Gun violence has become the focus of a woman who will vote for the first time this year in Tucson, Arizona, The 19th News reports. Her focus started in the fall of 2022: “Adriana Grijalva was getting ready to head to class at the University of Arizona when she got a text message from her cousin telling her to stay put. The cousin, who works in maintenance at the university, had watched law enforcement descend on campus and reached out to make sure she was safe. A former student had just shot a professor 11 times, killing him.” At the time, Grijalva wasn’t old enough to vote and she wasn’t politically active. “This November, she’ll be among the estimated 4 million Latinx Americans who can vote for the first time,” The 19th reports. “They’ll account for half of the growth in new eligible voters since the 2020 election.”
It’s a coming-of-age story with a heated political backdrop. Nationwide, Latinos make up about 15 percent of all eligible voters. But in Arizona — which helped deliver President Joe “Biden’s victory in 2020 after former President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 — Latinx voters like Grijalva make up a quarter of all eligible voters, the highest share of any battleground state. Latinas account for more than half of those voters. Nationwide, surveys show Latinas having exceedingly high rates of support for gun control policies. This is even more true in Arizona, where about two-thirds of Latinx voters back tougher gun regulations, a position that’s driven by the overwhelming support for these measures among Latinas in the state, across the ideological spectrum.”
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