Latino Voters Are Reconsidering
Many who supported Trump in 2024 are starting to voice their doubts
President Trump may be losing his touch with many of the Latino voters who once supported him. A recent poll by UnidosUS, a bipartisan Latino advocacy group, found that 25% of those who voted for him in 2024 say they’d make a different choice today.
While Trump’s approval numbers overall have tanked to the lowest since he took office, the drop in Latino support is notable given the hoopla about how successfully he’d made inroads into Latino communities, who were once seen as Democratic Party strongholds.
Between rallies in the deep-blue Bronx and shoutouts to reggaeton artists like rapper Nicky Jam (whom Trump famously misidentified as a “hot” woman on stage), Trump’s claim that “Hispanics love Trump” may be tested come November 2026. (Note, while the terms “Latino” and “Hispanic” are often used interchangeably, the term “Latino” encompasses a larger swath of voters with ties to parts of Latin America and the Caribbean that were not historically connected to Spain.)
What caused the drop in support?
In 2016 during his first run for president, Trump had the support of just 28% of Latino voters. That number jumped up to 36% in 2020, even though Trump lost the general election. In 2024, the number of Latino Trump voters reached 48%, representing one piece of a racially and ethnically diverse coalition that handed him a second term.
Latino voters who are now turning away from Trump explain the shift by pointing to the economy and unaffordable living costs, combined with harsh immigration policies and the Iran war. Leaders like Guesnerth Josué Perea of the Afro-Latin@ Forum have witnessed up close and personal the reality of Trump’s promises not matching the dream he sold to communities.
“A church that I know very well, their voters were majority for Trump,” Perea tells The Preamble. “Then their church immediately after the inauguration had to create emergency response protocols for people being deported and wrongfully detained in the streets right outside near the church.”
Perea says many Trump-supporting Latino voters believed Trump’s immigration policies would target undocumented immigrants who had criminal records or who broke laws. They weren’t prepared for their own family members — whom they knew as upstanding members of the community, and some of whom arrived in the United States as babies — to be sent back to countries they barely knew.
“Now it’s like, ‘No, that’s affecting my friends, and now I have to change my mind,’” Perea says.
According to recent estimates, ICE deported more than 540,000 immigrants in 2025 alone. Latinos accounted for 9 in 10 arrests made by ICE. Critics say the pressure to hit deportation quotas has led immigration enforcement to a “by any means necessary” approach, which has included rounding up community members, elders, and children everywhere from the halls of immigration hearings to graduations.
Dr. Carlos Vargas-Ramos, director of public policy, external relations, and development at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College CUNY, says it’s important to understand how Latino communities have historically been positioned economically to understand why Trump’s immigration crackdown policies could have been appealing in both 2016 and 2024.
“Many Latino voters reacted to the seemingly unchecked border crossings that they saw as threatening their economic livelihood because that is the population that they would have to compete with in the labor market,” Vargas-Ramos tells The Preamble. “It doesn’t mean that there are no professionals among the Latino population or highly skilled workers among the Latino population. There are, but we tend to be overrepresented in both lower-skilled jobs and semi-skilled jobs.”
Even Latino voters who have been unaffected by Trump’s immigration policies are still feeling other impacts of his administration — it’s hard to ignore that it’s harder to fill up their gas tanks, buy food, or run businesses in an economy upended by war and high tariffs.
“Particularly in this day and age of high inflation, their paycheck is not covering their expenses,” Vargas-Ramos explains. “You see more people relying on payday loans, using credit cards to just buy food or just go to the doctor, and this is unsustainable.”
But on a more personal level, Trump has gotten bolder in expressing disdain for some aspects of Latino cultures, particularly when it comes to language. In February, on America’s largest stage of the Super Bowl, reggaeton artist Bad Bunny centered Puerto Rican culture during his halftime show and celebrated Latino heritage more broadly, shouting out countries in Latin America and the Caribbean one by one in Spanish. Fans around the world hailed the performance as inspiring and radically creative, but Trump blasted the lack of English. He posted, “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying” and called the performance “an affront to the Greatness of America” that didn’t “represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence.”
Earlier this year, Trump dismissively said to Latin American leaders at a summit in Miami, “I’m not learning your damn language… that much I won’t do,” prompting light laughter.
His policy decisions, combined with this kind of rhetoric, may signal to Latino voters that their usefulness to him in 2024 won’t soften his desire for an America that centers Anglo roots, heritage, and culture.
Why should Trump care?
Despite President Trump’s allusions to running for a third term, he is a lame duck president who will not personally feel the blowback of voters turning away from him in 2026 and 2028. But his party will, if history proves to repeat itself. Typically, when US presidents see their approval ratings drop below 50%, their party loses seats in Congress, and Trump’s current approval rating hovers between 35% and 38%.
That’s precisely why Trump-voting Latinos’ shift away from Trump could spell trouble in the midterms for the GOP, which holds razor-thin majorities in the House and the Senate. According to Axios, in states like Texas, GOP leaders redrew district maps based on the assumption that Latino voters would keep showing up for them. In Texas’s District 15, where the Latino voting population is a massive 78%, races that were once taken for granted are competitive.
New Jersey and Virginia already saw a massive shift from Republican to Democratic support among Latino voters in the 2025 governors’ races. The UnidosUS poll also indicates that Latino voters are highly motivated, with 76% planning to cast ballots in the midterms. As the fastest-growing racial group in the United States, Latinos may play an outsized role in electoral politics for years to come.
Democrats will still have work to do
Despite the concerning news for Republicans, the UnidosUS poll indicates that their loss isn’t necessarily Democrats’ gain. While there has been a shift away from Trump, growing numbers of Latinos are also identifying themselves as independents rather than Democrats. Vargas-Ramos says the growth in the number of independent Latino voters suggests their votes are up for grabs, and parties will have to work to earn them. Recent estimates count Latino independents at 22%, which is larger than the 18% who identify as Republican. Vargas-Ramos also suggested that non-traditional candidates from outside of the party establishment — including celebrities, activists, and business leaders — may continue to have appeal.
“It doesn’t mean that we tend to favor one party over the other, but we are willing to stop calling ourselves Democrats in greater numbers than we used to before,” Vargas-Ramos tells The Preamble. “Similarly, we are more likely to say, ‘No, I am independent,’ even if we may be leaning more towards the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. Those loosening ties, affiliations, or identities with a political party may make you more likely to be receptive to a political entrepreneur or candidate who is courting you.”
UnidosUS also found that Latino voters were motivated to vote for Democrats as a way of supporting their broader community, while Latino Republican voters were more motivated by support for specific candidates. In other words, Democratic-leaning Latino voters may be motivated by a sense of community loyalty or familiarity with the party rather than by enthusiasm for a particular bench of Democratic leaders.
“I don’t think that the Democratic Party has really done a good job of communicating with the Latino worker,” Perea tells The Preamble. “The Democratic Party [is] not treating this administration with gravity… about how it’s affecting the daily lived reality of a person who’s in the working class.”
Perea says the Democratic Party may need to learn how to reach certain voters from newly elected leaders like NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
“With Mamdani, with certain candidates of the socialist Democrats, who is it that they’re talking to? The working-class people. They’re not talking to middle-class America…The right used that message a lot, ‘This is all about workers, about Latino workers.’ And so that fact makes a working-class person feel included, even though they were not being really included in many of the ideas.”
For Vargas-Ramos, the shift in support away from Trump feels even more dangerous for democracy in general if Latino voters don’t see inspiring alternatives.
“They may not be supporting Donald Trump,” but “that doesn’t mean that they’re going to support Democrats,” he says. “My fear is that many of those Latino voters will just sit out the next both midterm elections and presidential election.”
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