{"id":230012,"date":"2026-11-07T05:24:05","date_gmt":"2026-11-07T05:24:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/how-republicans-lost-the-latino-voters-who-elected-trump-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-11-07T05:24:05","modified_gmt":"2026-11-07T05:24:05","slug":"how-republicans-lost-the-latino-voters-who-elected-trump-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/how-republicans-lost-the-latino-voters-who-elected-trump-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"How Republicans lost the Latino voters who elected Trump – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trump wooed Latino voters in 2024, then alienated them, with ICE tactics shifting Latino voters toward Democrats
T<\/span>uesday night\u2019s explosive rout of the Republican party was supercharged by the fury of Hispanic Americans who turned out in record numbers in key battlegrounds to protest the Trump administration<\/a>\u2019s anti-immigrant assault on their communities.
\u201cTrump went against us,\u201d said Benny Melendez from Weslaco, Texas<\/a>. \u201cHe made us the target of ICE operations, so we decided to punish him by voting against his party. That\u2019s what happened.\u201d
Melendez, the owner of a small housebuilding company in south Texas, voted for Donald Trump<\/a> in the presidential election two years ago, attracted by his promise to secure the Mexican border and improve the economy. But on Tuesday, he cast his vote for the Democrats in a display of pure anger.
Two of his cousins and up to 15 of his building workers have been picked up and deported to Mexico by ICE<\/a>. When Melendez voted for Trump in 2024 he expected the immigration raids would focus on those with criminal records, he said, not his relatives and employees.
\u201cThey\u2019re taking our neighbors. They\u2019re taking our friends. They\u2019re they\u2019re taking our workers, and they\u2019re taking our family members. This is an attack against our community.\u201d
Melendez\u2019s rage, replicated in the millions across Texas, Florida and other critical swing states, itself tells a story. It speaks to how Trump first wooed, and then alienated, the backing of many Latino voters, effectively shooting himself in the foot.
In the closing days of the 2024 presidential race, Trump made a special pitch to Hispanic voters. \u201cI love Hispanics,\u201d he told them<\/a>, \u201cand Hispanics love Trump.\u201d
To some extent, that audacious appeal worked: in 2024 Trump garnered 48% of the Latino vote, according to Pew Research<\/a>, 12 points up from four years previously.
But on Tuesday night, Latino voters delivered Trump a resounding message of a very different sort. In a dizzying switch in affiliation, Hispanic American support for Republicans<\/a> plummeted from the almost half who backed Trump just two years ago to 30% today.
According to the New York Times<\/a> analysis of voter trends, election night marked a 28 point shift from 2024 in Latino allegiance toward Democrats nationwide. The dramatic turn was more notable than any other demographic voting group, with the next largest shift of 17% coming from Asian Americans.
The shift helped propel Democratic wins in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as governor\u2019s seats in states like Texas, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
If Trump and the Republican party had assumed they had forged a new alignment with Hispanic voters, they must now think again. Any such alliance was abruptly and spectacularly uncoupled on Tuesday.
\u201cPeople have called us the sleeping giant for a long time, and now we\u2019re really the swinging giant,\u201d said Stephanie Valencia, co-founder of the Latino polling experts, Equis Research.
\u201cThe vociferous message that voters sent last night was an F-U to Trump and Republicans and their misplaced priorities and broken promises.\u201d
It was a night of stunning surprises, and of firsts. Texas, the state with the second largest Hispanic populace after California, elected its first Latino governor, Democrat Gina Hinojosa<\/a>, a native of the Rio Grande Valley whose mother is an immigrant from Mexico, in an astounding rebuke to decades of largely white Republican rule.
Democrat Xavier Becerra, the son of immigrants from Mexico, will become the first elected Latino governor<\/a> in California, the world\u2019s fourth largest economy.
Here too the same voters\u2019 fury was powerfully vented. \u201cWe\u2019ve known better than anybody what these last two years have been like,\u201d California senator Alex Padilla, the son of Mexican immigrants, told the crowd at Becerra\u2019s closing campaign stop at the Palladium in Los Angeles on Sunday. \u201cWe have endured relentless attacks on our communities by Donald Trump and his rogue ICE agents.\u201d
Angelica Salas, an immigration activist who leads the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, called Becerra \u201cfamilia\u201d.
\u201cXavier Becerra dreams the way we dream,\u201d she said.
In key battleground states, Latino voters flexed their electoral muscle in this midterm cycle to a degree arguably never seen before. Texas took the prize for the seismic jolt that shot across the state.
In Hispanic-dominated south Texas where Trump made some of his greatest gains two years ago, Democrats won all four congressional districts along the border with Mexico. That included the three districts that Republicans had gerrymandered in an attempt to bolster their control of the US House \u2013 a move that backfired.
Two of those districts were held by their Democratic incumbents, Henry Cuellar in Texas 28 and Vicente Gonzalez in Texas 34. The third gerrymandered district, 81% Hispanic Texas 15, was flipped by the Democratic candidate, the Tejano music star Bobby Pulido<\/a>.
Pulido always looked to be doing well against the Republican incumbent, Monica De La Cruz, even though Trump had prevailed here in 2024. In the end, Pulido\u2019s victory was overwhelming, by an astonishing 24 percentage points with 95% of the ballots counted<\/a>.
\u201cNot bad for a quincea\u00f1era singer,\u201d Pulido said at his victory event.
Pulido\u2019s campaign manager Abel Prado told the Guardian that the outstanding result was in part a reflection of Trump\u2019s mass deportation drive that has seen thousands of undocumented Hispanic people detained and deported by ICE in Texas. \u201cWhen you implement policies with such cruelty and malice, then this is what you get,\u201d Prado said.
Among the 48,000 individuals that the Pulido campaign assembled in its voter database, almost 40% they found were members of mixed-status families. \u201cThese are people whose parents couldn\u2019t vote, but they could, and so when my dad got deported, or my mom got deported, that became a crystallizing moment.\u201d
Prado said that many people in the district who had voted for Trump in 2024 \u201ccame to their senses and realized the consequences of their previous vote. Tuesday night was a correction to what happens when one party is allowed to run rampant and do whatever they want without fear of consequences.\u201d
The 30 million registered Latino voters are as diverse politically, culturally and economically as any other group. Talk of a Latino monolith has for years led analysts to reach simplistic and inaccurate conclusions about their voting patterns.
Yet Tuesday\u2019s results showed a surprisingly similar rejection of Trump\u2019s policies across very different Hispanic communities. In Florida, Latino voters swung powerfully toward Democratic candidates in the Cuban and Venezuelan communities of Miami-Dade, and equally in the heavily Puerto Rican areas around Orlando.
In Miami-Dade, which Trump won by a whopping 15 points in 2024, the Republican incumbent Maria Elvira Salazar was fighting a neck-and-neck battle with her fellow Cuban American newscaster, the Democratic candidate Eliott Rodriguez.
That the race was so tight amounted to the realisation of Salazar\u2019s worst fears. In September she was blasted over news headlines when she warned Trump in a campaign advert<\/a> that his mass deportation of Hispanic immigrants had \u201cgone too far\u201d and that the very people who had put him back in the White House now \u201cfeel betrayed\u201d.
Trump\u2019s response was indicative. He accused Salazar <\/a>of backstabbing him, claiming that his \u201cLatino support hasn\u2019t wavered.\u201d The voters disagreed.
Tuesday\u2019s results will reverberate for some time. Democratic leaders, as they prepare to take control of Congress and begin the search for a presidential nominee, should be mindful that Hispanic voters are hungry for policies that reflect their needs, Valencia said.
\u201cThis was a cry for help from voters to focus on the right things: the economy and inflation, immigration, and wars abroad. Democrats are entering a probationary period with voters, they should not make the mistake of thinking that this swing is permanent.\u201d
The election has also ushered in a new generation of young, ambitious Hispanic politicians and organizers determined to be heard. Pulido\u2019s entire campaign staff was aged under 25.
\u201cThese are people who have never had a seat at the table who can now become a new voice in how we do things,\u201d Prado said. \u201cWe absolutely rejected anybody parachuting into the district, out-of-towners telling us how to do things.\u201d
He added: \u201cIf there\u2019s a gringo operative out there trying to take credit for what happened to the Latino vote in Texas on Tuesday night, please shut the fuck up.\u201d<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trump wooed Latino voters in 2024, then alienated them, with ICE tactics shifting Latino voters toward DemocratsTuesday night\u2019s explosive rout of the Republican party was supercharged by the fury of Hispanic Americans who turned out in record numbers in key battlegrounds to protest the Trump administration\u2019s anti-immigrant assault on their communities.\u201cTrump went against us,\u201d said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":230013,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}