Changing Latino Vote Remakes Landscape For GOP, Democrats
Donald Trump’s election victory scrambles one of the core assumptions of U.S. politics in recent decades: That the Republican Party is doomed to rely on an evershrinking core of white voters. A big factor in Trump’s election victory was a surprisingly strong showing among Latino voters, despite the former president having long cast immigrants from Latin America living in the U.S. unlawfully as criminals and, during the campaign, as “poisoning the blood” of the country.
Trump nearly won a demographic that Republicans haven’t won in at least five decades— racking up 42% of the Latino vote, compared with 35% in the 2020 race and 28% in 2016, according to a large survey of voters by the Associated Press and data from the Cornell University Roper Center. He very nearly won Latino men overall, garnering 47% support, the AP survey found.
The results confirm a trend that pollsters first noticed in the 2020 election: That growing numbers of Latino voters, who for decades have voted roughly 2 to 1 for Democrats, were becoming far more open to voting for Republican candidates, especially Trump.
That has huge implications for both parties. There are now 36.2 million Hispanics eligible to vote, more than double the 14.3 million eligible in 2000. Latinos now are ahead of Black and Asian-American voters and behind only whites.
For decades, Democrats have largely treated Latino voters as a bloc, part of a larger group of nonwhite voters they could rely on to make up for a declining share in the white vote, especially non-college- educated working-class whites. Democrats targeted
their pitch to Latinos accordingly, pledging to legalize millions of workers without permanent legal status. For many Latino voters with relatives who are undocumented, that is a huge draw, and remains so.
But Trump has found another way to appeal to Latino voters: Treat them like everybody else, especially the working class—voters who worry about the cost of living, want a strong economy, think too many people are crossing the border without permission and don’t think social issues like gender identity are paramount.
Trump’s rising support in the Latino community was a backlash against Democrats over the handling of the economy and the surge of illegal immigration, said Daniel Garza, president and founder of the Libre Initiative, a Hispanic advocacy group that backs conservative policies and candidates.
“I feel strongly that this is sort of the working class rejecting the current political class who haven’t recognized what the effect of the economy was on their pocketbooks,” said Garza. “They are rejecting this professional political class that has imposed an agenda on them that doesn’t fit their priorities.”
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Economic concerns
A Pew Research Center survey of Latinos in September found that 80% were very concerned about the price of food and consumer goods, and 77% about high housing costs—the same number who rate the economy as fair or poor.
For some Latinos, those are more important factors than whether they like Trump, or whether they sometimes find his language coarse or offensive.
“Trump is not the most simpatico of people,” said Diego Ballesteros, a 48-year-old who moved to the U.S. decades ago from his native Colombia and now runs a car-parts shop in the New York City borough of Queens. “But I don’t care about simpatico. I care about a strong economy. When Trump was president, we had lower gasoline prices and housing costs.”
Gerardo Peralta, a Domini--can turned American who owns a barbershop in Queens, said he felt that Harris spent the campaign talking about Trump as a bad person. “But she never gave us concrete policies about the economy,” Peralta said.
Many Latino voters also worry that immigration is out of control, especially after record numbers of people—more than eight million—crossed the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden administration.
Consider the election results from largely Hispanic counties in South Texas that border Mexico, where illegal immigration is the most visible.
Trump won Starr County, the second most heavily Hispanic county in the country, with 57.7% to 41.8% for Harris, according to the AP. Trump increased his vote share in Starr by 10.6 percentage points compared with 2020 and by a whopping 38.8 percentage points from 2016. It’s a similar story along the entire Rio Grande Valley, where the bulk of migrants cross the border without prior authorization.
Some Democrats interpret the concerns about immigration among many Latino voters as an impulse—shared by many waves of migrants before them—to not face competition in the labor market from new arrivals, the equivalent of shutting the door after they arrive.
But for Trump voters like Enrique Sanchez, a 30-yearold who lives in Henderson, Nev., it’s far more about a sense of control at the border.
“My dad was an illegal immigrant from Mexico,” he said. “I have sympathy for people who want to come. But the numbers are so much bigger now, and people are coming from all over the world, like Africa and China. We have no idea who is coming. It’s just not safe.”
Ballesteros, the car-parts shop owner, said that after about five years living in the U.S., “your mentality changes, you really start to feel that this is your country and care about what happens.”
After economic issues and abortion, Latinos said immigration is the most important issue for them, ahead of healthcare, crime, housing and other issues, according to a poll of Latinos in October by Florida International University.
The same survey found that 36% of Latinos favored mass deportations and four in 10 were in favor of building a border wall, saying immigrants were often criminals who threatened public safety.
For Republicans, the shift in Latino voters lays to rest the concern that the party would have to focus on a shrinking pool of white voters as Hispanics and other nonwhites made up a larger share of the electorate. After Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, a Republican postmortem recommended that the party woo growing numbers of Hispanic voters by limiting its rhetoric on immigration.
It was advice Trump has ignored. And while it might have damaged his vote count in 2016, he has since scored the highest numbers of Latino support of any GOP candidate since George W. Bush, who drew 44% of Latinos—a figure partly ex--plained by the fact he was from Texas, had a Latina sister-inlaw and spoke some Spanish.
A diverse group
Trump’s relative success with Latino voters shows they aren’t a monolithic bloc of voters but a diverse group like the rest of the U.S., ranging from Black Dominicans to blue-eyed Argentines, said Geraldo Cadava, a historian at Northwestern University. Latinos in rural communities like the Rio Grande Valley and California’s Central Valley are more conservative, similar to their white rural counterparts. Latinos in Houston or Los Angeles tend to be more liberal.
Maria Cardona, a longtime Democratic strategist, said that while Latinos did shift toward Republicans more this election, they aren’t responsible for Trump’s victory, which owes much more to white voter support in key swing states. Still, she said, “we as a party need to reflect on what just happened.”
Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford who has done research on the Latino community and was an adviser to the Obama administration on drug policy, said Democrats have fallen prey to what he calls “out-group homogeneity,” the idea that all the people different from you must be alike. Many white Democrats, he said, have mistakenly lumped “Black and Brown” people together in a single category— an “other” who often face systemic discrimination.
But there are growing differences between both groups, Humphreys said. For a start, Latinos came willingly to the U.S. and share in the narrative of America as a land of opportunity, while Blacks’ ancestors arrived enslaved and have faced far greater discrimination.
“The phrase ‘Black and Brown voters’ grates on me,” Humphreys said. “It’s white political-consultant talk that assumes everyone who is not white is the same.” —Ryan Dube contributed to this article.
