The 2024 presidential election saw Donald Trump gain the support of 45 percent of Latino voters, continuing that group’s apparent swing towards the Republican Party. Álvaro J. Corral writes that Trump made historic gains with Latinos across the country, and especially among Latino men, a shift which may be attributable to Latinos’ ongoing struggles with inflation and the cost of living.

The initial results from the 2024 Presidential election suggest the further erosion of Latino voters’ support for the Democratic Party. As I have previously written in co-authored work, the rightward shift among Latino voters during the Trump era continues to complicate the expectations of the “demographics as destiny” narrative which had assumed that steady racial-ethnic diversification of the electorate would produce favorable outcomes to Democrats.

Latino voters’ above average swing towards Trump

While the electorate showed signs of a nationwide “uniform swing” toward the Republican Party by an average of four to six percentage points compared to 2020, exit polls suggest that the movement among Latino voters potentially exceeded the national average. Specifically, exit polls estimate that Kamala Harris won a narrow majority of Latino voters nationwide (53 percent) compared to Trump’s support of 45 percent which potentially exceeds George W. Bush’s support in 2004.

To put this result in historical context, Democrats’ margin of victory with Latinos has declined from a peak net support of +44 percentage points in Obama’s re-election campaign of 2012 to just +8 in 2024. That Vice President Harris performed about as well with Latino voters as Senator John Kerry will likely invite a structural reassessment by the party like the kind undertaken by the GOP with its famous 2012 post-election autopsy report.

From notable gains for Trump in 2020 to historic ones in 2024

It’s important to revisit the debate surrounding Latino voters in the wake of the 2020 election. Given the nation’s general shift toward Democrats in that election, Trump’s modest gains with Latino voters were largely explained as a story of regionalism. The movement toward Trump among Latino voters in the Rio Grande Valley was chalked up to the uniqueness of “Tejano” voters who have always had a stream of cultural conservatism running through their politics. Latino communities in Florida were also categorized as a special outlier because fearmongering about Democratic “socialism” resonated with particular Latin American exile communities. But viewed from the lens of 2024, perhaps these working-class voters, many of whom work in service sector jobs outside of major urban areas, were less outliers and more harbingers of a disillusioned voting bloc desperate for a change to the status quo.

To be sure, Trump continued to amass notable achievements in these heavily Latino areas where his message has been resonating for the last few elections. But his gains have transitioned from merely “notable” to “historic.”

For example, long considered to be a bastion of support for the Democratic Party, all four counties that comprise the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, which range from 87 to 97 percent Latino, broke for Trump. The valley’s largest county, Hidalgo, has seen support for the Democratic candidate decline from roughly 68 percent in 2016 to 58 percent in 2020, and now to 48 percent in 2024. Donald Trump also became the first Republican Presidential candidate since 1988 to win Miami-Dade County (now two-thirds Latino) despite the fact that the Latino population of the county has been steadily increasing over time.

In the battleground state of Pennsylvania where the state’s 300,000 eligible voters of Puerto Rican descent were poised to exert influence, results suggest that Trump improved his margins in heavily Latino precincts of Hazelton and Allentown. Even Latino voters in blue states shifted to the right as places like Passaic County, New Jersey, which includes majority-Latino Paterson, and some of California’s most heavily Latino counties in the Central Valley produced surprising results. 

Why did this happen?

A primary reason for Trump’s strength with Latino voters in the 2024 election will likely be Latinos’ ongoing struggle to cope with rising food and housing costs which analyses suggest have disproportionately burdened theirs and other communities of Color. My previous co-authored work analyzing Latino voters in the 2016 election found that Latinos with lower incomes shifted towards Trump compared to 2012, and while it’s too early to say, such a shift may have occurred once more among poorer and working-class Latinos. Earlier this year, polling by UnidosUS and Mi Familia Vota found that “3 out of 4 Latino respondents said their concerns about inflation come directly from the high cost of housing.” Much like he did in 2020, once again Trump won about four-in-five voters who identified the economy as their number one issue in the election. Despite the Harris campaign’s policies to build a “care economy” and help first time homebuyers, it appears that many voters, including Latinos, based their vote retrospectively on the record of the last four years.

“Proud Boys in Raleigh (2020 Nov)” (CC BY 2.0) by Anthony Crider

Another source of weakness within the Latino community for Democrats has been the party’s unique struggle to maintain the support of Latino men. Although exit polls provide only a rough estimate, the gender gap among Latino voters in 2024 is especially eye-catching. While support for the Democratic nominee among Latinas may have declined about eight to nine percentage points, the decline among Latino men from 2020 was potentially twice that size. Democrats were right to be concerned that men of Color were a source of weakness in the lead-up to the election, but the fact that Trump appeared to have won a majority of Latino men (55 percent to 43 percent) while support for Harris among Black men mirrored the 2020 margins will be important to unpack.

Harris’ appeals to Latino voters fell short

On paper, Vice President Harris shares many of the same candidate qualities that commentators suggested explained Barack Obama’s resonance with the Latino community; her multiracial background, the immigrant experience of at least one of her parents; her status as a younger candidate that represented a different generation in the party’s leadership; and that both hailed from a state with significant Latino populations (California and Illinois).

Harris also deployed an impressive number of Latino surrogates in battleground states. Latino celebrities like Eva Longoria, America Ferrera, and George Lopez stumped for Harris and music heavyweights with diverse followings like Maná and Los Tigres del Norte also provided endorsements and serenaded crowds. Following the offensive comments against the Puerto Rican community made by a comic at the Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, mega-stars like Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, Fat Joe, and Marc Anthony came off the sidelines to push Puerto Rican voters to mobilize against Trump. While many Latino voters long offended by Trump’s anti-Latino rhetoric voted against him once more, it seems that a growing number decided to express their economic frustration instead.

Complex voting patterns

In sum, the complexity displayed by Latino voters was no different from other groups who cast their votes in ways perceived by many to be contradictory. On Election night, a significant number of “ticket-splitters” cast their vote for Trump while also supporting Democratic Senate and House candidates down the ballot. In other states (including in battleground states like Nevada and Arizona), voters supported ballot measures protecting abortion rights to a greater degree than they did the candidacy of Vice President Harris.

Though Democrats’ losses go well beyond their problems with Latino voters, the party will surely be reassessing its platform and mobilization strategies to recover ground with this increasingly influential community.

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