ne Saturday morning in late August, Ricardo Alfaro, an immigrant from El Salvador, approached a low-slung white house in Holland, Michigan. The place looked as if it had been the site of a party: a fire pit in the driveway still smelled of smoke, and cans of Modelo were strewn across the concrete. A resident named Veronica Cruz appeared at the door holding a baby and a stick of string cheese. Alfaro said that he was there to stump for Mike Rogers, a former Republican congressman now running for Senate in Michigan, against Abdul El-Sayed. “He’s focussed on the American Dream—I think that’s something that we share, as Latinos,” Alfaro told Cruz, in Spanish. As Alfaro gave his spiel about how Rogers would slash regulations, reduce government interference, and reform the American immigration system, Cruz studied a door hanger that he’d given her as the baby bit into the cheese stick. “So,” she said, “there’s more elections? This November?”
Alfaro, who’s twenty-seven and the youth director at an evangelical church, has decided to devote his time to turning Latinos into Republican voters. “Maybe you see things on the news, or on social media, but you’re not getting the facts or reliable information—that’s what we want to share with you,” he told Cruz. He introduced himself as a volunteer, but he is the Michigan strategic director for the Libre Initiative, a center-right group that’s affiliated with Charles Koch’s political-action committee Americans for Prosperity. In the past fifteen years, Libre has captured a significant share of the market for Latino voter-turnout operations on the right, with a presence in thirteen states, including all the electoral battlegrounds. Although Libre originated in Texas, a state with more than twelve million Latino residents, the organization chose not to funnel its money into the Senate contest there this fall. Daniel Garza, Libre’s founder and president, said that campaigning statewide for Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general and the Republican candidate for Senate, would have been too expensive, and that the group could have more of an effect on other races. But, “if Paxton loses by a point, two, three points, I won’t be sleeping at night for at least a year,” he told me.