Hispanic voters who helped deliver President Trump’s 2024 victory are rapidly souring on him, according to New York Times reporting from South Texas, with many saying they got a “raw deal” and planning to simply sit out this year’s midterms rather than switch parties.
Times reporter Jennifer Medina, who traveled through the Rio Grande Valley, found a region once blanketed in Trump campaign symbols that now shows barely a trace of them, a visible sign of how far support has fallen. She said optimism about Trump’s second term has “curdled into a deep sense of abandonment” among voters she interviewed, who largely cited two reasons for originally backing him: tighter border security and economic improvement.
While illegal crossings have dropped sharply, Medina found the immigration enforcement sweeping up longtime residents, including workers who’ve lived in the U.S. for decades, has hit local industries hard, with contractors describing crews vanishing overnight to deportation and remaining employees too scared to commute to work. Meanwhile, gas and grocery prices remain stubbornly high.
At a White House Hispanic Heritage Month event this week, Trump sidestepped the backlash entirely, according to Times White House reporter Erica Green, who was in attendance. Instead of addressing the economic or immigration frustrations, Trump announced attendees would get first dibs on touring his new ballroom and showered them with praise, calling them “smart as hell,” “hard-working” and “energetic — sometimes too energetic.”
His comments on the political fallout stayed vague, and in an apparent joke about the ballroom’s construction site, he remarked, “Only a Hispanic could survive that fall.”
Medina said the voters she spoke with care far less about Trump’s rhetoric than his administration’s actions. Many belong to WhatsApp groups circulating videos of masked agents detaining people on their way to work, footage they desperately want to stop seeing. Privately, Trump has reportedly bristled at any suggestion ICE should ease its approach, viewing the crackdown as exactly what he was elected to carry out.
Similar dynamics are reportedly playing out in other Latino-heavy regions, like South Florida, central California, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, though the shift isn’t necessarily boosting Democrats directly. Many disillusioned Hispanic Republicans say they’ll simply stay home on Election Day rather than cross party lines.
The warning signs extend beyond Hispanic voters. Vice President J.D. Vance is traveling to Alaska Monday to shore up Sen. Dan Sullivan’s tight race against Democrat Mary Peltola, while House Democrats expanded their target list by eight districts into traditionally Republican turf in Kansas, Texas, and Michigan. In Kansas, former GOP Gov. Mike Hayden became the second past Republican governor to endorse Democratic Senate nominee Adam Hamilton in less than a month.
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