Democrats are struggling to reverse the rightward shift among Latino voters seen in November, when President Trump made significant gains with the once reliably blue voting bloc.
While a majority of Latino voters cast their ballots for former Vice President Kamala Harris in November, the share supporting Trump climbed roughly 8 points between 2020 and 2024, according to data from AP VoteCast. Latino men shifted to Trump by double digits, even as the president was criticized along the campaign trail for anti-immigrant rhetoric and controversial deportation plans.
“The Biden campaign and then, by connection, the Kamala Harris campaign, had a lot of work to do with all of the groups, but I was surprised that so many Latino men were so disillusioned with Joe Biden and what happened in the last four years that they were willing to go to Donald Trump even with all of the crazy, xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric,” Democratic political strategist Maria Cardona said.
Back in 2016, when he won his first term in the Oval Office, Trump brought in just 28 percent of Latino voters, according to Pew Research Center. In 2020, his support climbed to roughly 35 percent, per AP VoteCast. This fall, about 43 percent support helped secure him a second term.
The 2024 numbers, part of a broader shift to the right in almost every state and across demographic groups, underscore that Democrats have been steadily ceding ground with the bloc that sided with former President Obama over Republican Mitt Romney by a staggering 71 percent to 27 percent in 2012, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
It was Trump’s messaging on the economy that convinced many voters, experts said.
“Trump did a fantastic job at messaging,” Cardona said. “A lot of it was misinformation, lies and conspiracy theories that, frankly, a lot of people believed. But at the end of the day, they believed that Trump was going to give them the economy that they had at the beginning of Trump’s [first] term.”
Meanwhile, the impact Trump’s stance on immigration would have on Latino voters may have been overestimated.
There was a long-standing consensus that “if there was a president or a candidate for office who had an immigration policy that was clearly going to hurt their community, it wouldn’t matter how much they liked their economic policies; that would just take those candidates out of consideration,” said Melissa Michelson, a professor of political science with a focus on Latino politics at California’s Menlo College.
“I think we’ve all now updated our understanding of how Latino voters make their vote choice decisions.”
The Trump camp worked along the campaign trail to tie immigration to economic woes, suggesting immigrants are stealing what Trump dubbed “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” — or claiming that immigration is driving the U.S. housing shortage.
That likely led some Latino voters to buy into the idea that “‘maybe things would be a little bit better if we didn’t have as many immigrants around,’” said Gabriel Sanchez, a political science professor and a senior fellow with the Race, Prosperity, and Inclusion Initiative at the Brookings Institution.
“If Latino voters are saying election after election, ‘focus on the economy,’ … and Democrats really didn’t ever have that messaging especially directed towards Latinos specifically, I think that’s really been the backdrop where immigration permeated a bit back,” Sanchez said.
Many Latinos don’t identify with the immigrant communities that Trump has targeted with claims that they’re “poisoning the blood of our country,” experts said.
“The idea being: If we can reduce immigration, then maybe Americans will see Latinos who are already here as less likely to be suspected of being here without documentation,” Michelson said.
Maritza Miranda Saenz, a strategist and former executive director of Maricopa County Democrats in battleground Arizona, sounded the alarm about Democrats’ slipping numbers with Latino voters.
“I don’t think they’re concerned enough,” Saenz said. “Democrats just are not scared yet … but that should be the top of every single conversation.”
In Arizona, which is among the top five states with the highest percentage of Hispanics and Latinos, Democrats “have been waiting for what they call the sleeping giant, the Latino voting bloc, to wake up and to vote in large numbers,” Saenz said. “And in the meantime, they have ignored that voting bloc.”
Trump’s backing among Latina women ticked up slightly this cycle, from 32 percent in 2020 to 39 percent in 2024, AP VoteCast showed. But the shift among Latino men was even starker, with support climbing 10 percentage points over the last four years, to 48 percent in November.
But as the Trump administration continues to target the federal workforce, including the Department of Education, Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.) said Democrats have an opportunity to regain any waning Latino women support.
“I know that the big fight will be education,” said Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “If he messes with moms, he’s going to face a lot of trouble, because moms don’t take it. They go out and they fight for their kids. So when you see that happen, when he reaches out to cut programs like Title I, which is the kids that are schools that have a significant number of kids under the poverty level, Title II for English language learners, or Title III, more training for teachers, moms are going to get upset. I think moms are going to put him in his place.”
And “overreach” from Trump on border security could also create openings for Democrats, said longtime political strategist Mike Madrid, co-founder of the Lincoln Project and the author of “The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy.”
The new administration has kicked off a blitz of action on immigration in Trump’s first month, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. The White House this week also drew backlash for posting a video appearing to mock deportees.
“The risk of Latinos coming back to a more traditional voting pattern of supporting Democrats is very high if Republicans overplay their hand that way,” Madrid said.
Though Latino voters’ concerns go beyond immigration, Cardona argued there is no denying the president’s policies are having an impact now.
“A lot of Latinos … are having buyer’s remorse,” Cardona said. “When Democrats were trying to make the case to the Latinos who were leaning towards Trump during the election, we would bring up the mass deportation stuff. They didn’t believe that he would do that. Even though they had people in their family that were mixed status, they did not believe.”
And given the importance of the economy to the bloc, frustration over prices under Trump could be another avenue to pull Latino voters back to blue.
As families “feel the pinch” of the new administration’s federal layoffs, tariffs and other economic complications, “I would expect Latinos to rebound back towards Democrats in two years,” Sanchez said.
Cardona said Democrats have time to rebuild the Latino coalition and regain control of either chamber in the 2026 midterms if they act now.
“When they go low, we need to go for the jugular,” Cardona said, paraphrasing former first lady Michelle Obama’s famous “when they go low, we go high.”
Democrats need to home in on the massive federal layoffs, many of which affect Latino Americans, the mass deportations and the impact Trump’s policies will have on the economy.
“There’s a lot of reasons and ways to do that now that are demonstrably focused on the fact that this guy, Donald Trump, doesn’t care about you and your family,” Cardona said. “We just have to really pierce that bubble and tell people the naked truth: Economists have said that Donald Trump’s plans would slow growth, explode inflation and that would cost families more.”
“That is a simple message, especially for those who gave Donald Trump their trust that he would be able to give them a better economy,” Cardona added. “I think this totally busts that bubble.”
