SAN DIEGO — Now that they have Vice President Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee, Democrats probably think they've solved their problem with Latino voters.

They might want to think again.

It's true that Harris is a major improvement over President Joe Biden. A recent poll by USA Today/Suffolk University found that Harris now leads Trump by 16 points among Latinos, 53% to 37%. In June, an earlier poll found that Trump was leading Biden — who was then the presumptive Democratic nominee — by two points. That means there has been a remarkable 18-point swing ever since Harris took the reins and became the Democratic presidential nominee.

But the story doesn't end there.

For one thing, any Democrat running for president who gets only 53% of the Latino vote ought to be ashamed. In most of the presidential elections since 1960, Latinos have given a majority of their votes to the Democratic candidate. The low mark has, up to now, been the 54% of the Latino vote that John Kerry won in 2004; the Democratic senator from Massachusetts surrendered 44% of the Latino vote to Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

Then there's the fact that, for a Republican, Trump's 37% of the Latino vote isn't half bad. Typically, if a Republican candidate for president pulls down between 30% and 39% — i.e., John McCain who got 32% in 2008, Bush who got 35% in 2000, or Trump himself who got 36% in 2020 — it's a decent showing.

Of course, the first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging it. And Democrats don't seem to accept the fact that they're in bad shape with a constituency that represents not just America's largest minority but also one of the fastest voter groups in this country.

Latino voters represent about 15% of the U.S. electorate. Latinos are also present in two battleground states: Arizona (where, according to 2020 census figures, they account for 28% of the state's population) and Nevada (where they make up about 30%).

In 2020, 16.6 million Latinos voted, and that represented an increase of 30.9% over the turnout four years earlier, according to the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative.

With the election just two months away, the hour is late. The Harris-Walz campaign needs to increase its Latino support to at least 61%. That's the percentage that Biden got in the 2020 election.

This will take hard work, strategic thinking and a genuine desire on the part of the Democratic nominee to make an emotional connection with a group that she has long ignored, neglected and overlooked.

Harris hails from a border state — California, where the population is about 40% Latino. Yet, I can't name a single thing that she has done for that community. Whether the issue is education, jobs or health care, Latinos are never on her mind.

On immigration, Harris has brazenly done an about-face on the idea of building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In her speech to the Democratic National Convention, Harris promised that — if elected president — she would sign a bipartisan border security bill. It requires that as much as $650 million be used to continue building what Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., the lead negotiator, describes as "the Trump border wall."

This is the same California Democrat who, in 2017, shortly after arriving in the Senate, called the border wall a "stupid use of money" and pledged to "block any funding for it."

The Harris-Walz campaign claims the border bill doesn't authorize new funding but merely extends the timeline to spend funds that were already appropriated during the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, Trump still has this mystifying ability to garner support from a demographic group that he continues to insult and "otherize." He does especially well with Latino men who seem to be drawn to what they perceive as his strength and straight talk.

The 36% of the Latino vote that the Republican got in 2020 represented a seven-point jump from the 29% he got in 2016.

The USA Today/Suffolk University poll shows Trump getting 37%, but other polls over the last year have shown him getting more than 40%. So he might do even better than expected.

If Trump takes a healthy chunk of the Latino vote, it won't be because he earned it. It'll be because Harris gave it away.

To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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