Jennie Dallas speaks on Latino support for McCormick in Pennsylvania
November 18, 2024
When GOP candidate Dave McCormick defied the odds to pull ahead of Democratic incumbent Bob Casey in the last leg of Pennsylvania’s crucial U.S. Senate race, few observers were considering the role played by the state’s rightward-shifting Latino electorate.
In retrospect, they should have. The 2024 election cycle saw the début of several notable entries into the commonwealth’s Hispanic conservative sphere – a nascent but ambitious bloc whose influence, in an era of razor-thin electoral margins, is outsized. These players include the Hispanic Republican Coalition of Pennsylvania, a grassroots organization established in 2022, and The LIBRE Initiative, the Latino outreach arm of Americans for Prosperity, a national political advocacy organization backed by the libertarian billionaire Charles Koch and his political network.
“There’s no doubt in my mind” that LIBRE’s involvement played a key role in McCormick’s win, said Jennie Dallas, the group’s inaugural Pennsylvania strategic director and the publisher of La Voz Latina Central, a Spanish-language newspaper distributed throughout the heavily Hispanic Lehigh Valley. Citing a statistic that 70% of Latinos feel the U.S. is going “in the wrong direction,” Dallas said LIBRE’s 2024 entry into Pennsylvania – its 13th state branch – was “a matter of time” for the country’s largest center-right Latino organization….