PHOENIX – Democrats are finally admitting they have a Latino voter problem.
The years-long hemorrhage of Latino support for the party came to a head Tuesday night, according to exit polls conducted by Vice President Kamala Harris hardly received majority support from the group at the ballot box. And Donald Trump will return to the White House in January with the most diverse coalition of supporters of any Republican presidential candidate in decades.
The shift among these voters is forcing Democrats — long confounded by rising support among Latinos for Republican candidates in the Trump era — to recognize the former president’s appeal, especially toward Latino men. That’s even as the Republican Party under Trump has become publicly more comfortable with overtly racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Surveying the wreckage after Trump’s victory, Democrats across the country suggested the problem was clear, even if the solution is not: Trump, they said, has been able to connect with Latinos and speak to their economic frustrations , their concerns about their families and their concerns about the future of the country, in a raw, unfiltered way that many of their own candidates don’t have.
“Why are we losing these people? Why are we losing firefighters? Why are we losing police? Why are we losing working people? … Because we are very consistent in our message, away from them – away from their traditional family values, away from their personal economic concerns and their family’s economic concerns,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, the top elected Latino official in the US this heavily Latino state. “And that’s a tough political pill for Democrats to swallow.”
Although Harris significantly improved her standing from where President Joe Biden stood among Latinos before dropping out of the race, the vice president only received 52 percent support among Latinos, according to exit polls. Biden earned 61 percent of Latino support in 2020, Hillary Clinton had 66 percent in 2016 and Barack Obama won more than 70 percent in 2012.
Trump – for the first time ever for a Republican presidential candidate – won outright among Latino men. And Harris also appears to have underperformed among Latino women. CNN’s exit polls show Harris losing 16 percentage points among Latino men and 9 percentage points among Latino women compared to Biden’s 2020 performance.
And the bleeding didn’t stop there. Harris also saw significant losses among Latinos who have not attended college, a dip of 15 points.
“We need a deep reflection on what’s going on with Latino voters, but we also need a deep reflection on what’s going on with men and what’s going on with working-class voters,” says Carlos Odio, a Democratic strategist and co-founder of Equis Research. , a Spanish research company.
Trump’s advance among Latinos should not have shocked Democrats, after months of opinion polls suggested so. In response, Democrats, with Harris at the top, began moving away from the idea that demographics are destiny, in what was widely seen as a rejection of identity politics. Harris campaign ads aimed at both English- and Spanish-speaking Latinos talked about the economy, high drug prices and crime; the vice president often spoke to the Latino audience not only about an “earned path to citizenship” but also about securing the border.
That approach was widely praised by Democrats as a reflection of the nuanced understanding of the Latino diaspora in the U.S. that Latino strategists say has long been lacking in Democratic politics. And the campaign in the last month launched an effort at “Hombres con Harris,” as well as a version of the economic policy agenda aimed at Latinos.
But in the end it did little to stop the damage.
“Nothing has changed in terms of what the Latino electorate wants,” said Matt Tuerk, the first Latino mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania, a heavily Latino part of the state. “They still want opportunities. What they are saying with their votes, if the exit polls are to be believed, is that they do not believe that the plans offered by Vice President Harris would give them that opportunity.”
Trump saw this as an opening. To shore up support in the final weeks of the campaign, Trump held a roundtable on Latino leadership at his golf club in Doral and did a town hall with Univision, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the US. After being indicted in Miami on federal charges In the secret documents case in June 2023, Trump made a pit stop at the famous Cuban restaurant Versailles, where he shook hands at the Little Havana monument, seeking the sympathy of people who had fled political persecution from the left and dictatorships in their home countries.
Strategists on both sides of the aisle say it has helped him win battleground states — but also chipped away at margins in blue states like New Jersey and New York, while widening his margins in states like Florida and Texas.
Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, a cultural context consultant from Florida, said she wished Harris had used the convention, debate or interviews to outright deny that her party was siding with socialists, especially given that Trump often mocked her as a ‘Marxist’.
“All these things are missed opportunities where people talked about her as a communist, but she never fully addressed it herself, as Biden did,” said Pérez-Verdía, a former Democrat who recently reregistered as a non-communist. party-affiliated voter. More broadly, she warned that it was a mistake for political groups to use symbols and words associated with socialism, or use terms like the gender-neutral “Latinx.”
Esteban Bovo, the Republican mayor of Hialeah, Florida, said Latino voters, and voters of color in general, feel “almost crushed” by Democrats, who see them as a minority group in need of help. Instead, he said, Latinos want the same things all Americans want: “education, opportunity, peace and tranquility, security.”
“It unites us all,” Bovo said.
Democrats in Congress, meanwhile, were shocked by the support Latinos gave to Trump, especially in southwestern states. Three Latin Texas counties with politically unstable majorities that Republicans favored this election — Starr, Hidalgo and Cameron — saw a huge uptick in support for Trump compared to 2016 and 2020.
In Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz, whose father is Cuban, made gains among Latino voters after attempting to woo the demographic as Republicans saw trends pointing to their support this election. Exit polls show Cruz winning the Latino vote by 6 points after losing it by 29 points when he last ran in 2018.
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), who will likely become the next chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, suggested it was “disinformation” from the right, and not any problem with the Democratic message, that caused Harris to hesitate Latinos.
“The Democratic party is a party of both civil rights and working people,” Casar said in an interview. “That’s it. That’s what we need to be known for, and we need to put an end to the right-wing disinformation machine.”
Meanwhile, the House of Representatives’ Democratic leadership will meet Wednesday to discuss the pending results — and gather Thursday for a so-called virtual family meeting to air their grievances and share insight on what could have gone wrong as the final votes are counted.
Odio said Latinos who switched to Trump were mainly concerned about the economy. In focus groups, he said, they didn’t think Trump would repeal the Affordable Care Act, restrict abortion access or deport Dreamers — but they did think he would be better for them on the economy.
“What they liked about him was that they saw a businessman who put economics above everything else. That was the lesson they learned from the way he handled himself during the pandemic,” Odio added. “And they themselves are people who put the economy above all else.”
And Fontes warned that some Latino men are feeling increasingly out of place in a Democratic Party that they say does not embrace their views on traditional families, or that they see as overly concerned about policing people who use inappropriate language.
“Someone will come back to me and say, I’m a misogynist, or I’m a sexist, or I don’t believe in all families, I only believe in traditional families,” Fontes said. “Men in my kind of position walk a very, very fine rope here, and I recognize how a lot of these people feel. But I’ve been told from my own political side that working out those feelings and talking about those kinds of things means I don’t belong in the Democratic Party.”
The Democrats look down for hope. Rep. Ruben Gallego appears poised to score a victory against Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake in Arizona, even as Trump appears headed to victory by an even larger margin.
But strategists on both sides of the aisle point to Harris’ abysmal performance with young Latinos — with Harris trailing Biden’s 2020 numbers by 20 points — as an existential threat to the Democratic Party, especially as more and more young Latinos grow old enough to vote. In 2024, 36.2 million Latinos were eligible to vote, double the number of eligible Latino voters in 2000.
Mike Madrid, co-founder of the Lincoln Project and anti-Trump Republican, argues that what is happening is not realignment. Rather, he says, it’s a byproduct of Latinos under the age of 30, who represent 40 percent of all Latinos and who have “no voting history to readjust,” choosing not to identify with the Democratic Party.
“The Latino vote has been changed forever,” Madrid said. “And the Democrats need to hurry up and figure it out or they will be irrelevant.”
Megan Messerly reported from Phoenix. Kimberly Leonard reported from Bonita Springs, Florida. Daniella Diaz reported from Dallas.
