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Some 35 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in next November’s midterm elections, where they are concerned about rising food and gasoline prices in the country.
Latinos are one of the fastest-growing racial and ethnic groups in the United States, with 62.1 million Hispanics making up nearly one in five Americans, Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Race and Ethnicity at the Pew Research Center, noted Monday during a New York Foreign Press Center virtual forum on the Latino vote and the midterm elections.
“(Latinos) have accounted for roughly half of the country’s population growth since 2010. And even before that in the 1990s. About half of the U.S. population growth since then has come from Hispanic population growth,” the Mexican-born researcher indicated.
He also noted that Latino voters are growing faster than the number of black voters, due precisely to immigration and children born in the 2000s, who have turned 18, the age required to vote.
And although it is a population that is dispersed, without being a majority in any state, half of them are concentrated in California and Texas.
“Almost 35 million people is what we project (to have the right to vote) this year,” a figure that in the 2020 elections was 32 million, a rise attributed to the children of immigrants born in the country and those who have become citizens.
“This number is growing rapidly: in any given year, about 1 million young U.S.-born Latinos enter adulthood and become potential voters,” he said.
However, Lopez acknowledges that it is difficult to predict how many will actually vote: it will depend on their interest in the elections, the candidates in the places with the largest Latino community, and the environment in the country.
