The rapid erosion of President Donald Trump’s support among Latinos underscores how this growing group is poised to become the largest bloc of movable voters in the electorate.
In 2024, Trump achieved historic breakthroughs in virtually every segment of the Latino community. Just over a year later, polls and election results alike show that Trump’s Latino support is ebbing just as comprehensively.
In a massive survey of Latinos released late last month, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found him declining among all major groups in the Latino community — with even about one-fifth of Latinos who said they voted for Trump just a year earlier saying they disapproved of his performance as president.
“Nationally, there’s no evidence that the Trump 2024 Hispanic numbers will become a new baseline for Republicans,” said Matt Barreto, a Democratic pollster and political scientist at UCLA. “The only evidence is to the contrary.”
This swift reversal has undermined the confident predictions of many conservatives that Trump had engineered a durable realignment among Latino voters, primarily around conservative cultural values. In 2026, Trump’s slippage among Latinos could become a major challenge for Republicans in the battle for the House of Representatives, including by confounding their plan to flip several heavily Latino Democratic seats through this year’s unusual mid-decade redistricting in Texas.
Yet even if discontent with Trump allows Democrats to recover next year with Latinos, few analysts on either side believe that will signal a return to the era when the party could rely on large and stable advantages among them.
Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican consultant who has become a fierce Trump critic, said the Latino backlash against Trump is just the latest turn in a process of “dealignment” that has seen this community toggle between the parties in frustration over both sides’ inability to ease their economic strains. “Latinos are now a true swingy vote,” said Madrid, author of the 2024 book “The Latino Century.” “But they are not voting for aspirational, positive reasons; they are punishing whoever is in power.”
Every demographic moved right in 2024
Trump’s 2024 gains with Latinos are difficult to overstate. Geographically, he improved in Latino communities from South Texas to the South Bronx. He gained among Mexican Americans in the Southwest, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in the Northeast, and Central and South Americans in South Florida.
Demographically, his reach was equally panoramic. Three major data sources used to estimate voter behavior — the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN, the Pew Research Center’s Validated Voters analysis, and the projections by Catalist, a Democratic data and targeting firm — told a similar story.
Trump’s gains among Latino men understandably attracted the most attention, since the exit polls, Pew and Catalist all showed him winning a majority of them, something no previous Republican nominee had done. But each of those sources also showed Trump gaining substantially compared with 2020 among Latinas. Likewise, Trump not only ran historically well among Latinos without a four-year college degree but also notched significant gains among those with such degrees. And while Trump — as is usually true for Republicans — ran best among Latino Protestants, many of whom identify as evangelical Christians, he also improved dramatically with Latino Catholics.
In all, the different data sources agreed Trump in 2024 swelled his Latino vote to around 45 percent, more than any previous Republican presidential nominee, according to exit polls. That represented a substantial gain from the roughly 35 percent he drew in 2020 — which was itself an improvement from 2016, when Trump carried only around 3 in 10 Latinos, according to the exit polls, Pew and Catalist.
Deep doubts about Trump’s policies
Little over a year later, the picture looks very different. Trump’s approval rating among Latinos started declining soon after he took office in January — as it did with other groups where he notched his most notable advances in 2024, such as younger and Black men.
The Pew survey released last month put an exclamation point on these trends. The poll surveyed an unusually large group of Latino respondents (about 5,000), which allowed for more detailed analysis of subgroups within the community than public polls usually permit.
That analysis showed Trump’s 2025 retreat among Latinos has been as panoramic as his 2024 ascent. The survey, for instance, found that not only did 73 percent of Latinas disapprove of Trump’s performance as president, but so did 67 percent of Latino men; not only did three-fourths of Latino Catholics and those unaffiliated with any religion disapprove, but so did nearly three-fifths of Protestants. In 2024, Trump carried a solid majority of Latino men without a college degree — the intersection of the educational and gender dynamics that most benefited him — but Pew found that a stunning two-thirds of them now disapproved of his performance.
Trump’s major policy initiatives faced withering reviews in the survey. On the economy, the share of Latinos who said his policies were worsening conditions (61 percent) was four times the number who said he was improving them (15 percent). About 7 in 10 said he was doing too much to deport undocumented immigrants.
Most strikingly, nearly 8 in 10 said they believed his policies overall are hurting the Latino community, compared with only 1 in 10 who believed they are helping it. (The remainder thought his policies were having no effect.) This discontent extended widely into the Latino groups that supported Trump most enthusiastically in 2024, such as men without a college degree and Latino Protestants, according to unpublished results provided by Pew to CNN. Trump’s strong 2024 performance among younger Latinos (especially men) was exhibit A for those claiming he had triggered a lasting realignment, but in the Pew results, almost exactly half of Latinos younger than 50 who voted for Trump last year said his policies are now hurting the community.
Like other pollsters from both parties, Barreto of UCLA said that even many Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 had substantial doubts about him at the time — but shifted to him anyway because they thought he was more likely to ease their cost-of-living squeeze than Harris would. “I think a lot of people who voted for him, they didn’t like him, but they did hope he was going to fix the economy,” Barreto said. “But … there haven’t been a lot of huge wins you can sell to working-class voters.”
While Latinos have not received the economic relief they expected, Trump is delivering more than many — rightly or wrongly — say they anticipated in his highly militarized campaign of mass deportation.
“What Latino voters who voted for Trump are clearly telling us — it may sound odd to some people — is that they earnestly thought that he would just go after undocumented immigrants who had criminal records, and they were OK with that,” said Rafael Collazo, executive director of UnidosUS Action Fund, which focuses on Latino voters. “Now they are seeing that’s not the case, and they are pushing back on that.”
The meaning of New Jersey and Virginia results
The results in last month’s gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia made clear that Trump’s decline in the Latino community has direct electoral consequences for other Republicans. In their decisive victories, Democratic candidates Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia each carried about two-thirds of Latino voters — much more than Harris did in those states just the year before, according to the Voter Poll conducted by SRSS for a consortium of media organizations including CNN. And vote returns from places with large Latino populations in each state suggest significant shifts from Republicans to Democrats compared with 2024.
If Latino voters shift in comparable numbers next year, that alone could topple the GOP’s narrow House majority. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and outside groups such as the UnidosUS Action PAC are targeting House Republican seats with significant Latino populations in states from Arizona and Colorado to New Jersey and Pennsylvania. “The map is much bigger than we would have anticipated a month ago,” Collazo said.
Latinos may be especially pivotal to the outcome of this year’s two biggest redistricting fights. In California, Latinos will constitute a majority of the vote in the reconfigured House districts that Democrats hope to flip from Republican Reps. David Valadao and Ken Calvert, as well as in the seat they redrew to fortify Democratic Rep. Adam Gray. Latinos will also represent an increased minority of the vote in the seat Democrats expect to take from Rep. Darrell Issa.
Meanwhile, Texas Republicans, under pressure from Trump, redrew their congressional maps this year in the hope of capturing five seats now held by Democrats. In four of those districts, including the South Texas seats now held by Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, Latinos constitute a majority of eligible voters, according to the Texas Tribune. Latinos are also a majority of voters in the nearby seat held by Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, which is Democrats’ top offensive target in the state.
Wayne Hamilton, a Republican political consultant who runs Project Red TX, an organization dedicated to growing the party in South Texas, brushes off concerns that the results in New Jersey or Virginia could signal trouble for the GOP with Latinos there. South Texas, he said, is booming economically, and Trump’s immigration agenda has broad support in low-income communities along the Mexican border that were “overrun by illegal immigration” under President Joe Biden.
After Trump’s moves to stiffen security at the border, people in South Texas “are beginning to get some normalcy back in their lives,” Hamilton said.
And yet, polls by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin show the share of Texas Latinos expressing a favorable view of Trump has plummeted from about one-half in fall 2024 to about 1 in 3 now. After Trump’s dramatic rise with Texas Latinos last year, the evidence suggests “what we’re seeing now is a reversion to the norm,” said James Henson, director of the project. To the extent anyone is using Trump’s 2024 showing “as a baseline for voting behavior, particularly among Latinos,” he added, “they are going to overestimate Republican turnout. Period.”
Not settled in either party
None of the GOP strategists I spoke with expressed much optimism Trump could substantially reverse his Latino decline before the midterm elections. Republican pollster Daron Shaw, who conducted a large survey of Latinos this fall with Barreto’s firm for UnidosUS, said he can envision the GOP preserving its support in South Texas and South Florida. But beyond those enclaves, “you are getting kind of late in the cycle for Republicans to turn the economy around,” said Shaw, who is also a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Latinos who traditionally voted Democratic [but] sat out in 2024, or maybe even switched to Trump, I think Republicans are in a rough way with them.”
Alfonso Aguilar, a longtime Hispanic Republican strategist who now serves as senior director for government affairs at Defending Education, sees somewhat more opportunity but worries that too many GOP leaders are blinded by “triumphalism” over Trump’s 2024 gains — and ignoring the evidence of regression since. In particular, Aguilar said that allowing polarizing figures such as top White House adviser Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to drive such a combative message on immigration enforcement is alienating Latinos.
“If your audience is a certain sector within the MAGA base, it is great communication,” Aguilar said. “But if you want to maintain the broad coalition that achieved the historic victory in 2024, that has to change.”
Republican former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, who represented a heavily Latino South Florida seat, also believes “it’s going to be hard for Republicans to recover some of [the] support” Trump has lost this year. “The only political solutions for the erosion Republicans have seen is for affordability to improve in the country and for immigration enforcement to come back to a place where most people can be supportive of it — which would mean the deporting [only] of people who are criminals, or a true burden on society,” he said.
For all these reasons and more, Madrid, Barreto and others I spoke to said Democrats had a realistic chance to push their Latino vote share in 2026 back toward the two-thirds or higher level they frequently reached before 2020. But even if they do, many believe those gains could prove just as evanescent as Trump’s from 2024. “There is a lot of evidence that Latino party identification is not as rigid as that of some other groups,” said Henson, in a view echoed by many of those I spoke with.
That leaves Latinos more open than most voters to switching their allegiance based on their assessment of immediate conditions, such as the economy or immigration policy. Both of those concerns drove Latinos away from Democrats in 2024; now they are alienating many from Trump. “You could argue that Latinos are the only voters voting the way you should in a healthy democracy: which is that you are willing to change your voting habits when somebody is doing something bad for you,” said Madrid, the GOP consultant.
The relentless churn of the Latino electorate adds to this fluidity. Demographer William Frey of the Brookings Metro think tank forecasts that about 1.1 million US-born Latinos will turn 18 and become eligible to vote every year for at least the next quarter-century. Shaw and Barreto, in their poll for UnidosUS, found that two-fifths of Latinos who voted in 2024 cast their first ballot in that election, 2022 or 2020. Because the Latino electorate “is so young, because it’s growing, because there are naturalized voters coming in, it’s constantly in flux,” Barreto said.
Even as they grow and disperse, Latinos have become one of the few moving pieces in an electorate where most voters, as political scientists say, appear “calcified” in their unbreakable loyalty to one party or the other. “The idea that there is this real deep natural affinity for the Democrats [among Latinos] is as problematic as thinking they are now hard-core Republicans,” Shaw said. In a nation sorted so immovably between antagonistic coalitions of red and blue, Latinos appear solidly purple.
