There’s an open question hanging over both parties when it comes to Latino voters right now: How should they talk about the second Trump administration’s ongoing campaign of mass deportations?
Setting aside the moral and humanitarian issues, this is an important, and curious, political debate. On the Democratic side, that’s over how to frame Trump’s operations: as overreach and excessive — of going beyond what he promised to his recent converts and targeting longtime, law-abiding residents and sweeping up citizens through racial profiling — or to focus on other issues, like the economy.
On the Republican side, it’s over whether to continue down the current path or pull back from excessive shows of force, the elimination of special migrant protections, and an all-encompassing approach.
For now, there isn’t consensus over any of this or even whether immigration is even an important or decisive issue for these voters. But both sides will still be spending the next few months looking at public opinion, primary voting, protests or popular backlash, and the campaign trail to get a sense of what approach might work.
What’s clear for now is that Trump’s 2024 coalition is in real peril — largely because of defecting Latino voters.
That’s why I decided to take a look at what the data and research we have at this moment suggests and try to lay out the nuances of how Republican-voting Latinos are feeling right now. Those perspectives and opinions matter. They may determine the durability of both the GOP’s 2024 edge and Democrats’ gradual erosion of support while also saying something larger about how these voters view themselves in the American political system.
Divisions are emerging between Republican Latinos and the rest of the GOP
Entering 2025, the new line of conventional wisdom about why Republican Latinos were swelling the ranks was two-fold: They were angry at the Biden-era Democratic Party’s management of the economy, and they were growing more tolerant of harsher immigration policy.
Polls, focus groups, and individual interviews with these voters all seemed to point in the same direction: a rightward shift among primarily working-class Latino voters, driven by a combination of economic anxiety and discontent with aspects of social liberalism that clashed with their more traditionalist views. What surveys suggested — and what the 2024 election confirmed — was that these voters trusted Trump to fix the economy, secure the border, and enact deportations on a mass scale. In many ways, their views were beginning to align more with those of white working-class voters, and they voted in 2024 accordingly.
Yet, just as this new conventional wisdom was beginning to settle, election results this year in New Jersey and Virginia suggested that the narrative about Latino voters — especially working-class ones with more conservative social views — had gone further than the voters themselves. Latinos shifted back to Democratic candidates, with the Democratic candidates in both states regaining much — but not all — of the ground among Latino voters that the party had lost in 2024.
Unsurprisingly, the conventional wisdom has quickly adjusted. Now, the narrative is that Trump and Republicans misinterpreted the support they’d won among Latinos in 2024, mistaking a vote against the status quo regarding prices and the border as a more fulsome endorsement of the entire MAGA agenda. Simply put, these voters wanted lower prices and a stronger economy, and, as my colleague Andrew Prokop has noted, Trump has signally failed to deliver on this fundamental promise.
The research and data we have available right now backs up this interpretation. A new analysis by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, for example, finds that Latino Republican voters in California are increasingly ambivalent about Trump’s presidency.
Analyzing statewide polling from the summer, the Initiative found that Latino Republicans are more likely than white or Asian GOP voters to oppose deporting longtime residents, more likely to support due process protections for potential deportees, and more skeptical of actions by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Indeed, according to the Initiative, when Latino Republicans are confronted with the way the Trump administration is handling raids, due process, and the question of birthright citizenship, they appear to be more persuadable than Republican voters in general.
The report’s authors suggest some recent enforcement actions are to blame. “Recent media depictions of ICE calvaries and gunmen entering family spaces, like MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, or picking up parents at school sites,” they wrote, “has felt like a step too far for some Republican voters.
But it’s not clear this is the primary motivation for these voters, even if they feel uneasy
That said, it still remains unclear just how much these changing views will translate to a change in voting patterns. Being unhappy with Trump’s stewardship is one thing; being unhappy enough with Trump’s stewardship to vote against the Republican Party, however, is something else. Other issues — such as the economy or social conservatism — could end up being more important to these voters, as was the case in 2024.
Polls conducted by the Latino firm BSP Research in September and October, for example, all show similar results in California and in battleground states of Republicans feeling uneasy about enforcement actions. But in the September poll, only 8 percent of respondents cited “protections for immigrants already here” as a top issue, and said economic concerns, homelessness and crime, and the border were more important.
Similarly, a national poll from October found that, while these voters were wary of mass deportation’s effect on their communities, they nevertheless still supported mass deportations and stricter border policies.
It all paints a pretty muddled picture of just how far Latino Republicans are willing to bend or change on their politics when confronted with Trump’s agenda.
“One in three Republican Latinos told us they believe that their community is safer because dangerous criminals have been deported,” Anais X. Lopez, a pollster and analyst at BSP Research, told me. “So, there are some Republican voters who are getting what they wanted.”
But, she emphasized that this trend still obscures the predominant issue in these voters’ minds: prices, affordability, and the economy. Last year, “they were saying, ‘You know what? If we’re going to vote for him, regardless of whether they agree with this immigration policy or not, if I’m going to vote for him, it’s because I’m struggling economically.’ Well, things haven’t gotten better in one sense, and they also haven’t gotten better in any other sense for them.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that Latino Republicans are going to be more sensitive to Trump’s immigration policy. They are. But there’s also no doubt in my mind that this is at best, a very, very distant second in motivating partisan voting behavior,” Mike Madrid, a California Republican analyst and former California GOP political director, told me about this tension in voters’ minds. “If the economy were good, no one would give a shit about immigration. You would not be seeing big changes in voting behavior. These voters are asking for the economy to be resolved, and if the economy were being resolved, there might still be variations in how these voters approve of enforcement, but it wouldn’t be changing their voting behavior.”
The looming, unresolved question about Latino Republicans
To Madrid and Lopez, this is the unresolved question facing American politics as it heads into another high-stakes midterm election. Is fear and frustration over mass deportation going to combine with economic dissatisfaction to create a larger and stronger swing against Republicans? And if Trump and the GOP do manage to make progress on inflation, affordability, and wage growth, would that give Trump and the administration more leeway to carry out its draconian agenda?
Lopez argues that, at this point, it might be too late for Republicans to reverse those negative attitudes. Fixing the economy wouldn’t necessarily reverse the sense of deception that some Trump-voting Latinos are feeling. Madrid, however, suggests there’s still persuasion possible there, which suggests to Democrats that they should still prioritize economic messaging.
“Yes, there is concern, there is fear, but overwhelmingly, we’re in an economic crisis that affects 100 percent of Latinos,” Madrid told me. “I don’t doubt that there’s a very strong salience for those that are closer to the immigrant experience. That’s true of almost every issue, but especially now, the overwhelming number of Latino voters are US born and growing further into the generational cycle that matters in the outcome of these results, and it doesn’t mean we’re not sensitive to it, but it also means we’re not lying awake at night, worried about ICE raids. We’re lying awake because we don’t have money for rent on Friday. What are we going to do?”