One of the biggest coups of President Donald Trump’s 2024 election campaign was his unexpectedly strong performance with Latino voters. According to the gold-standard Pew post-election analysis, Trump won 48 percent of the Latino vote, by far a 21st century high for Republicans, shaving 35 points from Hillary Clinton’s margin with this group in 2016 and 22 points off of Joe Biden’s 2020 numbers. If they can’t get some of those voters back, it is going to be difficult for Democrats to win national elections in the near future.
That’s why it’s notable that just eight months into his second term, Trump appears to have completely squandered his party’s decade-long gains with a formerly critical Democratic constituency by making Latinos in America fear for their safety. The Trump administration’s decision to unleash poorly-trained, virtually lawless ICE squads on major American cities (as well as agricultural regions) has produced a constant stream of stories about American citizens caught up in ICE dragnets or detained after what critics are calling “Kavanaugh stops” simply for the way they look, the language they speak, or even the neighborhood they happen to be in.
This is not what Latinos voted for in 2024. There was widespread frustration among Latinos about inflation and the cost-of-living crisis, which intersected with resentment against COVID-era business closure policies associated (often wrongly) with Democrats, and the influx of immigrants during the Biden administration—particularly the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans fleeing their country’s roiling crisis. Many people who navigated America’s byzantine immigration and citizenship process for years were also angry at the perception that legal status was being bestowed effortlessly on entirely new groups of people. The failure to see this coming was an inexcusable Democratic strategic catastrophe.
Trump benefitted in 2024 from the Biden administration’s inability to pivot or unlock resources that would have allowed cities to manage the stream of new immigrants, and Republicans could easily have reinforced their standing with these voters had Trump stopped with his still-popular policies on the border itself rather than greenlighting a national campaign of terror that by its nature is sweeping up ordinary, law-abiding American citizens of Latino descent. Republicans are inadvertently playing into Democrats’ greatest strength with these voters—the sense that Republicans are racists who don’t want them here. A 2019 study led by Florida Atlantic University’s Monica Escaleras found that perceptions of group threat were key to determining whether Latinos would support Republicans or Democrats.
More problematically for the GOP, Trump’s indiscriminate immigration crackdown, and the extent to which he and his allies don’t seem to care at all whether American citizens are being made to feel unsafe in their own communities, might be activating a sense of “linked fate” among third and fourth-generation Latino immigrants who voted on the basis of other issues in 2024. And as Paola Ramos, author of Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means For America argued in a recent NPR interview, “People are starting to see signs of a type of authoritarianism that is very familiar to Latinos” when they see or hear about the tactics used to detain undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere.
The numbers are stark. An October 13 Economist/YouGov survey pegged Trump’s approval with Hispanic voters at 30 percent, with 65 percent disapproving. Digging down, just 37 percent have confidence in ICE, 73 percent believe that ICE agents should have to wear uniforms to identify themselves and 63 percent oppose those agents’ use of masks to hide their identities. That same survey shows that inflation is still the most important issue to Latinos—something that the Trump administration has actively made worse since taking office. And virtually every poll that releases crosstabs shows a similar deterioration of Trump’s approval with Latino voters.
To be blunt, these are lights out numbers for President Trump’s 2024 coalition. You can play around with the Cook Political Report’s 2024 demographic swing calculator and see that moving Latinos back to anything approaching their pre-2024 norm would have won the election for Kamala Harris. And there’s nothing you could do that would be more devastating to the GOP’s future with these voters than convincing them that Republicans don’t care about their civil liberties or the sanctity of their communities.
In some ways it feels odd to talk about electoral coalitions as the president systematically dismantles the country’s democratic architecture. Will voters ever even have a real opportunity to make Republicans answer for what they’re doing right now? That question is very much up in the air, but to the extent that the 2026 and 2028 elections are free and fair, Republicans are likely to pay a very steep price for their mass deportation gambit if they don’t quickly reverse course on internal immigration enforcement.
David Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.