Trump’s Latino Support Shouldn’t Be Surprising

The usual Democratic hand-wringing over the Latino vote exit polls seems almost quaint right now.

In past cycles, Democrats securing the Latino vote by big margins was all but a given, and the quibbling was at the margins around how much support Obama or Clinton actually got. But Latino demographics have changed: The group has become younger, less foreign-born, and increasingly English-speaking. As they’re more Americanized, polls show they’ve aligned closer to mainstream voters — and their support for Democrats has continued to drop cycle after cycle.

So after Tuesday’s earthquake of a result, here are some facts.

The majority of Latino voters supported Vice President Kamala Harris, as nearly two years of polls suggested would happen. The CNN exit polls show Harris winning Latinos 52 percent to 46 percent for Trump. AP VoteCast, a project from the Associated Press and Fox News with more respondents, however, shows Harris winning Latinos 56 percent to 42 percent.

Just to give a sense of where polls ended up, Democratic group Equis Research published an average of public polls through October 30, which showed Harris leading 56 percent to 39 percent. Until there is better validated voter data next year, this will have to do, and either way you look at it, Republicans continue to make serious gains with Latino voters and Trump likely ended up a few points ahead of where he was expected to be.

CNN exit polls show 60 percent of Latinas supported Harris compared to 38 percent for Trump.
Results for Latino men have led to a lot of consternation, however.

CNN exit polls find Trump winning 55 percent of Latino men compared to 43 percent for Harris. This result alone has launched a thousand takes among progressives who feel betrayed. Meanwhile, AP VoteCast found Harris leading with 50 percent support from Latino men, edging Trump at 47 percent. As someone who has covered Latino voters for a decade, I say consider it likely that Trump secured the support of about half of Latino men, which is a serious accomplishment for his campaign, especially with Biden winning the group 59 percent to 36 percent in 2020.

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Ultimately, if you were paying attention, you knew this shift was coming before Election Day. Trump’s gains with Latinos are noteworthy because they follow what we saw in some areas in 2020, despite Biden’s win. In south Texas, for example, Trump won Starr County along the border, an area that’s 97 percent Latino and a place Democrats have won since 1896. Miami gains realized in 2020 and 2022 continued, with Republicans winning Miami-Dade County for the first time in 30 years. Trump also flipped Florida’s Osceola County, a heavily Puerto Rican area, from blue to red, which showed the controversial comments a comedian made at a Madison Square Garden MAGA rally about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage” did not dissuade some Puerto Rican communities from voting for him.

These GOP gains are also evident in states like Arizona and Nevada, which have still not been called, but where Trump leads. A sweep of the Sun Belt swing states would represent a serious setback for Democrats — and should prompt soul searching. Since former President Barack Obama’s campaign, they have been the party of the multi-racial coalition, an idea that was smashed apart on Tuesday night.

Now Democrats must decide if they are interested in working to regain lost Latino voters or if they want to keep banking on a narrow group of college-educated, white suburban voters to try and save the day. If they are, for now they can probably look past issues like democracy, immigration, and abortion — issues which moved voters but were not the blinking red light that caused this outcome. They should look no further than the top line of exit polls across the country, which showed voters were picking Trump and punishing the incumbent Biden-Harris administration over one issue above all others: the economy.

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“There’s a real economic component to it, you go to the grocery store and prices went up too much, too fast and our people felt it,” Rep. Joaquin Castro tells Rolling Stone, of Trump’s renewed allure to Latino voters. “They were left wondering, ‘What the hell is going on?’”

While Trump did not roll out reams of economic policy plans, he was the choice of voters who said they were better off financially four years ago. He also beat Democrats to supporting things like no taxes on tips, a favorite of labor unions in Nevada, which Harris scrambled to adopt once she entered the race this summer.

Kristian Ramos, a Democratic consultant and Latino vote expert, says the party has to reckon with the results with Latinos.

“We have to do better. The first step is admitting we have a problem and from there it’s about the way we talk about our accomplishments on the economy and inflation,” Ramos says.

Still, this is a disappointment for Democrats who have pointed to polling that showed the economy was a weakness for the Biden administration for years.

“My frustration is we have known the economy was moving Latino voters since 2016,” Ramos adds. “The main issue we lost people on was the economy…it just so happens this cycle the economy is absolutely central to what everyone was feeling.”

Colin Rogero, a Democratic ad maker who made ads for the Harris campaign, said a small but mighty team ran the campaign’s Latino program in a 100-day sprint. Coming from a working-class background in south Florida where a football scholarship allowed him to go to college and led him to a film and documentary career, he acknowledges that the party has a problem that goes beyond Latino voters.

“The Democratic Party has lost its positioning in the minds of voters with them understanding that they are the party for working-class people,” he says. “That’s gone.”

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He said it’s easy to fall into speaking about the economy way too broadly. People aren’t unhappy about the economy as a whole, he says, because if you measure the economy, it’s doing fine.

“The problem is people can’t afford shit,” he concludes. “People don’t care how much health care is a month, if they can pay it comfortably. They just can’t afford it anymore.”