A New York Times story highlights Latino voters’ overwhelming support of a women’s right to an abortion. This growing support comes as extremist Republicans continue pushing draconian bans in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas.
It also comes as House Republicans have passed four bills that would restrict access to reproductive care nationwide and introduced an additional six anti-abortion bills – including numerous national abortion bans this Congress alone.
DCCC Spokesperson José Muñoz:
“Republicans seem to be vying for a spot on the U.S. gymnastics team with the mental leaps they’re making to convince themselves Latino voters won’t care about their weird obsession with taking away a women’s right to an abortion. Democrats’ message to Latino voters on protecting their right to an abortion, lowering the cost of medication, and creating good paying jobs will resonate come November.”
A majority of Latino voters now support abortion rights, according to polls, a reversal from two decades ago. Polling trends, interviews with strategists and election results in Ohio and Virginia, where abortion rights played a central role, suggest Democrats’ optimism regarding Latinas — once considered too religious or too socially conservative to support abortion rights — could bear out.
As of April 2023, according to the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of Latinos believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Twenty years earlier, most Hispanics told Pew that they opposed abortion rights by a nearly two-to-one margin.
Latino majorities came out in favor of reproductive rights in 2023 elections in Ohio and Virginia, according to other surveys, and women played a major role in stalling the shift of Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party in 2022, when many voted for Democrats, citing abortion and reproductive health as the most important issue.
A crop of Latina Democratic candidates is nonetheless running on abortion rights in districts with large or fast-growing Hispanic populations.
In interviews, some said the fall of Roe had made the issue more urgent for their constituencies — and made voters more receptive to their message that abortion access was crucial to personal freedom and health care, even if the voters themselves were against the procedure.
