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On Thursday evening, Vice President Kamala Harris participated in a town hall with Univision at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. There, she spoke with one woman named Yvette Castillo who could not provide end-of-life care for her mother because of her immigration status.
“The reality is that, in terms of having access to healthcare, had your mother been able to gain citizenship, she would have been entitled to healthcare that may have alleviated her suffering and yours,” Harris said.
But she notably did not say that undocumented immigrants should be entitled to government healthcare benefits — and she then pivoted to talking about the border bill that former president Donald Trump killed.
Meanwhile, down in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump’s running mate JD Vance, was busy telling attendees at his own town hall that Harris wanted to bankrupt the system.
“If the message that our country sends after 25 million illegal aliens coming into this country is: ‘You get to stay here, you get to collect housing benefits, you get to collect welfare benefits,’ while folks in western North Carolina are struggling to survive, we will never have a border in this country again,” he told attendees.
The divide reveals the thorny trail that Harris must navigate when it comes to immigration reform and Latino outreach. For decades, Democrats believed that Republicans’ anti-immigrant stance would render them unable to win over a population that largely came to the United States as migrants. But the data has not borne that out.
Five years after Trump called immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border drug dealers, criminals and rapists, he has improved his margin with Latino voters — including in border communities such as South Texas that historically voted Democratic. Furthermore, many Hispanics have come to also say that they believe an influx of migrants is a crisis for the country.
The latest alarm bell for Harris came in the form of two polls. An Associated Press-NORC poll showed that while Latino voters have a more negative view of Trump, a stark gender divide exists — just 36 percent of Latino men say Harris would be a good president, while 50 percent of Latinas say she would.
Another poll in The Wall Street Journal showed that Trump has a stark six-point lead in Nevada, a state with a heavy Latino population. Nevada has voted for a Democrat in every presidential election since 2008, but it stands on the cusp of breaking for Trump. If it does, it will be because of his support among Latinos.
To combat this, Harris’s campaign has gone all-in on trying to win over Latino voters. This week, they officially launched Hombres Con Harris. But it isn’t the presidential candidate herself that’s running that campaign effort — despite her years working in California and navigating Latino politics, Harris has left it to her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, to do most of the Hombres Con Harris outreach.
Earlier this week, he traveled to Nevada and Arizona, where the campaigned with Jim McCain, the son of the late John McCain, and Ruben Gallego. (Despite being a Republican, the elder McCain long supported immigration reform. Hispanics have also long been a staple of US miltary service and Gallego is himself a veteran of the US Marine Corps.) Walz even held an event in Tucson with a full mariachi band.
But the Harris-Walz ticket still faces massive hurdles. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that 51 percent of Hispanic men between the ages of 18 and 34 in Arizona support Trump.
With less than a month to go, Harris might have less of a shot of winning over those voters and more of a chance of boosting turnout among Latinas like Yvette Castillo.
