LatAm in Focus at 200: What Do We Know about Electoral Trends in the Americas?

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Our latest edition of Latin America in Focus marks a major milestone: Episode 200.

Over the course of the eight years since its launch, AS/COA’s flagship podcast has covered a range of issues. From the Rio Olympics, to NAFTA’s renegotiations; from El Salvador’s Bitcoin gamble to how Covid-19 reshaped the region, the series has taken us from the rainforest to the football pitch to the movies.

We’ve asked a lot of questions along the way—including in the titles of our podcasts. As we cross the 200-episode threshold, we decided to revisit three of those questions. Given that this year more than half the world’s population was eligible to cast ballots, we focus on elections, and we invite back some past guests to get down to answers.

We start with a 2023 episode called “Will the Anti-incumbency Wave Reach Argentina and Guatemala?” The short answer is, yes, it did in both cases. Libertarian outsider Javier Milei was the victor in Argentina while Bernardo Arévalo came from well behind in the polls to triumph in Guatemala. Both cases proved to be part of a larger regional trend. As Brian Winter, Americas Quarterly editor-in-chief and AS/COA vice president of policy, explains to host Carin Zissis, starting in 2018, the opposition won 19 out of 21 free-and-fair Latin American elections. “There were five years it was virtually impossible to get reelected if you were an incumbent in the region,” says Winter.

But this year, Latin Americans are breaking the streak of voting out sitting candidates and parties, as seen in the presidential votes of El Salvador, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. Winter says a decrease in economic malaise and the end of the pandemic are two reasons that “people are more willing to consider voting for continuity instead of change.”

Then, we head back to 2022 and a question posed during the U.S. midterms: “What Do We Really Know about the Latino Vote?” Ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center, talks with AS/COA Online’s Chase Harrison. Lopez also previously joined us as a guest to help dispel the myth of the monolithic Latino voter. He covers what’s on the minds of this bloc, which accounts for 15 percent of eligible voters, and could play a big role in large and swing states.

He noted that even as the Democrat candidate’s gain may not mean a Republican candidate decline with the bloc. “Kamala Harris has improved her standing compared to [President Joe] Biden among Latino voters. But, interestingly, Kamala Harris' entrance into the election campaign hasn't resulted in a decline in support from Latino voters for Donald Trump,” says Lopez.

Finally, we jump to June 2024, when we reported from Mexico about the election, asking: “In Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum Won Big: Now What?” Fast forward three months and outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, is making the most of that huge victory and a congressional majority that could overhaul the judiciary, autonomous agencies, the military, and more.

What challenges will Sheinbaum inherit when she takes office on October 1? What do they mean for North American ties?

In a conversation with the podcast’s Executive Producer Luisa Leme, our host, Carin Zissis, lays out why, even with her coalition’s massive political sway, Mexico’s first woman president will face hurdles. “She's going to have to control all of these different factions, including [getting] factions that backed AMLO to back her and to back what she wants to do as president.”

We’re excited to share the two-hundredth episode. It also marks a shift in the podcast: Luisa Leme will be taking over the reins as host from Carin Zissis. Stay tuned, sign up, and subscribe; we’ve got a fall season in the works that will look at areas like entrepreneurship, tech, elections, and more.

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