Here’s why growing numbers of US Hispanics voted for Trump, and helped him win

Andres Oppenheimer

One of the biggest reasons why Republican candidate Donald Trump won the Nov. 5 elections is that Latinos voted for him in much larger numbers than anticipated, despite the former president’s claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

According to exit polls, Trump increased his share of the Latino vote nationwide from 32 % in the 2020 elections to 45% in 2024. Like with other ethnic groups, most of Trump’s gains with Hispanic voters were among men without college education.

Even in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, where pollsters predicted Trump would lose tens of thousands of Puerto Rican voters after a comedian at a Trump rally said a week ago that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage,” Trump got 42% of the Latino vote, almost twice what he had received four years ago.

Why did so many Latinos vote for the candidate who insulted Hispanic immigrants on a daily basis? Here are three reasons that may help explain it:

First, the main concern among Hispanic voters was the economy, much more than democracy, abortion rights or foreign policy. About 85% of Latino voters said their top priority in this year’s elections was the economy, followed by health care (71%) and violent crime (62%,) according to a pre-election Pew Research Center poll.

Despite the recent recovery of the U.S. economy, which the International Monetary Fund says is the fastest-growing among rich nations, low unemployment and a record-setting stock market, many Latinos — like other Americans — are unhappy about high prices.

U.S. annual inflation has fallen to 2.4% in recent weeks, but the news came too late to change voters’ minds about their personal economy. And Democratic candidate Kamala Harris did not do enough to separate herself from President Joe Biden during her short-lived campaign.

Second, Trump did a much better job than Democrats in courting specific Hispanic groups, such as Cuban-Americans and Puerto Ricans in Florida.

Harris did not spend much time, nor resources, in courting these constituencies, perhaps because Democrats had already concluded that they would vote for Trump. But the fact is that Democratic presidential candidates have seen their Latino support dwindle from 67% in 2008 to 53% today, and the party has failed to make a major effort to reverse the trend.

Third, many Latinos did not react negatively to Trump’s almost daily insults against immigrants, in part because they live in pro-Trump communities and want to blend into them as much as possible.

“They tell themselves, ‘I’m going to show that I’m a good American by voting for Trump,” Ernesto Castañeda, head of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University in Washington D.C., told me.

As for Trump’s false claims that Latino immigrants are responsible for a wave of violent crimes in the country, “many Latino voters say, ‘He’s not talking about me; he’s talking about the others. I’m the good immigrant, he’s talking about the bad ones,’” Castañeda said.

In fact, several studies have shown that Latino immigrants on average commit fewer violent crimes than U.S.-born Americans. As for Trump’s equally misleading claims that undocumented immigrants are stealing jobs from Latinos, economists say they have no basis: U.S. Chamber of Commerce statistics show that there is a huge shortage of workers in the hospitality, construction and other industries where immigrants tend to do jobs that American workers don’t want to do.

To be sure, there are other explanations as to why Trump has increased his share of Latino voters. Some experts suggest that Latino voters deep down admire “strong men,” or autocrats, despite the fact that many of them moved to the United States to escape from dictatorships.

Some Latino voters may also have bought Trump’s ridiculous claim that Democrats are “communists,” or that a Democratic president would impose “woke” issues such as encouraging gender changes among children in schools.

But the fact is that Trump has made substantial gains among Latino voters, who no longer vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. Pollsters were right in that prediction, and the Democrats will have to do some serious thinking about how to reverse the trend going forward.