How will the Latino vote swing in the California governor and mayoral races?

The California primary election is only four days away and the two most hotly contested races of the cycle — the gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral races — are still up for grabs. Once again, the voting bloc that has inspired the most intrigue is the state's sizable Latino electorate. Across California, the demographic makes up 40% of the population, and accounted for 30% of registered voters in the 2024 general election. In L.A., almost half of the city's population is Latino, but Latinos make up 37% of the city's electorate.

In both races, candidates have, to varying degrees, been courting the ever-elusive Latino vote. Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton proudly hoisted "Barstow street tacos" — a.k.a. Del Taco hard shell tacos — as he stood near a busy thoroughfare in the high desert earlier this month.

Meanwhile, billionaire Democratic contender Tom Steyer participated in a not-so-organic sock check with the popular meme page Foos Gone Wild, hosted a content creator meet-up at famed L.A. Oaxacan restaurant Guelaguetza and gained endorsements from prominent Latino influencers. Xavier Becerra, the Democrat currently leading the polls, has leaned into his Mexican heritage and the relatability of his family's pursuit of the American dream. He's also courted his own cadre of influencers.

On the mayoral side, Republican candidate and former reality TV star Spencer Pratt has shared AI-generated salsa and merengue songs that hail him as a savior and refers to Mayor Karen Bass as “Karen Basura” — the latter word being Spanish for trash. He’s scored endorsements from Latino business groups and held a block party in South L.A.

In contrast, incumbent Bass has touted her stance against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that largely affected Latinos in L.A. last summer, and has garnered support from the Latino working class. As for the third-place contender, City Councilmember Nithya Raman recently hosted a happy hour at Distrito Catorce bar in the heavily Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights, and has released an ad in which she speaks Spanish. Ahead of next week's election, I spoke with Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, the paper's resident Latino vote expert, about how the Latino vote might play out in Tuesday's two biggest races. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The big looming question is, do you feel like we're on track right now for California to get its first Latino governor in over 150 years? You never know what the electorate is going to do until you have the results. Polls were showing that Trump was not going to win in 2016, and we all know how that went. Polls were showing that [former L.A.

Mayor] Tom Bradley was going to be California's first Black governor back in 1982 and he lost. So, as a California political history nerd, I always keep that in mind, especially because it's an L.A. story. In fact, it's a phenomenon called the "Bradley effect," where people who are being surveyed tell the poll taker what they think they want the poll taker to hear, but actually do something else. And the story is that these people were saying, "I don't want to be seen as racist by saying I'm going to vote for George Deukmejian, so instead I'm going to say I'm going to vote for Tom Bradley," and then do otherwise.

What you see with Becerra leading the polls is that he has staged a remarkable comeback because he used to be at the bottom of the barrel before Eric Swalwell dropped out. We are still a week from election day. How many more hundreds of millions of dollars is Tom Steyer going to spend for himself? How many more tens of millions will be spent as opponents try to discredit him and try to get their guy on top?

I won't believe it until I see it — let's put it that way. Do you feel there's a candidate for governor that's really doing the most effective outreach to Latinos? I mean, Steve Hilton obviously did incredible things with the Barstow street taco. Look, we can make fun of Hilton all we want, but he has been the one who has explicitly been going to small towns, Latino majority towns, because he's really banking on what I've always called the "rancho libertarians" — conservative-leaning Latinos who historically voted Democrat, but don't like a lot of the policies that Democrats have inflicted on the working class.

Culture war topics, like trans children in sports or saying we're gonna ban the combustible engine in cars, stuff like that. Those things piss off people like my cousins. So Hilton's banking hard on that, more so than the Democrats. The problem with Hilton, though, is that he seems to forget how much people in California — but especially now a lot of the Latinos who did vote for Trump — loathe Trump.

That's what is going to sink him and so for him to say now that he's a candidate of legal immigrants, that's just stupid. That's just playing Trumper to that side of the equation. Steyer has done a lot to get progressive Latinos. All the young Latinos that I know are Steyer guys.

I know people and I have friends who were working on Steyer's campaign here in Orange County, or at least adjacent to it, and it's really the Boomer Latinos who are going for Becerra sort of by default. I don't think anyone has [done exceptionally well]. I think Hilton's done the best job of trying to reach out, but I don't think he's going to ultimately succeed. There were recently a couple of stories about influencers that have to various degrees been paid by the different gubernatorial candidates, particularly Steyer and Becerra.

Do you think that sort of campaigning really works? Do you think the backlash from that actually matters? Do people care? I think that it actually hurts the influencers.

When I saw that "Foos Gone Wild" thing, I thought to myself, "No way is this guy who is all about performative politics, no way is he actually trying to weigh in on this without something going on." And at first there was no disclosure, so I'm like, "Well, good for him." Then all of a sudden they put in the hashtag [acknowledging the payment from the Steyer campaign]. You saw it in the comments, a lot of these followers, if you really pay attention, they're more conservative-leaning than you would think them to be. They were calling out the "Foos Gone Wild" creator, saying, "Oh, you're a sellout." When influencers — and not just Latino influencers, but influencers in general — get involved in the political realm, it doesn't really work out well for them. They become political advertising, and everyone hates political advertising.

I actually don't blame the candidates. For Becerra and Steyer, this is no different than buying political airtime, buying fliers or doing all the stuff that they already do. This time, hate the players, don't hate the game. A few weeks ago you wrote that Becerra needed to channel his "inner cholo." Has he done that?

He's tío-maxxing. And he's not the crazy tío, but the one that went to Stanford and goes to the family pachanga in a tie even though everyone else is wearing tejanas. That is no act, that is actually who he is. I think he's actually stepped it up and has been a little bit harsher.

That whole "Cálmate, Antonio" confrontation with Antonio Villaraigosa at the gubernatorial debate was something he would not have said before. He truly is a nice person. I've met him a couple of times and he truly is that boring type, but he knows how to fight. You don't rise up in the Eastside political machine without knowing how to throw punches.

For Steyer, do you think there is any positive appeal to him being a billionaire? No way! He's no Trump. Trump sold Americans on this idea that billions come with power.

Steyer is the opposite. He is trying to say, "I don't have any power, even with my billions. I want to use those billions to give other people power." That's just dissonant, you know? And that's been one of the big critiques, especially coming from liberal Latinos — not progressives, not the young folks — but the liberal ones, saying, "Wait, we're not supposed to care for billionaires.

Why are we supposed to trust you?" That's been Steyer's biggest obstacle, frankly, that he is a billionaire. He keeps having to apologize for it. And Latinos don't care for rich people. What good is being rich if you don't have power behind it if you're not basically a thug like Trump is?

I'll never forget when I did my column about the podcast "American Cholo" back in 2024, the hosts said, "I don't like Trump, but Trump's a thug, and that's why the hood represents Trump, because he knows how to get stuff done." Steyer is not a thug. That's not who he is. Same thing with Becerra, he's not a thug. How is that "thug" mentality playing out in the L.A. mayoral race?

That's where Pratt is so dangerous for Bass and Raman. A lot of Latinos who don't really vote — especially the younger “rancho libertarians” — they don't care for [a sense of political decorum]. Let's not forget, No. 1, Rick Caruso won the Latino vote [in the 2022 mayoral race]. Not by much, but he won it.

No. 2, you still have misogynoir among certain sectors of the Latino community as well as straight misogyny. Additionally, those Latino Trumpers do not like bureaucrats. They don't like boring people. They like someone who can be loud, abrasive and obnoxious.

That's why I think Pratt — if he knew what he was doing, and I think he does know a little bit, but not as much as he makes it out to be — could easily be the candidate of Latino men. There was an earlier poll that showed [Republican gubernatorial candidate] Chad Bianco was leading among Latinos in Riverside County. When I heard that, I wasn’t surprised at all. He's a cowboy.

We all know that type. However, Spencer doesn't get Latinos in Los Angeles because he's going off about Latinos being against communism, and saying, "Karen's a communist." For Latinos in L.A. as a whole, communism or anti-communism has no political role outside of maybe Downey. If Pratt was smart, he would be trying to get the endorsement of [tough-on-crime Salvadoran President] Nayib Bukele. That would excite way more Latinos than saying Karen went to Cuba back in the '70s.

No one cares about that anymore. But if you have Bukele doing a video saying, “Vote for my friend Pratt,” he would get a bunch of votes, trust me. What is Karen Bass’ appeal for the general public, but also for the Latino electorate? What has she done to earn people's vote?

I personally think Karen has gotten worse of a rap than she deserves. When the fires happened last year, I said that people shouldn't be mad at her for going to Ghana. I still believe that. No one could have anticipated what ultimately happened.

She fired [Fire Chief Kristin Crowley] because, if you really want to put the blame on anyone, put it on the LAFD bosses. So you have that with Karen.

According to the LAPD, crime has gone down. Karen says homelessness has gone down by more than 17%. I think Karen's done a good job of standing up against Immigration Customs Enforcement and [former Border Patrol Commander Gregory] Bovino. I know some people are saying she hasn't done as great of a job as she should have, but if she was a complete and utter failure, you would not have all these labor unions backing her.

Labor's going to back labor, but if you don't do good by what labor cares about in Los Angeles — which is mainly standing up for working-class folks, especially Latinos — they're going to abandon you. All of that said, more than a few Latino friends of mine have told me already they’re voting for Pratt, or they saw the debate and they thought, “He kind of makes sense. I don’t know if I’m going to vote for him, because he seems crazy and he surrounds himself with crazy people, but I like what he has to say.” If both Pratt and Hilton were smart, they would disassociate themselves from Trump, while at the same time hammer in on those Latinos. Both of them kind of know that, but I don’t know if they’re truly committed to doing that, though.

Do you see an outside chance for Raman? I know that she's made efforts with the Latino community, especially recently, but it seems like she's not polling very strongly with that demographic. Do you think she's made enough of an effort for her to push her way into the runoff? It's tight, but I'm not going to make any predictions.

She did go down to Olvera Street recently to meet with the vendors, so that was an important thing. And she knows how to speak Spanish. That's what one of her campaign people told me. She's just not going for the conservative vote or the disaffected Democrat like Pratt is.

She's still swinging to the progressive side, but the true progressives are all going for Rae Huang. She's not going to get much of the establishment labor vote because of Karen. She's the odd person out and it’s bad. I think she’s good.

I just think she ran way too late in the game for her to make much of a move. I do think, though, Karen has an easier chance of beating Nithya than she does Spencer. Nithya is running a respectable campaign. Respectability politics don't really win in Los Angeles, especially now.

You need a politic of ire and populism, and Pratt is channeling that. For the people who are saying that Karen's trying to make it so that she faces off against Spencer, be careful what you wish for because it might come true. It still seems like a sizable portion of the Latino vote is undecided on both races. What do you think that indecisiveness boils down to?

In both races, there are too many choices and no one has really popped up as the overwhelming favorite. Whoever is going to get into the top two, they're not going to do it by overwhelmingly passing the third-place finisher. That's the only prediction I'll give. In the mayor's race, Karen has had to deal with a bunch of crap, so she's playing defense when incumbents usually don't have to play any game at all.

They just allow whatever happens to happen because they're usually gonna win. Latinos are the key to victory because they're just such a great swing vote.

But you have to get Latinos to come out and actually vote, because they consistently underperform. That's what Caruso did. I don't think Caruso was going to win, but if more Latinos had come out, it would have been way closer. For the gubernatorial race, I think Latinos are going to be coming out for Becerra in a way that he doesn't have to worry about it just yet.

For the mayor's race, if they want to advance to the top two — Bass, Raman or Pratt — they better pray that Latinos come out and go out their way. Is there anything else you want to add about these races? The last thing I'll say to all Latinos is vote. If you don't vote, you deserve all the desmadre that's coming your way because there is no excuse anymore.

Everyone has mail-in ballots. It used to be that maybe you couldn't get off of work. Well, now you can go after work. What's the excuse?

We're less than one week away from the premiere of "The De Los Podcast." Hosted by De Los editors Fidel Martinez and Suzy Exposito, the weekly show will feature conversations with some of the most influential U.S. Latino figures. The series trailer is available now. The show's inaugural guest is singer/actor/dancer Leslie Grace of "In the Heights" fame.

Future guests of the podcast include actor Xolo Maridueña (“Blue Beetle,” “Cobra Kai”), rapper Sen Dog of Cypress Hill and comedy legend Cheech Marin. Tune in June 3. Make sure you follow the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and give it a 5-star rating! Julio Salgado is a visual artist based in Long Beach.

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