For all the talk of a new, lasting multiracial coalition that helped elect Donald Trump, there are clues that this support may be wavering, particularly among Latino voters. Polls show the president’s approval rating with this group has plummeted since the last election, and a third of Latinos who voted for him say they are unlikely to back a Republican candidate in the next one.
This collapse happened for a few reasons. Latino voters are not only souring on the president generally, but also on his handling of key issues like immigration and the economy — the very topics that boosted his support with them initially. And curiously, this decline in support for the president isn’t translating into a surge for Democrats. Instead, many Latino voters express dissatisfaction with both parties.
This shifting dynamic suggests that both parties have been operating on flawed assumptions over the last few years. Democrats made the mistake of treating Latinos as a monolithic group, focusing on social justice issues while failing to address economic concerns that were pushing these voters toward the GOP.
Now, Republicans may be poised to make a similar mistake. They have largely viewed these voters as Republicans-in-waiting, banking on a rightward drift that they assume extends to the most extreme parts of the conservative social agenda. This approach risks alienating a large segment of the Latino electorate. Ultimately, both parties are learning a crucial lesson: Demographics aren’t destiny, and they need a more nuanced understanding of this diverse and rapidly changing group of voters.
The Democrats’ shrinking Latino majority
Over the last decade, Trump has remade the American electorate with the help of Latino voters. Back in 2016, his highly racialized and polarizing election victory resulted in one of the worst performances with Latino voters in modern history, winning fewer than three in 10 Hispanic and Latino voters, well below average for Republican candidates.
But splits began to develop among Latino communities in the US over the next few years. Working class, non-college educated, and male Latinos, as well as those from Florida and the Southwest, began to drift away from Democrats, particularly at the national level. They were more intrigued by Republican pitches centered around the economy, small business growth, and affordability.
At the same time, Democrats were hesitant to admit they had an issue with the Latino population, quibbling over messaging and campaign investments while missing the plot. By the time of the 2020 election, Trump had managed to not just recover his party’s losses in 2016, but expand on them, shrinking the Democratic advantage with Latinos by nearly 20 points.
Democrats, it turns out, misread Latino voters’ priorities and beliefs, gradually losing support from the peak they had from 2012 to 2016 (when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton enjoyed 40-point margins). The party largely approached Latinos as “voters of color,” marginalized minorities who could be mobilized through appeals to identity, immigrant solidarity, and social justice.
For some time, this worked, but Latinos weren’t behaving like a monolithic group. Instead, Latinos would fracture and become more dissimilar during this time, with various kinds of evangelicals, border residents, naturalized immigrants, and working class Latinos remaining or becoming more conservative as the Democratic Party and its white, college-educated base became more progressive.
Particularly on issues like crime, immigration and the border, and gender roles and identity, the liberal positions that Democrats took — or were portrayed to take — were out of step with the views of many conservative and moderate Latinos from 2020 to 2024.
In 2021, the Pew Research Center found that the most liberal, educated, and politically engaged Democrats exerted outsized influence on their party. By the 2024 election, this created an opening for Republicans, as Latino voters expressed greater openness to Trump and the GOP’s stances on the economy, immigration, and abortion. By then, their votes had begun to follow some of their beliefs.
Republican gains came quickly
As Democrats stumbled, Republicans stuck to a different approach: treating Latinos as a new kind of white voter. They doubled down on a hawkish and xenophobic immigration message that seemed to resonate with a large minority of Latinos, spoke of the border as an issue of crime and public safety, and talked nonstop about prices and affordability to exploit the lack of trust in Democrats’ stewardship of the economy.
Republicans sought to make the old Reagan line that, “Hispanics are conservatives, [but] they just don’t know it yet,” come true by hammering home the idea that Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party were too radical and out of touch.
This approach worked. Latinos concerned with immigration and the economy shifted to Republicans, and Trump posted a double-digit boost in support among Latinos, shrinking the Democratic advantage another 20 points.
Continued Latino support is not a given
An array of data suggest that this advantage is looking more short-lived, largely because Republicans aren’t taking into account the nuances of Latino voters. The GOP still did not win a majority of Latinos last year — and much of the boost was from disaffected Democrats or more moderate, disengaged Latinos who don’t have the same strong ideological leanings as the primarily white MAGA base.
The most recent evidence for this divergence comes from two research projects undertaken by the Democratic-aligned Equis Research group. In the spring, they tracked growing dissatisfaction among Latino voters with Trump’s handling of the economy, cost of living, and immigration. Even among what Equis calls “Biden defectors,” those former Democrats who switched to supporting Trump in 2024, a slight majority were beginning to turn on Trump’s economic policies.
This dynamic extended to immigration, where an overwhelming majority of all Latino voters thought the administration’s actions were “going too far and targeting the types of immigrants who strengthen our nation.” Some 36 percent of Trump-voting Latinos said the same thing, and a majority of Biden defectors, some 64 percent, felt the same way.
This suggests some degree of remaining immigrant solidarity among these swingier, evolving segments of the Latino electorate and disapproval over how mass deportations and aggressive anti-immigrant policies will affect law-abiding immigrants and their families.
Nearly two-thirds of Latinos in Equis’ polling believe that the Trump administration’s actions “will make it difficult for hardworking Latinos to feel safe, by increasing racial profiling and harassing all Latinos regardless of immigration status.” In other words, there is a limit to what various kinds of Latino voters are willing to stomach.
The same dynamic is becoming more clear with regards to the economy, where Latino voters, and new Trump voters specifically, are unhappy with the state of the economy. Biden defectors, Equis finds, are net negative on Trump’s economic policies: -6 percent of support in May and -8 percent in July.
Whether this dynamic not only hurts the GOP but also helps Democrats is unclear. Although many Latino voters still believe Republicans favor the wealthy over the working class, this long-standing sentiment is no longer pushing them toward the Democratic Party. Instead, they increasingly distrust both parties on this question.
But together, these signs suggest that the GOP is going too far with their policy and ideological mission in Trump’s second term, turning off the new converts they won to their coalition over the last 10 years.
Where the parties go from here
The two major parties are making errors with Latino voters. Both have to moderate their policy and ideological approaches while bringing more nuance to how they campaign.
Latinos do have some things that bind them together, and they are not just like white voters who can ignore discrimination and scapegoating and uprooting of their extended community’s lives (as immigration enforcement is showing). At the same time, they need to be talked to with more nuance.
Democrats tried to do this in 2024, moderating on immigration, dropping the usage of the term “Latinx,” and investing in hyper-specific, hyper-local campaigning with various kinds of Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Puerto Ricans, and others. But there was only so much campaigning they could do when facing a wave of anti-Biden, anti-incumbent electoral sentiment.
Republicans, meanwhile, toned down immigration talk and zeroed in on subgroups of the Latino electorate in battleground states in 2020. They appealed to religious and ideological conservatives — Cuban, South American, and Puerto Rican communities in Florida, as well as border communities in Arizona, Nevada, and Texas. Some of this nuanced campaigning did carry over to 2024, but it focused more on young and male Latinos in general. And 2024 saw a return to a kind of dog-whistle, racialized, and anti-immigrant scapegoating, which helped the anti-incumbent tide.
Latino voters are rapidly changing, existing as both a racial minority and an assimilating, formerly immigrant generation. Both parties will have to find a middle ground to recover or build up their coalitions. There is no such thing as a Latino voter, but rather, various kinds of Latino voters. Each must be approached differently.
The post Republicans are making a very simple, unforced mistake with Latino voters appeared first on Vox.
