Understanding Latino Support for Donald Trump

Donald Trump, according to exit polls, won a greater share of the Latino vote than any Republican Presidential candidate in at least the past half century, and maybe ever. At forty-six per cent—a fourteen-percentage-point increase from 2020— Trump beat George W. Bush's record by at least two points, and perhaps as many as six. The most eye-popping results were in Miami-Dade County and in southern Texas, where Trump won almost every county along the Mexican border. According to exit polling in several battleground states—including Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania—his margin with Latino voters grew more between 2020 and 2024 than it did between 2016 and 2020.

Even more surprising, the Biden and Harris campaigns weren't sitting idly by as it happened. They and their allied PAC's responded to the slippage in 2020 by spending more than a hundred million dollars on Latino-targeted ads and sending thousands of volunteers to knock on doors. In the final months of the race, with Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, campaign insiders said the efforts were paying off; after months of dismal polls for Joe Biden , Harris was not far from having the same Latino support that he had in 2020, and the insiders claimed those numbers would increase through Election Day. It's hard to say with certainty that their efforts were ineffective, because Harris might have fared even worse without them, and among Latinos in Georgia she did only one point worse, and in Wisconsin one point better, than Biden did four years ago. But that's cold comfort. The Democrats' version of the autopsy report that Republicans put out after their 2012 loss—which argued that they needed to fix their Latino (and Black, and Asian American, and Native American, women, youth, and L.G.B.T.Q.) problem—is already being written.

The assignment of blame came quickly. On Joy Reid's MSNBC show, the host acknowledged that a majority of Gen X voters and white women sided with Trump, but she told Latino men, "You own everything that happens to your mixed-status families, and to your wives, sisters, and abuelas from here on in." The liberal commentator Elie Mystal tweeted that "Black people did their job" by voting for Harris, but that "Latinos wanted this man. I hope that works out for them." Even though working-class Latinos had said that they were struggling to afford rent, food, and gas, and that President Biden had offered little or no relief, many political analysts chalked up Trump's gains to some collective character flaw. Mystal weighed in again, tweeting that "Latinos think they're white." (Many do, in fact, consider themselves white.) The journalist Paola Ramos tweeted that the inroads Trump made with Latinos weren't just about the economy but were also "intertwined with racism, xenophobia, transphobia."

It is beyond doubt that Trumpism is infused with white supremacy, and that this is part of its appeal to some Latinos. With people such as Stephen Miller in Trump's inner circle , his Administration is likely to do what it can to reverse the tide of demographic change, in part through mass deportations. But shifting attention from the thing that voters themselves said motivated them, to something more insidious, is as wrong as it is perilous. It is absolutely possible for Latinos to understand racism and still vote for a racist candidate whom they think, rightly or wrongly, will help them prosper. Moreover, bluntly asserting that Trump's Latino supporters misdiagnosed the root cause of their struggles and that they are, in fact, racist and sexist isn't the way to begin a conversation that could lead them to vote for Democrats going forward. More concretely, it also defies logic that a fourteen-percentage-point shift in four years can be attributed to the racism Latinos hold within themselves. All of a sudden, we're supposed to believe that the new Latino Trump voters decided that they're white, anti-immigrant, and trans- and homophobic?

When I think about Latino Trump voters, my paternal grandfather, also named Geraldo Cadava, often comes to mind. Since he died, two years ago, I've been poring over his military records, looking for clues about who he was. He served in the Air Force for twenty years, from 1947 to 1968, then spent another fifteen to twenty years working as a miner and a mechanic at a copper mine outside of Tucson, and washing dishes at a local country club. In 1995, when he was almost seventy years old, he filled out a standard geriatric-depression evaluation. He checked "yes" next to questions asking whether he felt "basically satisfied" with his life, whether he was "hopeful about the future," and whether he thought it was "wonderful to be alive now." But he also checked "yes" in response to a question that asked him, "Do you worry a lot about the past?" Next to that question, he wrote that he had been "discriminated against."

What did he mean? I tried to glean the answer from other records. In March, 1969, his request for G.I. Bill benefits to enroll at the University of Arizona was approved. "I do not know yet what they have to offer," he wrote, "but I am going as far as I can go." He never did go to college, because, he later wrote, he had a house to pay for and a wife and two kids. Instead, he took the hundred and fourteen dollars per month that the government gave him and signed up for a trade-school course in automotive mechanics. He again applied for G.I. Bill benefits in August, 1973, to "advance" himself by getting certified as a "Diesel Mechanic, First Class." Two weeks later, his request was denied because the class he wanted to take was not on a list of approved courses. A decade later, in 1984, when he was fifty-eight years old, he applied once more for benefits to acquire some new skill. This time, he didn't say exactly what he hoped to do, only that he was "too old to work and too young to retire completely." The records I have don't mention whether this last request was approved, but I remember him working only sporadically in the years that followed.

Striving toward but never quite realizing his goals was surely a source of frustration. He had been a "blue collar worker" his whole life, he wrote in one of his applications for benefits, and that didn't stop after the military. He was laid off at the copper mine when the price of copper plummeted. He had a thirty-year mortgage that he was still paying off when he last applied for military assistance. He hadn't always received the unemployment payments he was due. It became clearer to me why he said that he dwelled on the past, despite his over-all happiness. Yet the final line of his statement read, "The best thing I ever did was to . . . my country." The scan I have isn't fully legible. I'm left to fill in the blank myself. But, based on how proud he was of his time in the military, I believe that the missing word is "serve."

My grandfather was only one Latino. He never claimed to represent anyone else. But I know this: he worked hard for a living, never aspired to be white (he was several shades darker than I am), felt let down by the institution he worked for, and voted for every Republican candidate from Reagan to Trump, some of whom I and other liberals have called racist, or at least indifferent to the concerns of nonwhite Americans. He was a first-generation American who, by the time he died, had been a U.S. citizen for almost eighty years. Because of everything I've learned from him, it is easy for me to believe Latinos who say they voted for Trump because Democrats haven't always delivered on their promises of protection and prosperity. It's far from certain that Trump will do it, either—but many Latinos have grown desperate enough to give him a shot.

Blame is not the right idea. To blame means to assign responsibility for a fault, and it implies the violation of some rule, a deviation from a norm. According to this logic, Latino voters veered off course. But, if we learn anything between now and the next election, it should be that there is no prescribed path for Latinos. They have never been "naturally" liberal or conservative, despite claims to the contrary by Democrats and Republicans alike. Asserting that Latinos are naturally anything is an attempt to convince party leaders that Latinos are theirs to win, if only they put in the effort. It is also meant to cultivate Latino loyalty—but no group of voters, including Latinos, should be loyal to any party, because parties haven't always been loyal to them.

Latino Republicans in the sixties were among the first to point out that Latino loyalty allowed Democrats to take them for granted. Many Latinos hung a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt next to an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe because his New Deal had helped them find work and put food on the table, but what, those Republicans asked, had their loyalty got them? Democrats, they argued, sought their votes right before every election, only to ignore them until they needed their support again. When Richard Nixon first ran for President, in 1960, his campaign set up a job-recruitment and health center in a Latino area of Los Angeles. After his election in 1968, he hired several Latinos into his Administration, and, under the rubric of "brown capitalism," he conceived of economic programs designed to uplift Latino communities. When he was reëlected, he became the first Republican in the postwar era to win about a third of the Latino vote, which became an expectation in the decades that followed. Eight years later, Ronald Reagan won a similar share of the Latino vote by appealing to their work ethic, anti-Communism, love of family, and faith. Thousands, like my grandfather, were convinced and became lifelong Republicans.

Political consultants, advocacy organizations, and journalists have helped to create this situation in which less Latino support for Democrats is read as failure by Latinos themselves. A Time magazine cover story in October, 1978, titled "It's Your Turn in the Sun," said that the growing number of Latinos guarantees that "they will play an increasingly important role in shaping the nation's politics and policies ." It quotes Raul Yzaguirre, the director of the National Council of La Raza (now the nonprofit advocacy group UnidosUS), who declared, "The 1980s will be the decade of the Hispanics." Around the same time, news s started calling Latinos a "sleeping giant" that would transform American politics if they ever awakened. About two decades after the sleeping-giant cliché began circulating in the national press, the legendary Los Angeles Times journalist Frank del Olmo said it had to be slayed, in part because the Latino giant wasn't an especially partisan one; it lumbered in different directions at once. Nevertheless, many Democrats clung to the idea that, so long as Latinos got out to vote, their increasing share of the population would overwhelmingly benefit the Party.

In many ways, the eighties were the decade of the Hispanics, and decades since could even be called the Latino half century. In 1980, the Latino population in the U.S. stood at 14.8 million, or seven per cent of the national population. In 2023, there were more than sixty-five million Latinos, who made up about twenty per cent of the country. During these same decades, the number of Latinos serving in Congress grew from less than ten to more than fifty. One of them, Marco Rubio, is poised to become Trump's Secretary of State. When we debate whether Latinos have assimilated as Americans, the answer is yes. But the America that Latinos assimilate into today is not the America of the mid-twentieth century, when groups like Italians became white. Today, Bad Bunny sings in Spanish on "Saturday Night Live," major-party candidates hold town halls on Spanish-language television stations, and the prospect of living without us strikes fear in the hearts of anyone who wants continued access to food, clothing, and child care. The rest of America is assimilating into Latino America, as writers such as Jorge Ramos and Mike Madrid have argued.

Yet the flip side of the idea that we're "giants" is that we can be blamed, which in turn leads Latino advocacy organizations into an argumentative cul-de-sac. For progressive organizations, it seems that Latinos are only decisive when Democrats win. Clarissa Martínez de Castro, of UnidosUS, said earlier this year that Latinos would play a "decisive role" in the election, echoing almost forty years of asserting the decisiveness of the Latino vote. But, during the post-election Webinar hosted by UnidosUS, the pollster they worked with shared a slide that said Latinos made no difference at all. Wait a second: Do our votes matter or not? Advocacy groups have hyped the idea that we're decisive, because they have fought hard, for decades, to make candidates, legislators, and parties believe that Latinos deserve their attention, and investments of time and money. But we might get even more of those things when we're seen as tens of millions of Americans who are persuadable voters rather than members of a unified voting bloc—who deserve to be heard for the things they say about themselves.