Miguel Gomez, 21, could never fathom supporting a Republican, until this election. He grew up in a solidly Democratic middle-class home in Phoenix, the oldest son of a Mexican-born father and a mother who planted a Kamala Harris sign in the front yard.
“For the longest time, I was a Democrat,” he said. “I didn’t look into it.”
But as Republicans have fought to peel away Latino voters in swing states, Mr. Gomez shocked his parents and close friends when he said he was leaning toward voting for former President Donald J. Trump. With his plans to forego college and become a welder, and his steady diet of right-leaning bro podcasters, Mr. Gomez did not feel as though he belonged in the Democratic Party anymore.
His parents were not having it. To them, voting against Mr. Trump was a statement about identity, not a transactional decision about food or gas prices.
“We grew up in our culture,” said his father, Miguel Sr., whose family brought him to the United States from Mexico City when he was a toddler. But his son? “Him, not so much.”
When the younger man’s early-voting ballot arrived in the mail last week, he agonized over choosing between the two empty bubbles facing him.
“Am I overthinking everything?” he asked.
Across Arizona, a state where about one in four voters is Latino, the 2024 election is dividing Latino voters like no other. Many families and friends who were once solidly Democratic say they now find themselves on opposing sides of America’s gaping political chasm.
Twenty years ago, half of the Latino adults living in Arizona were foreign-born, and the majority were not citizens and therefore ineligible to vote. Today, two-thirds are born in the U.S. and more than 40 percent of Latino immigrants in the state are naturalized citizens. While the immigrant population in the state continues to grow, the U.S.-born Latino population is growing much faster.
This mirrors a national trend. The children of Latino immigrants are increasing aging into the electorate, and their political sentiment is less predictable than their parents.
In 2020, Latino voters nationally supported Joe Biden by huge margins, but in this election, awash as it is with fear and discontent, many of those voters are finding that family ties and old political loyalties are moving to the background.
Increasingly, they are divided along the same fault lines that splinter the rest of the electorate — men versus women, those with a college education versus those without, rural versus urban.
Even the immigration issue is cutting a little differently this election. In interviews, more than two dozen Latino voters in Phoenix expressed complicated feelings about Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and deportation plans: Some were repelled, while others supported a crackdown on newly arrived migrants.
A small shift toward Republicans by Latino voters could imperil Democrats’ chances in Arizona. Latinos supported Mr. Biden by a roughly 30-point margin four years ago, helping him eke out a 10,500-vote win in the historically Republican state.
Recent surveys show Ms. Harris struggling to match that level of support.
A poll last month by The New York Times and Siena College found her advantage with Hispanic voters in Arizona was just 11 points. Younger Latino voters say in surveys that Trump policies helped them while Biden policies did not.
The share of registered Democrats in Arizona has dropped to 29 percent from 32 percent over the past four years as more voters have registered as independents. The Republican share has held steady at about 35 percent, and recent polling shows that Republicans are making inroads with Latino men like Mr. Gomez.
The stakes of this election feel deeply personal in for many Latinos in Arizona.
One of Mr. Gomez’s close friends, Ariel Sanchez Perez, 20, worries that his undocumented parents could be swept up in Mr. Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations. Mr. Sanchez Perez is planning to vote for Ms. Harris, and got a job over the summer knocking on doors with a pro-immigration Latino advocacy group.
“I feel like Miguel wouldn’t be able to understand that aspect,” Mr. Sanchez Perez said, referring to his fears for his parents.
The two friends have been close since fifth grade, bonding over online gaming and nights hanging out at a local pizza place. But their lives have grown increasingly distant. Mr. Sanchez Perez went to Johns Hopkins to study mechanical engineering. Mr. Gomez stayed in Phoenix, got a graduate equivalency degree and works at a QuikTrip gas station.
The election has injected friction into their friendship. Mr. Gomez said he was still troubled by Mr. Trump’s deportation promises. But he also said that he was distressed by the homelessness and addiction he sees while driving around Phoenix, and said he thought Democrats were to blame for the fentanyl pouring across the border. He said he could not vote for a candidate whose administration had presided over record numbers of migrants entering the country.
And Ms. Harris, he said, just did not seem tough enough.
If Mr. Trump is attracting young, working-class Latino men, Ms. Harris has her own cohort: women. A recent New York Times survey found that she had a 30-point lead among Hispanic women nationwide, but was just barely above water with Hispanic men.
That gender divide is evident in the Martinez family, who live in Maryvale, a working-class Latino neighborhood of Phoenix. The driveways in Maryvale are packed with pickups that leave every day for construction projects or home repair. On weekends, people sell warm churros and frozen fruit ices from their front yards to earn a little extra money.
Julio Martinez, 50, a truck driver, said he wanted to be a “team player” four years ago, and voted for Mr. Biden because his wife and daughter could not stand his opponent.
This year, though, he is fed up with the cost of housing and food. He is on Team Trump.
Political discussions at home have gotten so heated that the family had to watch the presidential debate last month in separate bedrooms.
Politics, however, is inescapable. The family is battered by political ads while watching Cardinals football games. Mr. Martinez drives past billboards on his predawn commute to haul wastewater, and his daughter, Julissa, sees ads as she flicks through social media.
On one blistering late-summer Sunday, arguments started up — again — about why Julissa had embraced Ms. Harris.
“Because Taylor Swift endorsed her,” Mr. Martinez said.
“I don’t like Taylor Swift,” she retorted. Explaining her support for Ms. Harris, she said: “I just like what she stands for — women’s rights and everything. It’s empowering for a woman to be so powerful.”
Julissa glanced at her father. “A man will never know what a woman goes through,” she said.
Arizona Democrats opened a field office last December on a commercial strip in Maryvale, where volunteers gather regularly to fan out through the neighborhood, knock on doors and get voters engaged. But at the barbershop next to the campaign office, the men on duty said they were not planning to vote. On residential streets, there are few political yard signs.
Robert Fernandez’s house, a few blocks away from the Martinez family, is one exception. A Harris-Walz flag flapped outside. But in that home, too, there is conflict. .
Mr. Fernandez, 38 and an interior decorator, said his relatives used to all be Democrats. His mother voted for President Obama and Mr. Biden, and supported Mr. Fernandez after he told her he was gay.
But starting with the pandemic, and continuing through the Biden administration, his mother’s political views began to align more with her friends and neighbors in the conservative exurb of Phoenix where she lives. This year, she is supporting Mr. Trump.
Mr. Fernandez’s mother, Lucy, a retired retail worker, repeated some familiar conspiracy theories. She now saw the Democrats as puppets of the investment company BlackRock, “Hollywood idiots” and the liberal financier George Soros. She said she was not impressed with Ms. Harris’s accomplishments, and was unconvinced by efforts to win back support from voters like her without college degrees.
“I’m not well-educated, but I’m not that stupid,” she said.
When she visited Mr. Fernandez to help prepare elaborate Halloween decorations at his home, they spent much of the time fighting about the election.
“I’m more distant now with them,” Mr. Fernandez said, referring to the Trump-supporting wing of his family. “I care about my family, but I feel stabbed in the back.”
Mr. Fernandez’s mother said he simply did not want to understand the other side.
“I love my son and would do anything for him,” she said, “but when we get together, I have to tell him, ‘No politics.’”
There was no such luck for Miguel Gomez, the dissident Trump supporter. He said he had tried to avoid discussing the election with his parents, and bristled at his mother’s outspoken opposition to Mr. Trump.
“I try to get him to understand where we’re coming from,” said his mother, Elizabeth Pedraza-Gomez, whose family has lived in Arizona for six generations.
As they filled out their mail-in ballots together — Miguel’s first in a presidential election — his mother said she told him the decision was up to him. She left him alone at the kitchen island to finish, so she could get the ballots into the mail.
He cast an ambivalent vote for Ms. Harris. He said that he just wanted it to be over.
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