Latino voters took a chance on President Trump and the Republican Party in 2024.
The courtship didn’t last.
Just two years later, this fast-growing group of voters shifted back to the left and helped propel Democrats to one of the party’s most sweeping midterm victories in recent memory.
After their win in 2024, Republicans took Latinos for granted and enacted policies that incited fear in the community, said Hector Sanchez Barba, president and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, a group that works to build Latino voting power nationwide.
“They came after us,” Barba said. “It’s a very deep wound. What they have done to Latinos is something the community will not forget.”
Trump got about 36% of the Latino vote in 2020, a figure that jumped to nearly half in 2024. But a look at states like Texas reveal just how quickly that advantage was erased this year.
Predominantly Latino counties in the Rio Grande Valley along the Mexican border that went for Trump by 10 to 15 points in 2024 rejected Republicans in 2026.
That vote was critical for groundbreaking Texas Democrats like Sen.-elect James Talarico and Gov.-election Gina Hinojosa. It also helped Democrats retake control of Congress, said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center.
Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, for example, won re-election by 36 points in a district that Texas Republicans redrew to disadvantage Democrats. Latino voters “certainly contributed to the wins of Democratic candidates at the state level and, of course, in those congressional districts,” said Lopez.
It wasn’t just Latinos that propelled Democrats to victory.
Other groups that had drifted toward Republicans in 2024 took a leftward turn, too. That includes Black voters, young voters, and white voters without a college degree.
“Some people who didn’t vote in ‘24 likely turned out this year,” Lopez said. “We need more data to find out, but that’s likely a part of the story.”
That was the case for 22-year-old Phoenix voter D’Anna Sauceda. She sat out the 2024 election, but could not ignore how bad her economic situation had become in the first two years of Trump’s second term. She still lives with her mom and cannot afford to go to college.
“The people, we have to take the power back,” Sauceda said on Election Day. “It’s not all in Donald Trump. We also have power ourselves.”
Not all the votes are counted yet, so statistical trends are still emerging. However, Arizona-based activist Alejandra Gomez said it’s clear the Latino voters handed Democrats a mandate.
“The message is that our communities turn out,” said Gomez, executive director of the grassroots organizing group LUCHA. The group has worked to build Latino voting power in Arizona since 2010, when the state legislature passed an aggressive immigration law known as SB-1070.
Gomez said voters expect newly elected state and federal lawmakers to fight so that Latino communities can see Democrats stand by them.
To Gomez, that means a higher minimum wage, paid family medical leave and eviction protections. For the first time in generations, Arizona’s legislature is likely to be controlled entirely by Democrats. About a quarter of the state’s electorate is Latino.
“The day after Election Day, I was completely teary all day,” Gomez said
The stakes are high for both parties in this presidential battleground state. Whoever wins Arizona in 2028 will need Latino support, said Republican political strategist Jaime Molera.
“I think both parties have done a horrible job of really building the Latino base,” said Molera, who formerly served as the state’s top education official. He’s also worked closely for years with high-profile Republicans.
To regain the trust of Latinos, he said the party should end the war in Iran, stop tariffs and take a softer tone on immigration.
“Securing the border is one thing,” he said, “but ripping apart families, that’s another.”
Molera said his experience working with Republican senators like John McCain and Jon Kyl “who were very adept at winning the Latino vote,” showed him that the party can get them back.
“But it didn’t happen in a campaign season,” he added. “It happened over years. It has to be a sustained engagement.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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