If there is one thing no one can deny about Donald Trump it is that he is a lucky man. The president has beaten the odds more than once. Notably, when he left the presidency in January 2021 after the shameful assault on the Capitol, his political career seemed to have hit rock bottom. But not only was he acquitted in a second impeachment trial, and spared from an AR-15 rifle round that came within millimeters of blowing off his head (to name just two examples of his extreme luck); he also easily defeated Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the presidential election.

But if 2024 was his annus mirabilis, everything indicates that 2026 will be his annus horribilis. Today Trump’s approval rating stands at just 32%, while disapproval of his administration sits at 66% — the worst figures of his political career. And more importantly: Latino voters, who helped seal his victory in 2024, have turned their backs on him and are likely to be the decisive factor in the Republican defeat in the midterm elections on November 3.

It’s natural for many to ask whether Trump’s luck has run out. But that is only half the story. A more useful question is why. Trump treated his promises to Latino voters as an electoral transaction. But Latinos don’t experience politics from the White House; they experience the effects of bad policies and the president’s mistakes firsthand, from the immigration raids to the cost of embarking on a war with Iran. That is why a punishment vote weighs more than a mere change of mood: it is a response to a deceptive electoral offer. And it also leaves an open question for Democrats, who could win that vote without having worked for it.

In 2016 Trump won 28% of the Latino vote, compared with 66% for Hillary Clinton. Eight years later he got 48%. That 20-point gain is explained by two promises. The first was law and order. Trump stoked fear of immigrants (those crossing the southern border were “poisoning the blood of our country,” he proclaimed), but he assured voters that ICE would go after only those with criminal records and not the “good people,” those with their papers in order who pay taxes. The second, perhaps the more important, was economic. Although the country had recovered from the pandemic, voters longed for the prices of his first term, and Trump did not miss the opportunity: “When I win, I will lower prices immediately, from day one.” Most voters, including nearly half of Latino voters, took the bait.

The realities of his second presidency have been the perverse opposite of those promises. The cost of living has been high for a long time. Just go to the supermarket, open an electricity bill, or stop at a gas station to feel it as a hit to the pocket and a pang in the gut. Despite Trump’s claims in every speech that the economy has never been better, the country is barely growing and is dangerously close to a recession, while the Federal Reserve has just raised interest rates for the first time since 2023 to prevent rising prices from turning into stagflation.

To summarize the changes in immigration policy, it is best to illustrate them with a handful of quick images: crops rotting in Oregon, classrooms with dozens of empty desks in border communities, masked agents terrorizing parents, children, uncles and grandparents everywhere; human beings kept in cages like animals and others who vanish and are held incommunicado until they are deported, sometimes to countries they have never even been to before; more people gunned down in their cars or on the street, churches closed, festivals canceled, many people confined to their homes as during the pandemic.

The common denominator of all those by-now-routine images is the terror inspired by ICE raids. The declared pretext is to control migration and clean the country of undesirables, but the real objective is to terrorize. That is Trump’s great achievement: having established across the country an ecology of fear through an army of hooded agents that keeps millions of immigrants and their communities in check.

Although polls show immigration ranks below economic concerns, the combination of both has shifted preference toward rejection. Today, 67% of Latinos disapprove of Trump, 65% disapprove of ICE and 72% want substantial changes to immigration policy.

A reliable indicator that Trump and his policies are already a burden is the recent campaign announcement by Representative María Elvira Salazar, who accuses the president of having gone too far in his targeting of immigrants. Salazar has represented a predominantly Hispanic, middle-class Miami district since 2021, one that also voted for Trump in 2024. “The same Hispanics who brought you to the White House feel betrayed today,” she told him.

The Latino shift has put Salazar’s reelection at risk and threatens to derail the Republican strategy of redistricting. Experts have read her announcement as a desperate attempt to distance herself from a president whose anti-immigrant policies she supported with her votes, and her Democratic challenger, Eliott Rodriguez, has not missed the chance to remind voters of that. But the most important point has been underplayed: a prominent Republican is campaigning against her own president to warn that the raids do not distinguish between migrants with legal papers and those without, and that Republicans need Latinos to keep winning elections.

The administration’s response was swift. Salazar is pushing, together with Democratic Representative from Texas Verónica Escobar, the Dignity Act, an immigration reform that would grant a renewable legal status to millions of immigrants and protection to so-called “dreamers.” It is not an amnesty, but the MAGA government treats it as one. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) replied to the congresswoman’s announcement with a blunt statement: “Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Mullin, THERE WILL BE NO amnesty for illegals. Not now, not ever. DHS is focused on carrying out the largest mass deportation in HISTORY [capitalization in the original].” Trump, for his part, moved from the predictable show of disdain (“She only won because of me”) to undercutting her days later (“We need a NEW Republican to replace Salazar”).

Salazar’s standoff with Trump is not an isolated case. Every day brings more evidence of a rift within Republican ranks between those who continue to support the president at all costs and those who seek to distance themselves, whether because they are personally affected like Salazar or because they genuinely want an end to the cruelty and ongoing violations of the human rights of hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

Latino civil society and the private sector are also mobilizing, and examples are popping up everywhere with a month to go before the elections. On September 29 a coalition of 270 Latino organizations and community, religious and business leaders — Democrats, Republicans, and independents — demanded that the White House and Congress enact immigration reform and protection for “dreamers” and TPS recipients. It is a sign that opposition to Trump transcends partisan politics. It also reflects the sentiment of communities that largely want to secure the border, but not at this cost.

The midterms are one month away; the countdown has begun. If trends continue as they have, Latino voters will be the spearhead of the Democrats’ reconquest of Congress. Trump has given them plenty of reasons to feel betrayed. Have the Democrats offered voters good reasons to turn a punishment vote against Trump and the Republicans into loyalty to their party? The answer is likely yes, but in a situational and insufficient way.

A few weeks ago the pollster Mike Madrid told EL PAÍS that Latinos, for historical, racial and cultural reasons, defy binary political categories in the United States. At the same time, he argued that the very diverse Latino experience offers the possibility of building a bridge to overcome the racial and political antagonisms that underlie American society. That bridge is cultural, but also economic, because Latinos are today the most dynamic ethnic group and aspire to the same things other immigrant groups in U.S. history have sought: family, education, employment and homeownership — that is, prosperity and a better future for their children.

Therein lies the trap for the Democrats. If they mistake a punishment vote for loyalty, they will commit the same error Trump is about to pay for: assuming that an electorate that does not fit binary categories can be taken for granted.

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