Trump builds on Latino support, helping pave way to victory

President-elect Trump’s performance among Latino and Hispanic voters offered one of the brightest spots for Republicans on Election Day, as the former president made inroads with the critical voting bloc.

Despite the backlash Trump received for a rally featuring a comedian making racist jokes about Puerto Rico and Latinos, the former president appeared to grow his support among the demographic. Trump narrowly flipped Central Florida’s Osceola County, which has a sizable Puerto Rican population, by just more than a point. In comparison, President Biden won the county by nearly 14 points in 2020, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won it by nearly 25 points in 2016. 

Over in Arizona, the former president appeared to be surpassing his 2020 performance in the counties of Yuma and Santa Cruz, which both have notable Hispanic populations, though votes are still being tabulated in the state. 

A CNN exit poll showed Vice President Harris winning Latino voters over Trump 52 percent to 46 percent — a single-digit lead compared to President Biden, who outpaced Trump among the group, with 65 percent support to Trump's 32 percent in 2020. 

Most notably this cycle, Trump won Latino men by 12 points over Harris — a staggering 35-point swing since 2020, when Biden won the group by 23 points. And while Harris did comfortably win among Latino women, pulling ahead of Trump by 22 points, it’s a stark difference to the 39-point lead that broke for Biden among the cohort just four years ago.

“President Donald J. Trump received historic support from Hispanic voters because he has never wavered on the issues that matter most to our community: bringing down costs, restoring the economy, restoring American prosperity, securing the border, and safety at home and abroad," said Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign. "As President Trump said in his victory speech, now it is time to get to work and deliver for the American people.”

Warning signs that segments of the Latino voting bloc were moving toward Republicans have been apparent to Democrats for a number of years. In 2022, the GOP made gains with the voting bloc in Florida, particularly with the Cuban and Puerto Rican communities. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) won 58 percent of the state’s Latino vote, including 68 percent of Cuban Americans and 56 percent of Puerto Ricans. 

And in the polling in the run-up to the 2024 election, Trump was seeing promising signs among Latino voters in the polls, particularly among young Latino men. 

“It’s more pervasive than the isolated, young Latino male, although it’s particularly pronounced there,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who specializes in Latino voting behavior and trends. 

“You can’t flip Osceola County with just young, Hispanic men,” he said. 

Madrid argued that the significant shift among Latino voters is a part of a “longer-term, generational trajectory.” 

“It’s the emergence of a new type of voter, which is a nonwhite, working-class populist voter,” he said. 

Republicans argue that the swing is just as much a rejection of Democrats’ policies as it is a movement toward the GOP on issues like the economy and immigration. 

“You go to South Texas for instance and go into those communities, there actually has been a long-standing concern about the flow of illegal immigrants because that’s into their communities,” said one Republican strategist, adding that Latinos have also shown signs of leaning to the right on issues like school choice and abortion. 

According to a Pew Research Center survey released in March, 75 percent of Hispanics in the U.S. referred to the increase in the number of migrants over the southern border as a “major problem or crisis,” while 74 percent said they were critical of how the government was handling the situation. The poll also found that 51 percent said dealing with the southern border should be a top priority for the president and Congress. 

“The trend has been there and thankfully for Republicans, Democrats failed to recognize it, they’ve failed to appreciate it over history, and frankly, they’ve treated most minorities in their party the same,” the strategist said. “They treated a Hispanic voter in Texas, or Arizona, or fill-in-the-blank, the same as they treated a Black voter.”

“That’s not a coalition. That’s laziness and that’s taking people for granted.” 

DJ Quinlan, a former executive director of the Arizona Democratic Party, suggested it’s even simpler: Latino and Hispanic voters are impacted by the same trends as other key voting blocs.

“It’s a big mistake to focus in on telling the story of Donald Trump winning as being the story of more Latinos voting for him, and not looking at the overall broad social trend that's happening,” Quinlan explained. “There was an overall broad movement, and I will say it's largely driven by misinformation and economic anxiety than anything else.” 

“As a Latino myself, I worry that Latinos are going to be disproportionately impacted by a lot of these policies that the Trump administration seems to be leaning towards, I mean, noticeably, things like repealing the [Affordable Care Act], obviously mass deportation.”

Many believed Trump’s standing with the Latino community was on shaky ground following his massive rally at Madison Square Garden in New York late last month, when comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and made a crude joke about Latinos and procreating. Republicans, including Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.), were quick to condemn the remarks, while Trump and his campaign distanced themselves from Hinchcliffe. 

The Harris campaign used the controversy to boost its outreach to Latino voters, which was already ongoing. But in the end, the controversy did not appear to have a significant impact on the voting bloc. 

“Nationally I find what happened with Latino voters gobsmacking,” said Dan Eberhart, a Trump donor. “I think it’s a paradigm shift for American politics, potentially bigger than this election.