he held a town hall in Maryvale entirely in Spanish. It was a first in Arizona congressional politics and still a rarity anywhere in the country.
At other events, he has fielded and answered questions in Spanish, then translated into English for others. His campaign kickoff in Phoenix in 2023, began with Spanish.
They are often friendly environments that don’t offer the kind of policy candor that can cost potential votes.
Lake, whose husband is Hispanic, has reached out to Hispanic voters as well.
She made a campaign stop in Nogales last week and noted in a video that “Latinos embody everything I’m fighting for: faith, family and freedom.”
Days earlier, Lake taped a lengthy interview with Spanish-language Univision.
The interview covered topics Lake usually faces, from immigration to abortion to her 2022 election loss.
Lake said “I think we need to look at” whether to allow a path to citizenship for those brought to the U.S. illegally as children, but she went on to insist that “we can’t have it where some people can come in illegally and others can’t.”
In a January interview, Lake told Univision that children born to immigrants in the U.S. shouldn’t have automatic citizenship.
“I don’t think they are what’s called a natural-born citizen,” she said.
Ryan O’Daniel, an Arizona-based Republican consultant not involved in the Senate race, said candidates are simply reacting to the reality that statewide races in Arizona are now so close that literally every voter group matters.
“The big, core issues — whether it’s pocketbook, whether it’s abortion — is what drives people to make the decision for how they’re going to vote,” he said. “I think some of the outreach we’re seeing in Spanish language is more about voter turnout and getting people to actually participate.
“It’s a group that has largely been left alone up until the last couple of years. It’s because people were just taking them for granted. Republicans assumed they were voting for Democrats and Democrats presumed they were voting for Democrats.”
Gallego maintains he isn’t taking them for granted.
“I remember leaving work sites with my cousins to gather with friends and family to watch epic boxing matches,” Gallego said of his visit in a statement from his campaign. “Far too often, politicians treat Latino voters as a box to check. Our campaign is different: We’re focused on community events — food tours, town halls in Spanish, and this weekend, boxing watch parties.”
Lake’s campaign sees Hispanic voters as troubled by the same issues as other voters more broadly.
“Hispanic voters do not like the wide-open border. They don’t like the high inflation, and they do not like the crime Arizonans are experiencing,” the campaign said in a statement. “Ruben Gallego supports Joe Biden’s destructive policies that have caused record border crossings and historic inflation in Phoenix.
“Kari Lake supports the strong Trump policies that will secure the border and bring down the cost of living.”
Phoenix resident George Zelaya likes Lake, though he, too, has never voted.
The son of a mother from Honduras and a father from Mexico, he’s skeptical of politicians in general — “there’s a bit of maybe not full truths on both sides” — and doesn’t side with someone who is Hispanic just because he is.
Zelaya, 38, is weighing whether to register this year because he admires Trump for his honesty and record in office. He also resents vaccine mandates during the pandemic that Zelaya blames on Biden, whom he sees as untrustworthy.
Zelaya is thinking about Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, too.
“I’m not too familiar with the gentleman who was here,” Zelaya said of Gallego. “I know a bit about Kari Lake just because she had the big (dispute) with (now-Gov.) Katie Hobbs. I do like Kari Lake. … I did not like how Katie Hobbs refused to debate.”
That’s because Zelaya said he’s open to changing sides or candidates, but they have to make their own case. “I want to see what you’re made of,” he said. “I’m old school.”
Zelaya, who was on hand for Gallego’s visit to the gym where Zelaya works, said he respects that Gallego was a Marine.
“He seemed like a decent guy,” Zelaya said, though he admitted he would like to ask more substantive questions before considering whether he could vote for Gallego. “I don’t feel either for or against him, but I will go home and do more research on him now that I know he was here.”
Zelaya is troubled by what he sees as hypocrisy by the left when it calls for body autonomy on abortion rights and vaccine mandates during the pandemic.
“Your beliefs cannot be situational,” he said. “When you say, ‘My body, my choice,’ that means vaccinations, too.”
Victor Delgado of Phoenix said he sees Biden as a “puppet” and welcomes “pushing away that LGBTQ agenda from the kids.”
Trump, he said, presided over a better economy.
Delgado wants to see rent made more affordable, too.
He has tuned out the state’s Senate race entirely, with no opinion of Gallego or Lake and no urgency to form one.
“To the Latino community, they’re always going to say what sounds prettier to us, but in the end, they never come through.”
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake or Ruben Gallego: Which Senate candidate wins Latino vote?
