It Shouldn’t Have Been A Surprise That Trump Won Over Key Latino Voters

Democrats are learning the hard way that demographics are not destiny.

One of the most shocking defeats for Kamala Harris in last week’s election was her dismal performance among Latino voters. The CNN exit poll had her barely eking out a majority of 52% among Hispanics, against President-elect Donald Trump’s 48%. Worse, she lost Latino men as a demographic, with 55% backing Trump.

Those numbers may overstate the case; immediate exit polls are somewhat notoriously unreliable. BSP Research — a firm founded by Matt Barreto and Gary Segura, two of the most prominent pollsters specializing in the Hispanic electorate — issued results this week from an alternate exit survey of voters conducted in both English and Spanish, finding that Harris carried the Latino vote 62%-48% — including a narrow majority of Hispanic men. That’s still a drop from Biden’s 2020 numbers, though not as catastrophic as exit polling seemed to indicate.

But regardless of the margin, the inroads Trump made highlighted what has long been one of the Democrats’ most glaring weaknesses. The party had come to take Latino supermajority support for granted, even as polling data showed Trump’s influence growing.

The most obvious explanation for the shift is that the most prominent feature of Democratic President Joe Biden’s economy has been high inflation, eating away at purchasing power.

“We saw huge warning signs with Hispanic men, but even Hispanic women, where the nightmare phrase we kept hearing all over the country was: ‘Yeah, I don’t really like Donald Trump, and he says mean things about Latinos that I don’t like, but we were doing better economically when he was president, so I would be OK voting for him again,’” said Democratic-aligned pollster Fernand Amandi.