Latinos swung further toward Republicans than any other group in 2024, and they could swing further in the opposite direction this year. If Democrats recover the ground they have lost with this bloc over the past decade, it won’t mean that Latinos have come back to their natural political home. We don’t have one.
Like many Latinos, I’ve grown tired of having to talk every cycle about whether we lean Democrat or Republican. Are Latinos Democrats, because we support immigrants and workers’ rights? Are we Republicans, because our faith leads us to embrace traditional family values? I expected Donald Trump’s historic success among Latinos in 2024 to prompt fresh thinking about who Latinos are as a community—to foster a deeper understanding of what it means to be Latino, contradictions and all.
In 2024, virtually every segment of the Latino population moved to the right—women and men, Catholics and evangelical Protestants, rich and poor, white and nonwhite, in cities and rural areas, the recently naturalized and longtime citizens. Trump energized new Latino voters who hadn’t participated in politics before, and although he may have been the main attraction, other Republicans also did better with Latinos than they had in previous elections.
The elections of 2022 and 2024 brought many new Latino faces to Congress, and they came from all over the map. In addition to Latino representatives from Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas, we had others from New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington. They were men and women, Democrats and Republicans. They were mechanics, organizers, business owners, veterans. They had varied interests and didn’t speak with one voice. They were a demonstration of how Latinos were as integrated into American politics as any other group.
But two years later, many political observers still see Latinos as one-dimensional actors: as immigrants themselves, or as people instinctively inclined to sympathize with immigrants, or as traitors who are turning our backs to them. The focus on immigration makes sense, up to a point. The border is more secure today than it was under Joe Biden, but instead of dangerous criminals, the targets of ICE arrests have overwhelmingly been law-abiding, if undocumented, immigrants.
[Nick Miroff: Losing the ‘big-ass truck’ vote]
Yet even though Latinos as a group seem likely to vote against Republicans as a reaction against Trump’s immigration and economic policies, Democrats haven’t yet come to a consensus on exactly what immigration and economic policies we will be voting for. In terms of immigration, is it legalization? The end of private detention facilities? The continued deportation of dangerous criminals, but not law-abiding immigrants—à la Barack Obama, whom the left maligned as the deporter in chief? In terms of the economy, is it universal health care? A raised minimum wage? Programs to help Latinos start businesses? Taxing billionaires?
The lesson that Democrats seem to have drawn from 2024 is that immigration isn’t a winning issue for them, so they’d better focus on inflation and the cost of living instead. Republicans, meanwhile, want to believe that Latinos care about the economy above all else, because that would give them cover to do whatever they want on immigration. That did seem to be the lesson of 2020 and 2024, when Trump did better and better among Latinos despite his draconian support for mass deportation.
Most Latinos favor comprehensive immigration reform and think it’s wrong to deport immigrants who don’t have a criminal record and who have bought homes, raised families, and otherwise integrated into their communities. As the political scientist Matt Barreto told me before the 2024 election, Latinos want the border to be secure, but also think law-abiding immigrants who are longtime residents should be able to legalize.
A comprehensive policy based on this distinction is tricky, though, because it leaves unresolved the question of what to do with recent unauthorized arrivals who are both hardworking and law-abiding, which is to say most of them. Since the mass deportations of Trump’s second administration began, we’ve upheld veterans and their families, or immigrants who arrived decades ago and have built a life here, as sympathetic characters unjustly caught up in Trump’s immigration dragnet. But does this mean we should be deporting hardworking immigrants who arrived more recently? Immigrants who came decades ago were new arrivals once, and new arrivals today will one day be immigrants who have been here for a long time.
A poll in September, from NBC and Telemundo, showed significant divides within the Latino community on these and other questions. I was surprised to learn how minimally Latinos’ views of immigration have changed over the past few years—even after the arrests, deportations, and killings. When it came to “dealing with immigration,” respondents, by a margin of 45 to 31 percent, said Democrats would do a better job than Republicans. In 2022, that margin was 41 percent to 30 percent in favor of Democrats—that is, only a slightly higher percentage of Hispanics today think Democrats would handle immigration better.
[From the March 2022 Issue: There’s no such thing as ‘the Latino vote’]
Thirty-eight percent of Latinos believe that Democrats would more effectively secure the border, while an equal percentage believe the reverse. Four years ago, Democrats had an 11-point advantage on that question. Moreover, a lower percentage of Latinos today think immigration “helps more than hurts,” and a higher percentage thinks immigration “hurts more than helps.” Finally, compared with four years ago, a lower percentage of Latinos think that immigrants brought to the United States when they were kids should be legalized, and about the same percentage—39 percent in 2024, 37 percent today—think that all undocumented immigrants should be deported.
Democrats still have a lot of work to do to regain Latinos’ trust on immigration and the border, and Republicans haven’t suffered nearly as much as one might have expected given the Trump administration’s ruthlessness and cruelty.
Latinos are clearly dissatisfied with Trump. The economy was one of his greatest strengths but is now a significant weakness for him. Like all Americans, Latinos say they want the price of food, gas, rent, health care, and other basic needs to be lower. They also want more and better jobs, and higher wages, and for mortgage interest rates to be lower, so they can afford to buy their own home. But they also like Trump’s no-tax-on-tips, overtime-pay, and Social Security policies, and they still generally see Republicans as the pro-business party.
An important exception to the almost-exclusive focus on immigration and the economy is the work that Carlos Odio and Rachel Stein, of the Latino research and polling firm Equis, are doing in their newsletter, The New Dynamic. In addition to these issues, they have focused on the Iran war and the strong preference Latinos have for not getting entangled in foreign conflicts more generally, their objection to foreign aid if the trade-off is less investment at home, and the steadfast belief among Latinos, especially more recent arrivals, that the United States is the greatest country in the world.
The goal should be not only to “see with clear eyes what has been revealed in the age of Trump,” as they have written, but also to explore the broad array of issues that shaped Latino life and politics even before Trump entered the arena. For too long, this more expansive approach has been obscured or overshadowed by the issues of immigration and the economy, which can reveal as much about the partisan imperatives of the moment as about Latinos.
After last spring’s primaries in Texas, Voto Latino, a Latino voter-mobilization group, asserted that Latinos are “coming home to Democrats—there is no question about it.” When I mentioned this to Daniel Garza, a longtime Republican and head of the conservative LIBRE Initiative, he said, “There is no home for Latinos.” My hope is that Latinos will claim many political homes instead of just one, and that candidates in all parties continue to fight for votes that we will give them only if they represent the interests of the many communities we are a part of, then follow through on their promises.