The largest Latino civil rights organization, UnidosUS Action Fund, will officially endorse President Biden on his re-election bid on Tuesday from the battleground state of Arizona, according to CBS News.
Through research, advocacy programs and an Affiliate Network of nearly 300 community-based organizations UnidosUS seeks to improve the social, economic and political life of Latinos throughout the country. Hence, they have historically played an important role in mobilizing the Latino electorate.
"The choice for Latino voters is really clear," UnidosUS President and CEO Janet Murguia told CBS News in an interview ahead of the endorsement.
The action fund will endorse the Biden-Harris campaign at an event in Phoenix, Ariz., a state that has come into the spotlight lately for a variety of issues related to Latinos raging from immigration policies to abortion restrictions.
Arizona, along with Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Georgia, are also key battleground territories where Latinos are predicted to tip the scale ahead of the November elections. In 2020, for instance, Biden won Arizona by less than 11,000 votes, a narrow margin in which Hispanic voters played a critical role.
The UnidosUS event will also include the group announcing their support for Congressman Ruben Gallego, the Democratic candidate in one of the most heated Senate races in the country. Gallego will go up against Republican Kari Lake, an ally of former President and presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
"With Biden, we can move forward and continue to advance on a path to progress and to a brighter future," Murguia said. "With Trump, we move backward to really extreme policies and to an economy that crushed Latino families when he was in office."
"He's talking about mass deportations," she continued. "Not just at the border, but across communities. This would hurt families and destabilize communities and have a harmful effect on our national economy."
Murguía also highlighted specific policies by the Biden administration that would benefit the Latino community, such as expanding the Affordable Care Act to include DACA beneficiaries.
UnidosUS will focus on mobilizing the over 2 million Latinos in the battleground state through get-out-the-vote efforts like door knocking, making phone calls, voter education initiatives, promoting its endorsed candidates and more.
"One of the biggest barriers to voter turnout has been a lack of investment in mobilizing in Latino voters," Murguia told CBS News. "We saw last election that very few Latino voters were actually contacted by either party or by the candidates to go out and either register to vote or vote on Election Day."
Similarly, the organization tackles certain obstacles that particularly affect the Latino electorate, such as misinformation and lack of outreach.
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