Many Latino Men Are Supporting President Trump This Election - NPR

"Hispanic men in particular are a swing vote," said Michelle Mayorga, a New Mexico-based pollster who worked on polls for Equis Research focused on Latino voters.

In polls by Equis Research in key swing states from Arizona to Nevada, Latino male voters show much more support for Trump than Latina voters.

But the support tracks with a Republican Party effort to court Latino voters over decades.

Republican strategists turned to Latino communities when they started to see African American voters fleeing the party in the 1950s and 1960s, said Geraldo Cadava, a historian at Northwestern University who wrote a book on Hispanic Republicans.

Ever since Richard Nixon's reelection campaign in 1972, Republicans have won somewhere between a quarter and a third of the Latino vote," said Cadava, author of The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, From Nixon to Trump.

And Latino Republican voters just identify as Republicans above all else, just like many Americans.

While some might expect that support to wane in communities who've been most severely affected by COVID-19 — losing more jobs and more lives than other demographic groups — Cadava said the Trump campaign's messaging has been successful on low unemployment for Latinos pre-pandemic, "law and order" (many Latinos serve in the military, police force and in the Border Patrol) and other issues important to Latino conservatives.

"It's been kind of amazing to watch, I mean, in some ways the Latinos for Trump campaign, which started officially in the spring of 2019, has been relentless in recruiting Latino voters," Cadava said.

In Orange County, Calif., Randall Avila is counting on Latino voters to turn the county red again by flipping back four congressional seats the party lost in 2018 and holding on to the county seat.

And while he said he probably wouldn't phrase things the way Trump does sometimes, Latino voters such as him are attracted to the message of lower taxes and lower costs of living, especially in California

"I've never seen the Republican Party fight this hard to get Latino and African American votes," he said