Democratic Schadenfreude and the Latino Vote
After close to half of Latino voters chose Donald Trump in 2024, Democrats reacted like someone catching their grandpa giving money to a chatbot. “A lot of folks are asking on the Democratic side, ‘Why would they do this to themselves?’ ” the CNN anchor Jim Acosta said. He asked whether Latinos had “just had the wool pulled over their eyes.” Online, the reaction got ugly. Some posters (who claimed to be Kamala Harris voters) shared the tip-line number for ICE, encouraging their followers to call and report undocumented family members of Latinos who had voted for Trump. Those posts represented an angry fringe; however, even among levelheaded Democrats, I heard some species of vindictiveness. They understood why Latinos, buffeted by years of inflation and rising housing costs, had rejected Joe Biden. But they felt these voters would—and should—pay for supporting Trump.
For anyone who felt that way in 2024, reading polling conducted during the past year must’ve been a deeply gratifying experience. As ICE agents laid siege to Minneapolis and gas prices shot up after bombs began falling on Iran, numerous surveys showed Trump hemorrhaging support among Latino voters. A recent NBC News poll found that sixty-four per cent of Latinos disapproved of the job Trump was doing. Equis, a polling firm established to study Latino communities, has found that a third of all Latinos who supported the President in 2024 now feel “disappointed,” or outright regret their vote. The leading reason for this disappointment, according to Equis, was “Trump’s broken promises and lies.”
Tony Pérez is an evangelical pastor in Reading, Pennsylvania, a city whose population is about seventy per cent Latino. He’s one of the many residents whose vote helped Trump win the swing state in 2024. A few weeks before that year’s election, Pérez, a warm and goateed man in his early sixties, welcomed me into a church he founded in town. As we walked through the nave, he pointed up at the national flags he had hung along the walls and rafters to represent the immigrants in his congregation. I saw the colors of Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Chile, Guatemala, Colombia, Puerto Rico, and more. Trump was popular among the congregants, Pérez said, mainly because of their belief that he could turn around the economy. People around town had felt richer in 2019 than they ever did under Biden. But for the pastor there was also a moral dimension to supporting Trump: Pérez crusades against gender-affirming care for minors, and he considers the President an ally in that fight.
I caught up with Pérez by phone recently. He told me that, during the past two years, he’s seen pain and fear among the immigrants in his pews as Trump expands mass deportation. “I think most Hispanics here think there needs to be some kind of pathway for people. The rhetoric comes across as a little harsh, and some people are disappointed by that. I am disappointed by that,” Pérez said. After ICE showed up at a bodega in Reading, Pérez got a call from one of his congregants who lived a town over. The man told him that he no longer wanted to risk the drive to church. “It breaks my heart,” Pérez said. Even for those unafraid of ICE, a long drive to church has grown more unpleasant because of high gas prices. “People did feel that he would handle the economy better,” he said.
As we talked, Pérez imagined what he’d do if he walked into a polling booth today and looked down at a ballot with Trump and Harris on it. He wouldn’t hesitate: he’d vote for Trump again. I asked Pérez to think about all the Trump voters he knew who told him that they were anxious or disappointed. Would they make the same decision? “If Kamala and Trump ran again, most of these people would vote for Trump again, in spite of the immigration thing,” he said. “You hold your nose and do it, because you have to.”
Surveys back up what Pérez is saying about his views and those of his congregation. In Equis’s polling, just eleven per cent of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 said that they would now support a Democrat. That’s hardly a sea change. “We’ve seen pretty tepid favorability ratings for the Democratic Party,” María Ísabel Di Franco Quiñonez, a senior research director for Equis, said. The poll numbers are “primarily driven by rejection of the Trump Administration, not enthusiasm about the Democratic Party or the Democratic brand.” In them, you don’t see a group of prodigal Latinos making their way back to Democrats; instead, you see a group of voters wandering into a political wilderness. “They’re de-aligning, not realigning—it’s, like, we can be against both of you,” Mike Madrid, a former Republican campaign manager and now an anti-Trump conservative strategist, told me.
In Madrid’s eyes, both major parties, by trying to organize and mobilize Latinos as an ethnic group, neglect the degree to which class determines how they vote. Communities as distinct as Mexicans and Peruvians are overrepresented in blue-collar professions compared with non-Latino Americans. Latinos are also, on average, much younger than the general population, as a result of collapsing birth rates among white Americans. This puts many into the under-forty generation who are trying to buy their first house and find some financial stability. Those voters had a brutal four years under Biden. Even as blue-collar wages increased, housing prices in most parts of the country exploded, keeping many Latinos who had been saving up locked out of the market.
When I talked with Pérez this month, he blamed Democrats for a more than fifty-per-cent increase in housing prices in Pennsylvania over the past six years. (Housing costs have, of course, increased all over the country. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis show that, between 2020 and 2024, in deep-red South Carolina, they were up sixty-five per cent; in Tennessee, they were up sixty-six per cent.) Now Pérez is seeing Democrats, such as Representative Chrissy Houlahan, whose U.S. House district includes Reading, unveil “affordability” messaging. He isn’t buying it. “I heard this quote, ‘It’s like an arsonist becoming a fireman,’ ” he said. “They would love to run on affordability, but when gas was four bucks and Biden was in office, you didn’t hear them complain.”
At the same time, Latinos’ dismay with Trump is profound enough that it has stunned pollsters. In 2025, Di Franco Quiñonez, the senior research director at Equis, and a colleague personally interviewed Latino Trump supporters. They returned to talk with the interviewees multiple times throughout the year as part of an ongoing ethnographic study that Equis called Beyond the Ballot.
“We really wanted to understand what their journey of the first year of the Administration would look like,” Di Franco Quiñonez said. “I think it would be difficult for any of us to have predicted the level of disappointment and the level of rejection of the Administration that we have heard.”
One of the participants, a Cornell grad whom Equis called Juan, worked as a government contractor in Phoenix, Arizona. Juan voted for Biden in 2020 before defecting to Trump in 2024. He told Di Franco Quiñonez and her team that, though he identified with Democrats’ message of inclusion, in particular for immigrants, he found Biden’s economy untenable. He saw Trump as a leader who would take control and bring down costs. After the attempted assassination of Trump in July, 2024, “he was putting his fists up, like, ‘Let’s fight, let’s fight, I have more fight in me,’ ” Juan told the Equis team. “I was, like, I have to commend this man for the amount of vigor and strength.”
In December of 2025, Equis interviewed Juan again. “I got rate hikes on my apartment utility bills—electricity bill, water bill,” he said. He saw health-insurance premiums go up when the Affordable Care Act got cut back. Juan’s mother had lived without insurance before Obamacare, and Juan saw those days returning. “The sickest people who need insurance, their rates are for sure going to go up very high,” he said. Juan said that he was leaning toward supporting Democrats in the midterms, but he hadn’t made up his mind. “Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are very unwilling to support certain candidates within their own party who aren’t perfect,” he said.
During Equis’s interviews with voters, one conversation that stayed with Di Franco Quiñonez was with Lorena, a woman in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Lorena is a Mexican immigrant, with multiple undocumented family members, and yet she told Di Franco Quiñonez that she supported Trump specifically because of his immigration policy. Lorena’s husband was undocumented when the two got married, and to get legal status, he was forced to leave the country for ten years. After all their sacrifice, Lorena told Di Franco Quiñonez and her colleagues that she was furious at what she perceived to be the Biden Administration’s permissiveness toward undocumented immigrants. (Biden allowed more than five hundred thousand vetted new arrivals from certain countries to enter on humanitarian parole.)
Di Franco Quiñonez’s team went on to interview Lorena five times in the second half of 2025. In those later conversations, “the distress was visible,” Di Franco Quiñonez said. Lorena told them about panic in Colorado Springs, as police and ICE activity increased and several of her neighbors got deported. She’d expected ICE to go after criminals and recent arrivals, not her neighbors and loved ones. Yet that December, when one of Di Franco Quiñonez’s colleagues asked Lorena whom she’d vote for, she said that she didn’t trust either party. “Honestly, I don’t know if I’m going to end up going to vote,” she said.
“Trump was handed this historic opportunity to remake the Latino electorate and has squandered it at every turn,” Carlos Odio, a co-founder of Equis, told me. In 2024, Trump exploited many Latinos’ sense that they had been cut in line. Odio used Biden’s sending funding to Ukraine and Israel as an example. “There was a feeling of ‘other people are being prioritized ahead of me,’ ” Odio said. Then Trump took office and spent billions on dubious foreign adventures in Venezuela, the Caribbean, and Iran. “He’s acting like a man with a political death wish,” Odio said.
“The challenge for Democrats,” Odio continued, “is the Biden years just happened yesterday.” He cautioned that, though the party is “looking better now by comparison, there still is a lot of trust to rebuild.” Odio also warned that Democrats have to abandon any sense of superiority to Latinos who voted for Trump. “It is about welcoming back defectors and not holding people’s vote against them as a moral failing,” he said.
Chuck Rocha, a campaign strategist for multiple Democratic campaigns, said that he’s told his clients to drop the “abstract talk” about affordability and get specific. “I’ve been having my candidates talk about the actual effects on individuals,” Rocha said. He’s run ads featuring voters describing their struggles, in which the candidate only appears at the end. “The key is it’s not the politician; it’s a fucking person telling the story.”
Based on all he’s seen, Rocha is confident that Democrats across the country have a real advantage with Latinos this November. “I can tell you that now, without a shadow of a doubt,” he said. “I’m working on too many races. Every Latino race in America we’re involved in, the numbers are lining up.” That makes him more nervous about 2028. “What scares me to death is that we’re going to do well with these Latino voters in the midterm, and then think we’ve got it all figured out for the Presidential year,” Rocha said. “It is just a whole different electorate.” Democrats still have plenty of time to squander their advantage. ♦