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The Latino vote encompasses tens of millions of Americans who have a broad range of backgrounds and ideologies; the fact that it is not a monolith has become something of a political cliche. ButDonald Trump unmistakably made huge progress among the entire demographic in 2024. He won an estimated 48 percent of the Latino vote, according toPew Research Center, up from 36 percent in 2020 and 28 percent in 2016. The cities and states that shifted most to the right in 2024 were those with large numbers of Latino voters, many of whom were deeply dissatisfied with the inflation that skyrocketed during Joe Biden’s presidency. Many also warmed to Trump’s hard line on immigration, in the aftermath of a historic border surge. And while some of these voters simply wanted a change in leadership, others embraced the MAGA movement in a way that sparked fear among Democrats that a key part of the electorate had fundamentally shifted.

Yet more than a year into Trump’s second term, his standing looks far less impressive. Multiple polls show that Trump’s approval rating among Latinoshas sunk precipitously amid discontent over his stewardship of the economy and harsh deportation tactics. And elections over the last year haveoffered encouraging signs for Democrats that they may be repairing some of the damage in heavily Latino areas.

Jack Herrera is a freelance reporter who frequently writes about immigrant communities and theSouthern border. Ispoke with him after the 2024 election about the new Trump voters he had encountered, and I caught up with him again recently to get his thoughts on where those voters, and Latino voters more generally, stand now.

The last time I spoke with you, we discussed whether Latino voters’ shift to Trump represented a one-time change or something more seismic. Here’s part of what you said: “I do think that this is a political realignment by and large. My only caution is that it’s not as fundamental a shift as it looks like in the results, because if you take away inflation, I don’t think you see as big a shift this year as we saw.” 

A year and change into Trump’s term, inflation has slowed, but people are still pissed off about prices. And polling indicates Latino voters are basically where they were with Biden: largely unhappy about the economy, which overshadows everything else. Does that line up with what you have seen and heard on the ground?
Yes, and I’ll add two bits of context. The first is that I think there is a significant percentage of the Latino electorate that will be mercenary in the next few years. If real wages don’t go up, they’ll punish the incumbent party. You can run against the incumbent’s economic record if the economy hasn’t improved — that’s a really workable strategy. Democrats have done that successfully in the special elections we’ve seen so far. The note of caution I’ll add is that in off-cycle elections — special elections especially, but also midterms — the percentage of Latinos who show up is really small. There are results that look really good for Democrats in places likeNew Jerseyor inTarrant County, Texas, but the sample size we’re talking about here is so small that I’d caution Democrats who want to see Latinos come back to Democrats and are like,okay, we’ve already won the fight.

Even if Democrats do well among Latinos in the midterms, you’re saying that there’s no more taking anything for granted. 
Yeah. The Latino Democratic voter was never as dependable as Democrats portrayed. This idea that there would be a 70 percent and maybe higher percentage of Latino voters who would always vote Democrat — a lot of that was wishful thinking. The Latino population has beengrowing so much faster than the non-Latino population, and it was just so tempting, if you’re somebody who wants Democrats to win, to think:These people vote mostly for Democrats and that population’s exploding. Democrat perma-victory! 

But they have been much more of a swing voting population than African-Americans, for instance. And if you look at elections over a longer duration, like 40, 50 years, it’s 60-40 elections, 55-45 elections, and then you had some really big ones after 2008 in favor of Democrats.

Right, George W. Bush did very well with Latino voters.
What does it mean to be a Democrat, ideologically? I think Latino voters have voted on the economy for a long time, and on a more sophisticated level than people give them credit for. One person I think of a lot — her name is Vicenta Lira, and she works as a school janitor in a small meat-packing town called Denison, in Western Iowa. And she said — I’m paraphrasing — that Democrats talk so beautifully.If Democrats did the stuff they talk about in their speeches — the way they talk about the economy and working-class people and immigrants — if they did that stuff, I’d be a Democrat. But they just don’t do that stuff when they’re in power. I don’t see things change. When it comes to the economy, she’s like, “I felt richer in 2019 than I felt in the last few years. So even though Democrats say they care all about these working-class people, I just don’t see the results of that.”

I think it’s an earned level of suspicion. People aren’t voting based on what the party bills as its own ideology. They don’t go online, look at the platform and say “Okay, I agree with that.” They actually look at the deliverables. What has this party achieved for me when it’s in office?

In the runup to 2024, you spoke with a lot of people who had switched to supporting Trump. Have you gone back to many of those people since to see what they think now? 
I have. It isn’t a huge number of people, but among those I’ve talked to, there isn’t anyone who’s like, “Oh, I feel totally betrayed. I’m switching my vote to Democrats in next election.” But there has also been a notable lack of people saying, “I’m super happy with how things are built. I don’t think I’ve talked to anybody yet who’s like, “Yeah, he’s doing a fantastic job. 10 out of 10s across the board.” A telling response I get a lot is “I’m not paying that much attention to what Trump’s doing. The next presidential election is not for four years.” For a lot of the chattering classes, the idea that you’re not constantly reading headlines about what Trump’s up to feels crazy. But that’s just always been the case. I’m sure more of that news is filtering down to a sort of less news-interested population than usual — I’m sure people are reading more headlines or seeing more videos or just consuming more news about Trump than they were about Biden. But still, for working-class people, somebody who’s working — a lot of people are really working multiple jobs, working 12 hour days — there’s just not a lot of time to go catch up on or listen to a podcast.

So that’s one element to that answer. The other element is something that political scientists observe, which is that people tend to affirm the decisions they’ve already made. If you voted for Trump, you’re going to have a bias towards affirming that decision, affirming your past wisdom. SoI think it’s kind of telling that the people I’ve talked to don’t have strong feelings one way or the other. I think if Trump had done great with this population, if people felt like their vote was paying off, I would’ve heard a lot more enthusiasm.

I follow a lot of right-wing Latino influencers on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, all that. It’s really curious to me how often they’re on the defensive. I saw one afterAlex Pretti was shot. Myra Flores, a right-wing influencer who’s running for office again for Congress in South Texas, was posting photos of Laken Riley, who was killed by an undocumented immigrant saying, “Well, she was also a nurse. How come Democrats don’t care about her?”

That’s not a “we’re winning” strategy. That’s running defense. Prominent Latino conservatives who have a big audience are being flacks for the party right now, and that in itself is a sort of diagnosis. Their messaging is often defensive rather than victorious or excited.

That’s a good segue into immigration. The way the Trump administration has carried out deportations hasnot been popular at all among Latinos. Does that reaction surprise you? Because I thought Trump was pretty clear on this: he said he would carry out the biggest deportation operation history. So I’m surprised when voters are surprised about that. 
The degree to which this is a sea change even from Trump One really needs to be underlined. The Latino Trump voters I talked to didn’t take the mass deportation threat that seriously or think it would impact their neighborhood, and I think that was for good reason. I think it was actually a sophisticated mindset, because over the course of different administrations — Clinton to Bush, Bush to Obama, Obama to Trump — for a lot of that time, you’d have the Republicans running on more deportations, and Democrats running on welcoming immigrants. But if you looked at the level of deportations and ICE activity, it was a constant line. If I showed you that chart and you’d never heard which administration was in power, I don’t think you’d be able to tell which was the Republican administration. I’ll make the point I always have to make, that immigration is not a top five issue for Latinos in past elections. They’re not single-issue voters on this at all. And among the population who does care about immigrant rights, I think the sophisticated and realistic mindset was there’s not a huge difference between administrations.

Obviously the nature of immigration enforcement has changed dramatically. Interestingly, deportation numbers aren’t hugely up compared to Obama, but the number of arrests and the aggression of the raids really is a change.

It’s who’s getting deported that’s different. There are many more deportationscoming from the interior of the country, not the border. 
And the nature of them —armed SWAT force raids on apartment buildings — are really different. And so I think that will show up in how people vote, because they’ll be like, okay, Democrats genuinely do have a different policy than Republicans when it comes to immigration Maybe they’ll still deport people, ICE will still be funded, et cetera, et cetera. But there probably won’t be people repelling from a helicopter smashing into an apartment building. That probably won’t happen under a Democratic president.

So Democrats could ride that backlash to Trump, but they haven’t really done anything to reestablish trust with the voters they lost. Not to make you play campaign strategist, but how could they do that? Is it just a matter of drilling down on the economy more? And is there anyone who you think has done particularly well at this lately? 
Maybe this is too reflective of my own politics, but moving beyond affordability — even that word is so consultant class-coded. I think it’s about having a policy that goes beyond “let’s bring prices down” to “we have a cost of living crisis and we need to deal with it as a crisis.” That’s something Mamdani did really well among Latinos. If you look at the trend lines over the course of his long campaign, the primary versus the general election, his vote among the Latino population increased, increased, increased.

And that’s how Trump did so well in 2024. He wasn’t just saying “ oh, we’re going to chase some policies around to make things more affordable”. It was like “Housing crisis? We’re going to fix that. And you know how we’re going to do it— mass deportation.” I think that was a fanciful message, but it wasn’t just fixing things around the edges. For all his faults, he’s a guy who, as one voter I talked to put it, grabs the wheel. There’s at least the feeling of big change when he’s in office in a way that I don’t think people feel with Democrats.

On a different note, there’s been a lot of predictable right-wing backlash around Bad Bunny‘s Super Bowl performance, with people resenting, or pretending to resent, him doing the whole show in Spanish, among other things. It’s grist for the culture-war mill, but is this the kind of thing that people you report on are even paying attention to?
I think people thought it was awesome across the board. Here’s my take on the Bad Bunny Super Bowl: The NFL is not a particularly left-wing institution. The league definitely doesn’t want to piss Trump off. So why did they pick Bad Bunny? They knew that was going to cause a backlash in the administration. I think the NFL is less afraid of pissing off Trump than they’re afraid of losing Latino consumers.

The reason the NFL has to take Latinos seriously is the same reason the U.S. has to take China seriously, or the country has to take Texas seriously: U.S.-based Latino consumers are an economic superpower. As a consumer class, Latinos are an economy larger than Texas, larger than New York. If you take U.S. Latinos alone, they’re something like the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world, and it’s a population that’s also growing.

The NFL needs this market if they’re going to be viable this century. So they need Bad Bunny a lot more than Bad Bunny needs them. They really need to expand that audience, and this is a really canny way of doing it. And when you see all this stuff with Kristi Noem saying, “We’re going to have ICE at the Super Bowl,” it really reveals the fact that people in the administration, like JD Vance and Steven Miller, are uncomfortable with the fact that the Latino population has grown so much in influence, at the supposed cost of what JD Vance callsHeritage Americans. And ICE is their armed response. That’s the armed wing of their response to this demographic shift of the growing influence of Latinos. But you saw at the Super Bowl that ICE raids are a really facile attempt to stop this massive demographic shift. It’s already well underway, and it’s basically unstoppable.

And yet, as we’ve discussed, Latino voters have been drifting Republicans’ way. So is it really in the GOP’s interest to alienate those voters?
That speaks to the convulsions in the party. Are they trying to be a MAGA coalition or are they trying to be a sort of reactionary white nationalist party?

Usually the second one seems to win out.
It does seem like those are the people who have their hands on the wheel in this administration.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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