By Sabrina Rodriguez · The Washington Post (c) 2025
A pair of influential Latino Democrats are teaming up to launch a new super PAC to mobilize Latino voters in support of Democratic candidates after the party suffered major slippage with the key voting bloc in recent election cycles.
Former congressman Tony Cárdenas (D-California) and Chuck Rocha, a longtime Democratic strategist who served as an adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vermont) presidential bids and Sen. Ruben Gallego’s (D-Arizona) Senate campaign, are starting Campeones PAC – which means “champions” in Spanish – in response to their party’s challenges with Latino voters.
In interviews, Cárdenas and Rocha argued that Latinos’ votes are not suddenly out of reach for Democrats, despite Donald Trump making inroads with the reliably blue voting bloc in the 2024 election, but the party must move quickly to engage with those voters and show them they can trust Democrats.
Some Latinos “were flirting with the Republican Party … and some just stayed home. So there’s an opportunity to win them back, and that’s why we’re moving now,” Rocha said. “We’re at a crossroads of maybe losing those folks forever if we don’t step up and explain to Latinos what Democrats are going to do to make their lives better.”
“Instead of sitting around and waiting for the party to get better, we decided we will just do it ourselves,” added Rocha, who said he’s spoken to several Democratic leaders and groups about the party’s ongoing struggles with Latinos in the months since the election.
The longtime friends each said they wanted to improve Democrats’ standing among Latinos after seeing what they called an insufficient investment in Latino outreach from Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign and the subsequent results of the 2024 election. Latino Democratic operatives who worked with the Harris campaign have expressed frustration that the campaign often ignored their advice and were reticent to spend what was necessary to court Latinos.
“How do you shortchange a community that you say is important to you and is important to your victory?” Cárdenas said. “The proof is in the pudding. You did not invest in communicating with them.”
Latino voters – and particularly Latino men – were one of the demographic groups that saw the most dramatic shift toward Trump in the 2024 election. While Harris won a slight majority of Latino voters overall, 51 to 46 percent, in the 2024 election, she significantly underperformed Joe Biden’s 33-point margin in 2020. Latino men swung 18 points to favor Trump nationally compared with 2020, according to exit polls.
Trump and Republicans had begun making inroads with Latinos in the 2020 presidential contest and 2022 midterms. Ahead of the 2024 election, he and his allies had focused on trying to win a greater share of the key voter group by courting Latino men, younger Latinos and those who voted sporadically or had never voted.
Part of Campeones PAC’s mission will be to communicate to Latinos what Trump and Republicans are doing to hurt Latino communities and how Democrats are the ones backing policies that will benefit them, Cárdenas said.
“I’ve witnessed firsthand for 28 years my Republican colleagues claiming and talking about the American family and how they care about them and, with all due respect, at the end of the day, they care about Wall Street, and they care about the richest people in the world,” Cárdenas said. “We’re seeing it unabashedly right now like never before.”
Cárdenas pointed to Gallego’s successful Senate campaign in Arizona as an example of how Democrats can decisively win Latinos when they prioritize them. Gallego ran several points ahead of Harris with Latinos in the battleground state that Trump won. Gallego has said part of his campaign’s success came from engaging with working-class Latinos in ways that would resonate with them, such as serving as a judge at a tamale festival, hosting watch parties for major boxing matches and closing out his campaign with a rodeo.
The group is planning to invest in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races this year, Cárdenas said. Latinos make up roughly 16 percent of eligible voters in New Jersey and 7 percent in Virginia, according to the Pew Research Center.
Cárdenas, who retired from Congress earlier this year, is set to lead the super PAC while Rocha, who was the architect of Sanders’s Latino outreach in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, will serve as a senior adviser.
Cárdenas served in public office for nearly 30 decades and previously led Bold PAC, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s campaign arm. Democratic operatives have long praised Cárdenas for his work building Bold PAC into a major fundraiser for Latino Democratic candidates.
The two men have recruited a group of longtime Latino operatives, including Maria Cardona and Albert Morales, to serve as advisers. They said they plan to rely on Latino pollsters, consultants and thought leaders as they strategize how to better reach and connect with Latino voters.
“The party has to get better at getting back to the reason that this Mexican joined the party, which was to fight trade deals, fight back against the elites of my party and investing my money more into my neighborhood than not overseas in some foreign war,” Rocha said.
“We have to win the messaging back,” he added. “And we hope the Democratic Party comes along with us, but we can’t wait on them.”