Trump’s Surge With Latino Voters Wasn’t A Surprise

One of the most shocking defeats for Kamala Harris in last week’s election was her dismal performance among Latino voters. The CNN exit poll had her barely eking out a majority of 52% among Hispanics, against President-elect Donald Trump’s 48%. Worse, she lost Latino men as a demographic, with 55% backing Trump.

Those numbers may overstate the case; immediate exit polls are somewhat notoriously unreliable. BSP Research — a firm founded by Matt Barreto and Gary Segura, two of the most prominent pollsters specializing in the Hispanic electorate — issued results this week from an alternate exit survey of voters conducted in both English and Spanish, finding that Harris carried the Latino vote 62%-48% — including a narrow majority of Hispanic men. That’s still a drop from Biden’s 2020 numbers, though not as catastrophic as exit polling seemed to indicate.

But regardless of the margin, the inroads Trump made highlighted what has long been one of the Democrats’ most glaring weaknesses. The party had come to take Latino supermajority support for granted, even as polling data showed Trump’s influence growing.

The most obvious explanation for the shift is that the most prominent feature of Democratic President Joe Biden’s economy has been high inflation, eating away at purchasing power.

“We saw huge warning signs with Hispanic men, but even Hispanic women, where the nightmare phrase we kept hearing all over the country was: ‘Yeah, I don’t really like Donald Trump, and he says mean things about Latinos that I don’t like, but we were doing better economically when he was president, so I would be OK voting for him again,’” said Democratic-aligned pollster Fernand Amandi.

That recurring sentiment, Amandi said, highlighted the Biden administration’s failure to publicize its accomplishments — like shepherding a massive infrastructure bill through Congress or taming inflation that followed largely from COVID-era public support programs.

“The Biden administration and its communications apparatus clearly did not do a good enough job to convey their historic accomplishment of taking an economy inherited in crisis and turning it into an economy on the mend that was, in fact, helping Hispanics,” Amandi said. “More than laying credit at the feet of Trump, I think you also have to hold the Democratic Party’s complacency with voters and their own inability to accept that they were losing support drip by drip as signs for an immediate need for course correction.”

The Democrats’ dwindling share of a core constituency points to truisms long espoused by get-out-the-vote workers and political scientists alike.

Latino voters do not feel as strongly about party affiliation as other demographics. While Democratic politicians often view immigration as Hispanic voters’ core concern, the economy and jobs routinely take the top spot in voter surveys.

Immigration reform and border security ranked sixth and seventh, respectively, as the most pressing concerns for Latino voters in the BSP Research exit survey released this week. Cost of living/inflation took spot No. 1, followed by health care costs and jobs.

It’s possible that most people’s impression of the national Hispanic vote as overwhelmingly Democratic is colored by an acute case of recency bias. Former Republican President George W. Bush won roughly 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2004, according to an estimate by the Pew Research Center — a figure right between Trump’s performance in the CNN exit poll and the BSP Research estimate.

Former Democratic President Barack Obama saw soaring levels of support among Latino voters that peaked at 71% in 2012. The Democratic share of the Hispanic electorate has declined in every election since then. Trump’s gains were not a turnaround — they marked the continuation of a 12-year trend.

And like the Latino voter bump that Democrats saw during the Obama years, the unique candidacy of Trump himself may help explain how the Hispanic vote is changing.

“It is striking that the party ID of Latinos hasn’t shifted much, but the vote has moved more,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Hispanic Center. “Since 2019, there really hasn’t been much of a change — a majority of Latinos still lean toward the Democratic Party, about a quarter lean toward the Republican Party. There hasn’t been a sudden swing. It’s been kind of stable.”

The image of the Latino vote emerging from last week’s election is not a reliable Democratic supermajority whose primary challenge is turnout, but a massive swing vote whose loyalty must be reearned every cycle.

Democrats will struggle to remain nationally competitive without restoring that Obama-era edge among Latino voters. Even the BSP Research survey data, which is far rosier for Democrats than the CNN exit poll, shows that declining Latino support may have cost the Democrats the states of Arizona and Nevada.

Both Segura and Barreto maintain, however, that Trump’s Latino gains were too small to change the overall result and that the only two racial or ethnic demographics Trump won were white men and white women.

“It is patently false that the shift in Latinos in 2024 caused the election to swing to Trump,” Barreto wrote in an email to HuffPost. “The truth is that a majority of Latinos still voted Democrat in 2024, even as we can acknowledge a shift in support to Republicans. What swung the election to Trump was the continued majority support he received from white men and white women.”

Democrats are feeling the sting of their declining performance among Hispanics most profoundly in Texas.

For the last two decades, Democrats have pinned their hopes of flipping Texas on the notion that nonwhite blue voters would eventually outnumber mostly white conservatives as the state’s demographics shifted to make it look more like California.

The biggest problem they faced was low turnout among Hispanics, who have historically favored Democrats in Texas by wide margins. The logic went that if Latino voters would show up at rates comparable to those of white or Black voters, the state would eventually turn solid blue.

But Trump trounced Democrats in South Texas by wider majorities than he did elsewhere, winning counties that haven’t voted Republican in decades. There’s little ambiguity in the data — Hispanics make up more than 90% of the population in several of the South Texas counties that Trump won or only narrowly lost.

Trump ultimately carried Texas by 14 percentage points, dooming Democratic dreams of turning the state even purple, let alone blue, any time soon.

Like the national trend, the South Texas shift happened over time, with Trump’s improved 2020 results setting off alarm bells among Democrats. Local voters interviewed by The New York Times expressed the same economic concerns heard by pollsters elsewhere in the country, if perhaps more emphatically.

The high levels of unauthorized immigration concentrated in the area under Biden also likely had an impact on voters, according to Rice University political scientist Mark Jones. The area is also more culturally conservative than major Hispanic communities elsewhere in the United States, as evidenced by the conservative Democrats the region has historically elected to both Congress and the state legislature.

“If demographics are destiny, then Texas is destined to remain a Republican state,” Jones said. “But the better way to look at the Latino vote in Texas is that it’s very volatile. The Latino electorate are the ultimate swing voters.”