The Latino voters who helped Donald Trump make historic gains in 2024 are not necessarily turning Democrat but pulling away from both parties as economic dissatisfaction continues.
While recent polling shows a movement away from Trump among Latinos, including some who backed him in 2024, the shift is not a major Democratic realignment, and could make Latino voters one of the most consequential and unpredictable electorates in the 2026 midterms.
A shift from both parties
The evidence suggests “a much more swingy electorate than something just like a realignment,” said María Isabel Di Franco Quiñonez, senior research director at Equis Research, at an Aug. 28 American Community Media briefing. “We were all a bit premature when it came to realignment. We’ve seen great levels of skepticism and frustration with both parties.”
Equis’s latest polling shows that 14% of Latino voters who voted for Trump in 2024 now say they would support a Democrat in November, while another 10% remain undecided.
María Isabel Di Franco Quiñonez, senior research director at Equis Research, discusses the backlash Trump is facing from his supporters as a result of his immigration enforcement actions.
“The main thing that we have seen … is just a lower identification with the Democratic Party, greater identification as an independent, and again support for Republican candidates without necessarily a heightened identification with the Republican Party as a whole,” Di Franco Quiñonez said. “Since the election, a meaningful chunk of Latino voters have really soured on Trump.”
That fluidity appears across age groups, regions and other demographic categories, she added.
One group crucial to Trump’s 2024 gains — irregular voters, who skipped previous elections or are voting for the first time — could also prove crucial to this November’s midterm election, when turnout is typically lower than in presidential years.
“This is not and never has been a realignment,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist and Lincoln Project co-founder. “What we’re witnessing is a broad movement away institutionally from the parties, and this emergent Latino populism is going to be a defining characteristic of American democracy.”
“The economy has been the dominant issue for 30 years. This is not new, but you don’t have an infrastructure in our community that has ever prioritized that issue in a meaningful way, and certainly not our politicians, which is why the realignment is happening,” he continued.
Latino voters “weren’t becoming more Trumpy,” Madrid said. “There was overwhelming data saying they’re moving away from the Democratic Party, and that exists to this day.” Now, he said, they’re moving away from Republicans too, but not toward Democrats by default.
Republican political strategist Mike Madrid discusses Latino support for Trump in 2024 and the voting bloc’s apparent shift back leftward.
Clarissa Martínez De Castro, vice president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS, said the swing nature of the Latino electorate predates these recent party shifts.
Pointing to UnidosUS’s first Hispanic voter report in 2002, she said that for decades, Latino voters “tended to fall more or less about two-thirds on the Democratic side, one-third on the Republican side, and for a long time we said that when it came to Hispanic voters, Republicans were their own worst enemy and Democrats’ best friend.”
Economic issues beat ideology
But as Republicans under Trump began campaigning more aggressively among Hispanic voters on economic issues while Democrats failed to cement existing support, more voters turned independent and undecided, Martínez De Castro explained.
Roughly four in five Latino adults in the U.S. — 38.5 million people — are working-class, meaning that a failure to deliver on economic promises can have immediate household effects.
UnidosUS voter tracking shows that four of the top five concerns for Latino voters are pocketbook-related: the cost of living, jobs, housing and healthcare, with immigration ranking fifth.
“The economy and how it’s impacting working families” was part of why both Bernie Sanders and Trump resonated with portions of the Latino electorate in their respective presidential campaigns, Martínez De Castro said.
That frustration may also help explain why some Latino voters have supported more recent Democratic Socialist candidates, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — who won a plurality of Latino primary voters and a majority in the general election — without necessarily embracing democratic socialism as an ideology.
Clarissa Martínez De Castro, vice president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS, discusses the failure on the part of political leaders to recognize the concerns of the Latino electorate.
“This is a material movement before it is an ideological movement,” driven by “the material conditions of their everyday lives” rather than a shift in political identity, said Eli Valentin, assistant dean of graduate and leadership studies at Virginia Union University and author of “Politicking in the Barrio.”
He described a recent wave of anti-establishment primary upsets — including, in New York City alone, the defeats by Mamdani-backed Democratic Socialist challengers of five-term House member and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Rep. Adriano Espaillat, and of state 7th Congressional District hopeful Antonio Reynoso — as “an anti-establishment repudiation” rather than a leftward turn.
“Policy preference and ideological identity, they’re not the same thing,” added Valentin.
Di Franco Quiñonez said her own experience campaigning in Brooklyn highlighted the importance of whether candidates can show that they have actually helped voters.
In a competitive 2021 Brooklyn primary, she served as field director for progressive candidate Sandy Nurse, who won not on ideology but because voters remembered her running a mutual aid network during the pandemic.
“They were voting for her because many of them remembered her showing up at their door with food assistance boxes during the pandemic … It can be as simple as people remembering what a candidate has actually done for them,” Di Franco Quiñonez said, calling that gap between promise and delivery “the greatest weak point for many Democratic candidates.”
“Voters don’t believe that they will deliver. They believe that they have these nice promises. But when it comes to showing up at their doorstep in their time of need, no,” she added.
The immigration test
The role of immigration promises is widely misunderstood, panelists agreed.
UnidosUS polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Latino voters, including most Republicans, support legal status for long-residing undocumented immigrants even when the program is described as “amnesty.”
More than 30% report that their employers have lost workers due to immigration enforcement under Trump, and 30% say these operations are hurting the local economy.
Most Latino voters “want to see meaningful changes to the way that immigration enforcement is being carried out internally in the United States. That does not mean abolish ICE,” said Di Franco Quiñonez.
Seven in 10 Latino voters oppose additional funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without protections, per the same UnidosUS poll.
“The question of immigration and law enforcement are different in the minds of voters. There’s clearly strong concern about government overreach and what is going on with terrorizing our communities,” said Madrid, adding that “there is a genuine, sincere, long-term interest in a pathway to citizenship” that Latino voters have held more consistently “than any other community.”
This November, Madrid said he’d watch closely whether Republican support among Latino voters — 48% for Trump in 2024 — falls back below 30%, which he said would confirm the movement is not a lasting “demographic shift … I think it’s going to be a very, very strong year for Democrats broadly.”
Turnout alone could be similarly revealing, as the growth in the Latino voting-age population in 2024 was unusually small compared with previous presidential elections, rising by about 115,000 voters rather than the roughly 1 million typically added between presidential cycles.
“If more Latinos come out in this midterm than the last one,” said Valentin, “we will have a different narrative coming out of November.”
