Three questions drove the midterm elections for Hispanic voters: Why does stuff cost so much? How can I make more money? What is my future in America?
After drifting away from Democrats in 2024, many Hispanic voters came back in 2026, but my party should take caution: They didn’t return out of loyalty to the Democratic brand but rather to register their deep frustration with President Trump and Republicans.
To retain these voters in 2028 and beyond, Democrats have a lot of work ahead. Hispanic voters have demonstrated unmistakably that they are the indispensable swing bloc in our body politic.
As a member of one of the nation’s fastest-growing demographics, a prospective Latino voter turns 18 about every 30 seconds. This year, we showed up early: A report four days before Election Day noted that one analysis showed an 80 percent increase from 2022 in early voting among Latinos.
For generations, Hispanic voters were a reliable part of the Democratic base. In 2016, according to the Pew Research Center, Hillary Clinton won 66 percent of the national Hispanic vote compared with 28 percent for Donald Trump. But in presidential elections since then, Hispanic voters gradually shifted toward Republicans.
In 2024, this rightward swing was especially pronounced in places like Miami-Dade County in Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, both of which had many areas that saw double-digit swings toward Republicans. Mr. Trump carried Hispanic voters across Texas as a whole, while Miami-Dade voted for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time since 1988.
This year, my consulting firm worked on a combination of 20 competitive Senate, House and governor’s races in states and districts with sizable Latino electorates, including in Texas for James Talarico’s Senate campaign and Gina Hinojosa’s bid to become governor. That means I’m not a neutral observer, but it also means I watched these races up close and saw in polling, focus groups and what was happening on the ground that there was a surge of anxiety and frustration among Hispanic voters about their place and future in this country.
Latinos aren’t a monolith. But we are monolithically irate about how hard it is getting to stretch a paycheck. Like other voters, we see how Mr. Trump’s Iran war is driving up fuel costs; how his tariffs are driving up the cost of groceries; and how ICE agents routinely harass brown people for being brown.
Hispanic voters are, on average, 13 years younger than white voters. They are also often working class — occupying positions as day care workers, construction workers and other jobs at the base of the economic ladder. Even modest price increases can hit them the hardest.
Many Hispanic voters turned to Mr. Trump in 2024 because they saw him as someone who might help them level the playing field. They gave him a shot, but rather than alleviating the affordability strains of the Biden years, he prolonged them. Many welcomed his promise of stricter immigration enforcement, expecting it to target criminals, not anticipating that some of their loved ones would be swept up in what has become a sometimes deadly immigration crackdown.
But this fall’s shift back to Democrats wasn’t just about Mr. Trump. It was also a result of a deliberate push by the Democratic Party leadership to engage these voters early in the campaign. Recognizing the need to reach Hispanic voters directly, Democratic leaders deployed culturally competent, bilingual messaging in a number of competitive races to make a clear case: Republicans were in power and were directly responsible for Americans’ economic woes.
In the not-too-distant past, the Democratic Party took heat from Hispanic leaders about a lack of investment in their communities. But during the 2024 cycle, Democratic leaders made an early commitment to hire Hispanic consultants: That year, 47 percent of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s vendors were minority-run or owned. This year, the committee clearly built on that approach.
The investment in early messaging enabled Democrats to win Hispanic voters back by consistently telling the story of the Trump administration’s failures. They ran Spanish-language TV ads, targeted Spanish-language digital media operations and delivered bilingual mail to Hispanic voters — in part through my firm, which focused on House races where Hispanic voters made up at least 10 percent of the total electorate.
Proof of the strategy’s success is in the results: According to preliminary estimates from Times Voter Trends, Democrats won 69 percent of the Hispanic vote — a 29-point shift to the left from 2024. Hispanic Democrats won in swing districts, including California’s 22nd Congressional District and Colorado’s eighth.
And then consider Texas’s 15th Congressional District. After Mr. Trump won it in 2024, it was one of the state’s districts that was redrawn at his request to try to give Republicans a greater advantage going forward. Despite being majority-Hispanic, the redrawn boundaries were also designed to flip the neighboring 28th and 34th district seats from Democratic to Republican by forcing the incumbent representatives Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar into tough re-election battles.
On election night, Democrats not only successfully defended both incumbents, but the candidate and Tejano musician Bobby Pulido flipped the 15th back to Democrats, and Democrats captured Texas’ 35th district — another newly drawn district Republicans thought would be theirs.
The critical question today is whether Hispanic voters will stick with Democrats. The party’s choices for its next presidential and vice-presidential candidates will be a huge factor. It would help enormously if the Democratic ticket included a Latino with working-class roots — someone like Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona or Representative Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico. And Democrats shouldn’t overlook the appeal, to many voters, that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will have if he winds up on the Republican ticket.
My worry is that after overperforming with Hispanic voters this year, Democrats will assume the job is done and these voters are permanently back in the fold. It isn’t and they aren’t — Hispanic votes will have to be earned every cycle.
So what does that look like?
To start, it means running politically moderate and somewhat culturally conservative candidates in heavily Latino districts that are rural or exurban. I’m a Texan who grew up in a trailer home with a teenage mom. I can tell you that in many parts of my home state, border security (done the right way), oil workers, cowboy hats and big ol’ pickup trucks dominate. Culture wars and alarm bells about saving democracy often don’t.
A similar vibe goes for California’s Central Valley, Arizona and the suburbs north of Denver. Apply that to Nevada, New Mexico and Georgia, each with a million Latinos or more, as well as Michigan and even South Carolina.
You have to have a multilayered communication strategy that talks to the America that’s part of the big ol’ truck economy and the aspirations of a “minority” group that’s about a fifth of the country. Democrats need to coalesce around a common-sense approach to immigration: Keep bad people from coming into our country while creating a pathway to citizenship for law-abiding immigrants who have been here, working and paying taxes for years and who broke only one rule, risking everything to live the American dream. Promising to support Medicare for all isn’t a bad start, but it’s not enough.
Democrats must continue to make early, deep investments in the Hispanic community and continue to directly address the fundamental questions about affordability, opportunity — and, yes, belonging — that drive nearly every kitchen-table conversation.
Chuck Rocha is the founder of Solidarity Strategies and the president of Nuestro PAC. He is the author of “Tío Bernie: The Inside Story of How Bernie Sanders Brought Latinos Into the Political Revolution.”
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