SAN ANTONIO — Two years ago, Democrats suffered the sting of a sweeping repudiation from Latino voters who voted by the millions for President Donald Trump and the GOP. On Tuesday, those same voters delivered a rebuke just as brutal to Republicans.
That dramatic turnaround — fueled by frustration over high prices and anger at Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown — helped Democratic candidates on Tuesday achieve historic national gains in states long out of reach.
Democrats in some states made up some of their losses from 2024 with Hispanic voters, a rapidly growing demographic group that accounts for 1 in 6 eligible voters nationwide, according to the Pew Research Center. In other cases, they surpassed the party’s high-water marks from 2018, gaining new ground among first-time voters or those unlikely to turn out.
Meatpacking hubs in southwest Kansas and majority-Hispanic counties in Florida that voted for Republicans by wide margins two years ago flipped blue after years of moving rightward. And in Texas, an even sharper shift to the left fueled decisive Democratic victories by James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa, who were running for Senate and governor, respectively.
“Latinos very specifically said, ‘Basta, enough,’ to Trump and Republicans and their misplaced priorities and broken promises,” said Stephanie Valencia, a Democratic strategist and co-founder of Equis Research, a research and polling operation focused on Latino voters. “It’s the same ‘F you’ that Democrats got in 2024 as well.”
Trump won Latino-majority counties nationwide by five points in 2024. Valencia said that the same issues that drove Latinos toward the GOP that election — the economy, immigration and war — also drove them back to the Democrats this year in a trend that cut across different Hispanic national origins.
Where President Joe Biden in 2024 had struggled with chaos at the U.S.-Mexico border, high inflation and the war in Ukraine, she said, the GOP had now been put on the defensive with ramped-up deportations, a high cost of living and unpopular wars in Iran and Gaza.
Across the country, counties where Latino citizens make up a majority of the voting-age population shifted 28 points toward Democratic Senate candidates, who flipped seats in deep-red states such as Kansas.
That jumped to 34 points across Texas and even larger figures in some majority-Hispanic South Texas counties in the borderlands. Starr County in the Rio Grande Valley shifted 72 points to the left to back Talarico by over 50 points, helping drive him to become the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in Texas since 1988.
The shift among Latinos, one of the most dramatic for any demographic group on Tuesday, was particularly notable because Latino voters have been moving steadily away from Democrats in recent election cycles.
The swing also backfired on Republicans’ attempted gerrymander of South Texas. GOP leaders drew five new congressional districts where they believed they would retain Trump’s gains with Latinos, but Democrats won four of those seats.
Mike Madrid, a former adviser to Republican campaigns who has since left the GOP, said that pollsters underestimated how many young Latinos would vote. “The size of this young Latino wave is unprecedented,” he said.
But he cautioned that this isn’t a realignment toward Democrats. Instead, he called it “dealignment,” meaning that a large percentage of Latinos are showing that they have no serious allegiance to either major party.
Vianca Rodriguez, who served as a deputy communications director on Trump’s 2024 campaign, wrote on X that the party must be “much more aggressive” in going after these voters.
“You need the Hispanic American vote and continuing to make them feel alienated is costing us,” she said.
In San Antonio, first-time voter Anthony Gonzalez, 19, took a break from his restaurant job to cast his first ballot ever. He didn’t know a lot about the candidates and left some blank. But he did want to support Talarico.
“I saw a lot of videos online, and I liked his passion,” Gonzalez said. “I know some of it’s propaganda, but things are just kind of crazy right now.”
Gonzalez said he feels like the United States isn’t what it used to be — or at least what it promised to be for young people like him. He recently visited his barbershop and was told his preferred barber had been deported.
Andrea Flores, an immigration expert who worked in the Biden administration, said both parties have now experienced the consequences with Latino voters of getting immigration wrong.
Many Latino voters in South Texas cited their experiences seeing thousands of migrants who had crossed the border walk through their neighborhoods, asking people for water or directions, as the issue that turned them against the Biden administration. Trump’s mass deportation agenda had now pushed them away from Republicans.
“The through-line between 2024 and 2026 is that Latino communities rejected federal immigration policies that created fear and chaos in their communities,” Flores said.
She pointed to the shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston in July as a moment in which many Mexican Americans could see themselves as the target of the escalating violence of enforcement. The undocumented Mexican father of three was gunned down by ICE officers during a traffic stop in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement alleged he “weaponized” his vehicle.
Salgado Araujo’s sons and their pleas for justice, Flores said, typified the experience of many Latino families who have long waited for Congress to create pathways to legalization for their loved ones. Failing to deliver, she said, will doom Democrats to future dramatic swings.
Abel Prado, the campaign manager for Democratic House candidate Bobby Pulido, said his campaign in South Texas intentionally targeted Hispanic voters to flip a GOP-held seat.
“Republicans misunderstood what enforcement would do to the economy and the pain it would wreak on the fabric of the nuclear family,” Prado said. “What you saw last night was a direct repudiation of what happens when you disrupt the things that people care about the most.”
In southwest Kansas, where the meatpacking industry has drawn thousands of mostly Mexican immigrants in recent decades, a mix of immigration and economic issues encouraged first-time voters and nonvoters to turn out for Democrats, said Alejandro Rangel-Lopez, an organizer in that region with the nonpartisan group New Frontiers.
Seward County, Kansas, saw one of the most dramatic shifts of all majority-Hispanic counties nationwide, swinging to Democrats by 52 points.
Rangel-Lopez said that the arrival of newer immigrants from Haiti and Venezuela, as well as the promise of no tax on tips, had helped pull Latinos toward Trump. Several highly publicized immigration arrests in the Dodge City area two months ago pushed them away again — and brought out younger voters, too.
“The promise of tax breaks and a great economy, and that they’ll only take out the criminals — people realized that’s a lie,” he said. “They’re taking neighbors that were just going to work.”
Latinos’ political orientation often varies sharply based on ethnic or national origin, and some groups saw a less dramatic shift compared with the mostly Mexican American populations in the Southwest.
In Florida, home to Caribbean and Central and South American communities, Democrats did not entirely reverse their recent losses among Latinos but still managed to win back some ground.
Trump won the state’s two majority-Latino counties by 10 points in 2024. This year, in Florida’s U.S. Senate race, Miami-Dade and Osceola counties shifted left by 19 points, flipping blue. That was not enough to get statewide Democratic candidates over the line.
Republicans had also either won or were narrowly leading close contests for the state’s three majority-Hispanic districts, all of which are anchored in Miami-Dade County. Trump’s mass deportation polices put the incumbents in those seats in a political bind, as they had in South Texas.
Rep. María Elvira Salazar, who represents the heart of Miami and appeared to be heading to a recount, took a strident tone in opposition to the Trump administration’s policies to echo the concerns of her constituency. The Associated Press has not declared a winner, though she declared victory on Tuesday night.
A fourth Florida seat, in a heavily Puerto Rican slice of the Orlando area, was also still too close to call. Democratic Rep. Darren Soto’s majority-Hispanic seat had been redrawn so that White voters were narrowly the largest group.
Rosalba Cortez, an 80-year-old in Orlando, said late last month it would take a lot of work to ensure that Soto remained in the House. Cortez said she went door-knocking for Soto every day.
“Every time Democrats have to turn over the country to [Republicans], everything goes down,” she said in Spanish at a campaign event. “Everything gets damaged.”
At least this year, that sentiment cut across geography.
Derric Leo Treviño, a local Republican candidate in Starr County, Texas, said voters in his overwhelmingly Latino community voted for Democrats out of economic frustration with the GOP.
Although Trump flipped Starr County in 2024 for the first time in more than a century, this slice of the Rio Grande Valley saw the sharpest shift to the left this year of any majority-Hispanic county nationwide.
Treviño said that school vouchers that took money out of the public schools didn’t play well in his rural community. The war in Iran pushed him and other families to make uncomfortable adjustments to household budgets as gas prices climbed and stayed there. “Everybody is complaining, conservatives and liberals alike, about the price of food and fuel and electricity,” he said.
In two years, he said, Latino voters there and elsewhere may all be having the same conversation.
“They vote with their pockets. You have a family to take care of and stretch every penny,” Treviño said. “Naturally, they are going to vote for whoever is going to help them do the most with what they’ve got.”
Armus reported from Kansas City and Sidhom from Washington. Jack Herrera in Columbus, Ohio, Mariana Alfaro in Kissimmee, Florida, and Eric Lau and Clara Ence Morse in Washington contributed to this report.
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