Guest Post::What happened to the Hispanic vote?

Hispanic voters moved toward Trump in 2024.

Herb Rothschild says Democrats need to return to their roots as the party of working people.

ProPublica: Texas Border Counties, 2016

ProPublica: Texas Border Counties, 2024

Guest Post author Herbert Rothschild looks at the Hispanic vote in Texas for some direction. Herb Rothschild is a retired professor of English. During his working years he was a political activist on behalf of world peace and civil rights for Black Americans. He is still doing that work, advocating for peace and justice. He writes a weekly column for Ashland.news, an on-line newspaper he helped to found. A longer version of this post appeared there a week ago.

Rothschild

Guest Post by Herbert Rothschild

In 2015, when I was publishing Relocations in the Daily Tidings, I predicted that Texas would turn Blue by the 2024 election. My prediction was wrong. 

Not about the demographic changes that I thought would make the difference. The projection upon which I relied was rather accurate. By 2024 the racial/ethnic makeup in Texas was Anglos (non-Hispanic whites) 37%, Hispanics 40%, Blacks 12%, Asians 6% and Others 5%. The false assumption I made was that Hispanics would continue voting Democratic by the large margins historically they had voted.

In the 2016 election, the historic trend held. Clinton got 61% of the Hispanic vote in Texas to Trump’s 34%. By 2020 the trend had begun to change: Biden 58%, Trump 41%. The reversal was complete by 2024: Trump 55%, Harris 45%. (Note: these data are approximate, based on exit polls and surveys, but they tell the story.)

Nationally, Democrats did modestly better than they did in Texas, but the same trend was evident. In 2016, Clinton got 66% percent of the Hispanic vote to Trump’s 28%. In 2020, it was Biden 61%, Trump 36%, and in 2024 it was Harris 51%, Trump 48%.

When I wrote the column in 2015. I thought that the relative youth of Hispanics in Texas compared to a rapidly aging Anglo population boded well for Democrats. Unfortunately for Democrats, the biggest erosion of loyalty over the last three election cycles has been among younger Hispanic voters in Texas (especially males), so unless Democrats can figure out a way to reverse the trend, it will accelerate.

Well, what went wrong? 

Because most Hispanic Americans were poor at home and are mostly still making their way in the U.S., the political party that seemed to favor working people won their loyalty. For a long time that was the Democratic Party. The single best explanation for the reversal I’ve been focusing on is that it’s a consequence of the more general perception that the Democratic Party abandoned its championship of working people. 

That perception was well-founded. The abandonment began in 1977 and ended only with Biden, who, along with influential members of Congress like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, tried his best to relocate the party in the FDR-Truman-Johnson tradition. 

Juan Proaño, CEO of LULAC, the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization for Hispanic-Americans, said right after the 2024 election that Trump’s messaging on the economy resonated with Latinos. “I think it’s important to say that Latinos [had] a significant impact in deciding who the next president was going to be and reelected Donald Trump. (Latino) men certainly responded to the populist message of the president and focused primarily on economic issues, inflation, wages and even support of immigration reform.”

That immigration wasn’t a losing policy issue for Trump among Hispanic voters in Texas might seem, on its face, hard to believe. True, he said awful things about people crossing the border from Mexico. But many saw the newcomers as competitive for unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. They also worried about drug violence. Some of the biggest voting shifts occurred in counties in the Rio Grande Valley.

Another factor to note was Trump’s projection of himself as a strong leader, helped by the contrast with a doddering incumbent. That image played well with Hispanic men generally and young Hispanic men especially. The gender gap among Hispanic voters was as pronounced as it was in the general electorate.

The good news for Democrats is that sentiment has begun to turn back. Global Strategy Group conducted an online and text-to-web bilingual survey of 800 nationwide Hispanic/Latino registered voters between August 26 and September 4, 2025. Comparison with results from the surveys it conducted between February 20-27 and May 8-18, 2025 showed that Hispanic voters are defecting from Trump across all demographics. 

Fifty-nine percent of Hispanic voters have an unfavorable view of President Trump, while only 39% approve. In February, 55% of Hispanic voters had an unfavorable view of Trump, while 43% viewed him as favorable. The largest defection has been by Hispanic voters between 18-29. The study showed that they viewed Trump unfavorably by 34 points in September, compared to 11 points in February. These reversals are mainly because of disappointed economic expectations. 

While the Democratic Party needs to implement some messaging strategies specific to Hispanic voters, it must understand that this challenge is part of its larger challenge to break decisively with the neo-liberalism of the Clintons and Obama and once again champion economic equity instead of just funding the safety net. It must tax the rich at the pre-Reagan levels, correct the imbalance between military and social spending, raise the federal minimum wage to $15, adopt universal public health coverage, and make college affordable again. 

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