Behold, the elusive Latino Vote: often sought after but never fully understood by politicians or pollsters.
Every four years, the general media tries (and fails) to encapsulate what exactly the second-largest ethnic group in the U.S. seeks in a presidential candidate.
Do they want someone tough on borders or soft on borders? A politician or an outsider? A white man or a person of color? A peacemaker or an agitator? A Catholic or a Protestant?
A new study from the Pew Research Center shows that, in the 2024 presidential election, a slight majority of Latinos voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris — but they also voted for President Donald Trump at a much higher rate than they did in 2020.
Trump managed to garner 48% of the Latino vote compared to Harris’ 51% share and significantly jumped past the 36% clip that he got during in the 2020 presidential election. The study’s results reveal that the initial 2024 exit polls actually underestimated Latinos’ Trump support, with the Republican candidate tracking at 46% of the Latino vote on Election Day.
Additionally, 47% of naturalized citizens of all ethnic backgrounds voted for Trump in 2024, compared with 38% in 2020. In that same voting bloc 51% voted for Harris in 2024, a notable drop from the 59% who voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
Hispanic naturalized citizens recorded a 12% bump in voting for Trump, jumping from 39% in 2020 to 51% in 2024.
Mike Madrid — a political consultant and founding member of the Republican political action committee known as the Lincoln Project — authored the 2024 book “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy.” In his prescient writing, Madrid analyzed the oft-misunderstood and misrepresented Latino electorate and highlighted the issues of top priority for the community.
Though not surprised that Latinos as a whole shifted toward the right, Madrid was caught off guard by the size of the political shift from one election cycle to the next.
“I still thought this was probably two or four years away,” Madrid told The Times of the Pew Research findings. “There’s an overwhelming feeling from all the polling work I’ve done that both parties have failed the [Latino] community. There is very little evidence that there’s a shift to being more conservative. There’s a lot of evidence that Latinos are becoming more populist.”
Journalist Paola Ramos, who authored the 2024 book “Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America,” mirrored Madrid’s lack of surprise at the results.
“It’s not shocking. I think there is this tendency within the Democratic Party to not want to confirm reality,” Ramos told The Times in a phone interview. “I hope that this does serve as a real wake up moment for the Democratic Party, because there’s been this historic reluctance not to confront what seems to me a very dynamic and evolving Latino community.”
In Madrid’s view, the Democratic Party built the disdain for itself through immigration policies — which he points to as one of the main reasons why naturalized citizens may have flipped their party in 2024.
“Biden and Harris adopted a very permissive, very progressive position on the border,” Madrid argued. “There was backlash to it, because [naturalized citizens] were — after having waded many years through a very broken system and playing by the rules — seeing people being rewarded, in their eyes, for coming in around the system that they just navigated.”
Ramos saw that sense of betrayal with the Democratic Party’s false promises on immigration reform as leading to “deep disillusionment” among Latinos, which might have led them to find solace in Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
She also examined the psychosocial side of why Latinos have leaned into Trump’s political tactics.
“I think many people tried to run away from being lumped in with immigrants, particularly when Trump was obviously making an entire campaign around criminalizing immigrants,” Ramos said. “If you have a candidate that is spending his entire campaign in demonizing you, then you want to prove as much as you can that you don’t belong to that group. … [There’s also] the idea that once you’ve ‘made it’ in this country, you don’t want others to climb up the same ladder. That is a very real phenomenon.”
Madrid believes the situation to be much more cut-and-dry than Ramos. In his view, Latinos shifted Republican because of the Democratic Party’s lack of messaging on the economy.
“I think what happened was you had a whole new generation of Latinos getting elected to office with no history of it … and they started to toe the line of the wealthy, white, college-educated, homeowning face of the Democratic Party that that cared more about climate change and marriage equality and gun control and all these cultural issues that animate wealthier constituencies,” Madrid said. “They forgot about developing a working class agenda. They didn’t focus on economic mobility at all.”
However, Madrid and Ramos both pointed to the surprise victory of Zohran Mamdani in last month’s New York City mayoral Democratic primary as a sign that the Latino vote can be swayed in any direction when presented with a charismatic, populist message and figure.
“A Democratic socialist just picked up all the voters that voted for Trump six months ago, who are the same voters that voted for Eric Adams, a centrist Democrat, four years before that,” Madrid said. “You have a Latino, working class of people that will vote for a centrist Democrat, a far-right populist or a Democratic socialist, as long as somebody will listen to them and their economic concerns. This is not ideological. It’s economic populism — it couldn’t be more clear than that.”
Ramos is unsure whether Mamdani’s historic win will point to a larger national moment for a unifying, populist message within the Democratic Party, but she notes that his approach has addressed some of the major problems that could rejuvenate the party’s momentum across voting blocs.
“His message is resonating across the board, and that is part of what I see as as a big problem in the Democratic Party — it’s in the middle of this identity crisis,” Ramos said. “You don’t know if they’re pro-immigrant or not. You don’t know they’re pro-trans rights or not. You don’t really know what they’re for. With Zohran, his message is very clear-eyed. You know what he’s for. And I think people like that.”
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