The National Journal’s Matt Vasilogambros had a productive visit to Iowa recently. His feature on how immigration raids in 2006 affected the Latino community in Marshalltown is a must-read. Do click through, but prepare to be disheartened by stories of families broken apart and impacts that went far beyond the undocumented immigrants who were swept up in the raids at the Swift & Co. meat­pack­ing plant.

Vasilogambros also followed up on his story from last summer on “Why Latinos Don’t Caucus in Iowa” with a new look at the relatively poor outreach by presidential campaigns to the growing number of potential Latino caucus-goers.

If Latino participation in the February 1 caucuses exceeds the record set in 2008, credit will be due primarily to the League of United Latin American Citizens chapter in Iowa. Adrian Carrasquillo reported for Buzzfeed earlier this month on LULAC’s campaign. Highlights from both articles are after the jump.

According to a new report by the Pew Research Center, about 27.3 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in the 2016 general election, “a 40 percent increase since 2008 and the most ever.” Latinos make up roughly 5.5 percent of Iowa’s population, but their presence at the caucuses has been far below that level.

The estimated 3,500 Latino Iowa caucus-goers in 2008 represented only a little more than 1 percent of approximately 240,000 people who turned out for Democratic precinct caucuses and 120,000 who caucused for Republicans. Vasilogambros reported for the National Journal last week,

Chris­ti­an Ucles has seen the same cycle of Latino pan­der­ing for the last four caucuses.

Cam­paigns show up in Iowa, wait sev­er­al months un­til they hold a hand­ful of Latino-spe­cif­ic events, send a sur­rog­ate or two, and maybe host a roundtable with loc­al Latino lead­ers. That’s the ex­tent of their out­reach, Ucles says. Rarely are there paid, loc­al staff ded­ic­ated to the Latino vote, nor do cam­paigns spend sub­stan­tial re­sources for voter-re­gis­tra­tion drives or caucus training for Lati­nos. Many in the state don’t even know what a caucus is, he says.

But it hasn’t been for a lack of try­ing on Ucles’s part. As the polit­ic­al dir­ect­or for the Iowa branch of the League of United Lat­in Amer­ic­an Cit­izens, he reached out to pres­id­en­tial cam­paigns from both parties early this time around, ask­ing them to send can­did­ates and sur­rog­ates to speak to Lati­nos this sum­mer. Oth­er act­iv­ists with the Latino For­um in­vited them to at­tend events like the Latino Her­it­age Fest­iv­al, a massive an­nu­al gath­er­ing in down­town Des Moines in Septem­ber. Only [Martin] O’Mal­ley and [Bernie] Sanders showed up.

It’s not that cam­paigns don’t care about Lati­nos, he says. They made a stra­tegic de­cision based on pre­vi­ous caucuses and de­term­ined that in Iowa the Latino vote doesn’t mat­ter. But they may be to blame for the lack of par­ti­cip­a­tion.

“They won’t talk to Lati­nos un­less they have a his­tory of par­ti­cip­at­ing in the Iowa caucuses,” he tells me. “But why don’t they show up? Be­cause your cam­paign doesn’t talk to us. And why doesn’t your cam­paign talk to us? Be­cause they think that we don’t vote. So, it’s a cycle that keeps go­ing.”

Ucles shared more thoughts with Bleeding Heartland last July on the barriers to Latino participation in the Iowa caucuses. His perspective is particularly valuable, given his experience volunteering for various presidential campaigns here, going back to the 2000 election cycle.

LULAC’s national organization provided $300,000 to the Iowa chapter to support efforts to reach out to some 50,000 registered Latino voters in Iowa. Vasilogambros described that campaign in some detail, as did Carrasquillo in this piece for Buzzfeed on January 11. Direct mail and phone calls reached Latinos in all 99 Iowa counties, with canvassers targeting “the 20 precincts where many of Iowa’s nearly 50,000 registered Latino voters live.”

LULAC hopes to get 10,000 Latino voters to caucus this time around. And they’re pretty open about their motivation: It’s an anti-Trump effort.

“What Trump has done with his hate is he has caused much concern among our young people,” said Joe Enriquez Henry, who is in charge of the effort in the state, and is LULAC national vice president for Midwest coordinating. […]

The basic message of the mailers is, “If you don’t get involved someone else is going to make the decision for you,” Henry said. Those mailers began in November; the third was sent this week. His five staffers are trying to contact each targeted voter three to five times each — all part of the effort to get them to commit to caucusing.

LULAC has invited campaigns from both parties to their bilingual caucus trainings, but Jeb Bush’s campaign has been the one going to events across the state to make presentations for their candidate.

Bush, who began the race as the establishment favorite has seen his standing in the polls drop, only to be eclipsed by Ted Cruz leading many Iowa polls, followed by Trump and Rubio. (Henry and others involved with the LULAC efforts said Cruz and Rubio have not engaged in Hispanic outreach in the state.)

Jeb Bush’s campaign has scaled back its Iowa efforts lately, but all credit to them for reaching out to an under-represented population that most Republicans ignore. Since last summer, Bush has been among the presidential candidates most critical of Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric toward Latino and Muslim immigrants. His brother George W. Bush’s campaign made significant Latino outreach efforts in Iowa during the summer of 1999 as well, Vasilogambros reported.

The lack of effort by the Cruz and Rubio campaigns is somewhat surprising, but perhaps their strategists were afraid of alienating evangelicals who have delivered victory to the last two Republican Iowa caucus winners.

Any relevant comments are welcome in this thread.