Latino Voters Moved Toward Republicans. Now Biden Wants Them Back.

Did Democrats take the Hispanic vote for granted in 2020? Some in the party think they did, and can’t afford the same mistakes going forward.

Alejandra Gomez was surprised, but pleased, by a flurry of phone calls from the White House in the spring, offering updates on its efforts toward an immigration overhaul. Officials also asked what her Arizona-based advocacy group thought of its work on voting rights and how the pandemic relief package was affecting the state. “It’s absolutely different than what we’ve seen before,” Ms. Gomez said, comparing the efforts to those of previous Democratic administrations, which typically waited to reach out only during re-election campaigns. She wasn’t alone. Leaders of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials were taken aback when both the president and vice president committed to speaking at their conference in June, the first time in the event’s decades-long history that the top two White House officials had agreed to speak in a non-election year.