‘A hard political pill to swallow’: Dems grapple with losing Latino voters
Harris barely won majority support among Latinos, according to exit polls.
Democrats are finally conceding they have a Latino voter problem.
The party’s yearslong hemorrhaging of Latino support reached its apex Tuesday night, as exit polls showed Vice President Kamala Harris
barely won 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 in decades of a Republican presidential candidate.
The shift among these voters is forcing Democrats — who have long been confounded by increasing levels of support among Latinos for Republican candidates in the Trump era — to acknowledge the former president’s appeal, particularly with Latino men. That’s even as the GOP under Trump has become more publicly comfortable with openly racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Surveying the wreckage after Trump’s victory, Democrats across the country suggested the problem was obvious, even if the solution isn’t: Trump, they said, has been able to connect with Latinos and speak to their economic frustrations, their concerns about their families and their worries about the future of the country, in a raw, unfiltered way that many of their own candidates haven’t.
“Why are we losing these people? Why are we losing firefighters? Why are we losing cops? Why are we losing blue collar working men? … Because we’re very consistent in our messaging 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 highest-ranking Latino elected official in this heavily Latino state. “And that is a hard political pill for Democrats to swallow.”
Though Harris greatly improved her standing from where President Joe Biden was with Latinos before he dropped out of the race, the vice president notched just 52 percent support among Latinos, according to
exit polls. Biden in 2020 earned 61 percent of Latinos’ support, Hillary Clinton carried 66 percent in 2016 and Barack Obama won more than 70 percent in 2012.
Trump — for the first time ever for a GOP presidential candidate — won Latino men outright. And Harris appears to have underperformed with Latino women, too. CNN’s exit polling shows that Harris lost 16 percentage points with Latino men and 9 percentage points with Latino women compared to Biden’s 2020 performance.
And the bleeding didn’t stop there. Harris also saw significant losses with Latinos who haven’t been to college, a 15-point dip.
“We need a deep reflection about what’s going on Latino voters, but we also need a deep reflection about what’s going on with men and what’s going on with working class voters,” said Carlos Odio, a Democratic strategist and co-founder of Equis Research, a Hispanic research firm.
The inroads Trump was making with Latinos shouldn’t have shocked Democrats, after months of polling suggesting as much. In response, Democrats, with Harris at the top of the ticket, had started to shift away from the idea that demography is destiny, in what was widely seen as a repudiation of identity politics. Harris campaign ads targeted at
both English- and
Spanish-speaking Latinos talked about the economy, high drug prices and crime; the vice president talked often with Latino audiences not only about an “earned pathway to citizenship” but securing the border.
That approach was widely hailed by Democrats as reflective of the campaign’s nuanced understanding of the Latino diaspora in the U.S., which Latino strategists argued had long been missing in Democratic politics. And the campaign in its final month launched a “Hombres con Harris” effort, as well as a version of its economic policy agenda targeted toward Latinos.
But it ultimately did little to stop the damage.
“Nothing’s 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 opportunity. What they’re saying with their vote, if the exit polls are to be believed, is they don’t believe that the plans that were 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 Latino leadership roundtable at his golf club in Doral and did a town hall with Univision, the largest Spanish-language channel in the U.S. After he was arraigned in Miami on federal charges in the classified documents case in June 2023, Trump made a pit stop at the famous Cuban restaurant Versailles, where he shook people’s hands in the Little Havana landmark, seeking the sympathies of people who’d fled political persecution from the left and dictatorships in their home countries.
Strategists on both sides of the aisle say it helped him win battleground states — but also chipped away at the margins in blue states like New Jersey and New York, while widening his margins in states like Florida and Texas.
Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, a Florida-based cultural context adviser, said she wished that Harris had used the convention, debate or interviews to flatly deny that her party sided with socialists, especially given that Trump often derided her as being a “Marxist.”
“All of these things are missed opportunities where she had people talking about her being a communist, but she never addressed it full-front herself,
like Biden did,” said Pérez-Verdía, a former Democrat who recently re-registered as a non-party affiliated voter. More broadly, she warned it was a mistake for political groups to use symbols and words associated with socialism, or to use terms like the gender-neutral “Latinx.”
Esteban Bovo, the Republican mayor of Hialeah, Florida, said that Latino voters, and voters of color more generally, feel “almost talked down to” by Democrats, who see them as a minority group in need of assistance. Instead, he said, Latinos want the same things all Americans want: “education, opportunity, peace and tranquility, safety.”
“It binds all of us,” Bovo said.
Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, were shocked at the support Latinos gave Trump, especially in southwestern states. Three politically volatile majority Latino Texas counties that Republicans had eyed this election — Starr, Hidalgo and Cameron — saw a huge upswing in support for Trump compared to 2016 and 2020.
In down-ballot races in Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz, whose father is Cuban, made gains with Latino voters after making an effort to court the demographic as Republicans saw trends pointing to their support this election. Exit polls show Cruz won 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 Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, suggested it was “misinformation” from the right, not any problem with the Democratic message, that caused Harris to falter with 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 should be known for, and end the right-wing misinformation machine.”
Meanwhile, House Democratic leadership will meet Wednesday to discuss the pending results — and will meet Thursday for a so-called virtual family meeting to air out grievances and share insight on what could have gone wrong as final votes are tallied.
Odio said that Latinos who shifted to Trump were primarily concerned about the economy. In focus groups, he said, they didn’t think that 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 in him was that they saw a businessman who put the economy over everything else. That was the lesson they drew from how he handled himself in the pandemic,” Odio added. “And they themselves are people who put the economy above everything else.”
And Fontes warned that some Latino men are finding themselves increasingly out of place in a Democratic Party that they feel doesn’t embrace their views on traditional families, or that they see as overly concerned about policing people for using incorrect language.
“Someone’s going to come back at 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 a position are walking a very, very fine tight rope here, where I recognize how a lot of these folks feel. But I’m told by my own political side that elaborating those feelings and talking about those sorts of things, means that I don’t belong in the Democratic Party.”
Democrats are looking down-ballot for hope. Rep. Ruben Gallego appears poised to notch a victory against GOP Senate candidate Kari Lake in Arizona, even as Trump appears to be 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 falling 20 points behind Biden’s 2020 numbers — as an existential threat to the Democratic Party, particularly as more young Latinos become 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 an anti-Trump Republican, argues what’s happening isn’t a 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 vote history to realign,” choosing not to identify with the Democratic Party.
“The Latino vote has forever changed,” Madrid said. “And the Democrats need to hurry up and figure it out or they’re going to be irrelevant.”
