Donald Trump gains support among Latino voters despite xenophobic rhetoric

David Mendez is part of a growing group of Latino voters who support Donald Trump, a candidate who continues to appeal to many Hispanics despite his tough rhetoric on immigration. “If we don’t fight now, this country will be communist in 30 years,” says Mendez, 53, a native of Mexico City now living in Las Vegas, Nevada. He began his career as a casino waiter, eventually working his way up to dealing blackjack, and later becoming a supervisor, a position he held for 18 years. “During this time, I’ve watched the country decay; moral values have been lost,” he says in a phone interview. Mendez cast his vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but since 2012, he has been voting Republican, hoping to stop what he sees as the nation’s rapid decline. In Trump, he found a blend of “new blood and fresh ideas.”

“Since 2016, I have lost many friends because of my support for Trump, including my best friend, who stopped talking to me,” says Mendez, who is now dedicated to financial training. “The Democrats sell us the idea that we should all be equal, but that makes us lazy. For the economy to work, there always has to be someone who has more. That is how we grow,” he says. Mendez admits that his favorite candidate “speaks impulsively without thinking” but he does not take it personally when Trump calls Mexicans rapists or criminals. He also does not believe the Republican will go through with his promise to carry out the largest mass deportation effort in American history. “It is impossible because there are too many people, but I agree that the criminals and terrorists who have arrived should be expelled,” he adds.

In September 2020, Mendez had the chance to see his idol up close during a meeting between Trump and Latino leaders in Nevada, a key battleground state with 410,000 registered Latino voters. During the event, Mendez asked the then-president to grant legal status to Dreamers — the undocumented young people who arrived in the U.S. as children. “You will be pleasantly surprised,” Trump responded. But nothing changed, and the Dreamers are still waiting for their status to be regularized.

This week, Trump held a similar event in Florida, similar to the one Mendez attended a few years ago. It was a roundtable in Doral, a city near Miami where more than 80% of the population is Latino, with 35% born in Venezuela. The former president adjusted his schedule to meet with Latino leaders, even skipping a speech in Georgia, a crucial swing state, at the National Rifle Association convention. A few years ago, it would be unthinkable for a Republican candidate to make such a move. However, Trump has prioritized a meeting aimed at winning over the 36 million Latino voters eligible to vote in November.

This was Trump’s second event with Latinos in less than a week. “The polls are looking great, and maybe even more importantly, early voting numbers are incredible in states like North Carolina,” Trump said Tuesday morning.

Kamala Harris continues to be the top choice among Hispanic voters, with 56% supporting the Democratic candidate, according to a poll conducted earlier this month by Siena College and The New York Times. This figure aligns with a 40-year trend of Hispanics consistently leaning toward the Democratic Party. Surprisingly, Trump has maintained a solid 37% to 40% support among this crucial voting bloc since August. This is the highest level of Latino support he has received in his past three presidential campaigns. By comparison, in 2016, he secured just 28% of the Latino vote.

Analysts are grappling with how a candidate like Trump, known for his divisive rhetoric, has managed to maintain significant support among Latinos — a demographic that, by the 2020 elections, had become the largest minority in the U.S., surpassing African Americans, representing 11% of registered voters. This election cycle is also seeing a surge in new Latino voters, with an estimated one in four Hispanics expected to vote for the first time on November 5.

If Trump secures 37% of the Hispanic vote, he will tie Ronald Reagan’s record from 1984. The Republican who received the highest percentage of Latino support is George W. Bush, who garnered between 40% and 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004. The discrepancy in Bush’s numbers is attributed to an alleged overrepresentation of Cuban voters from Miami-Dade, the most conservative Hispanic community in the U.S.

Among Cuban-Americans, Trump leads Harris by 46% to 45%, while 5% remain undecided, according to a YouGov and Univision poll. However, Trump does not enjoy the same level of support among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, where Harris maintains a stronger lead.

Mike Madrid, a Georgetown-educated political consultant and one of the foremost experts on Latino voting trends, cautions against the conclusions drawn from certain polls. He refers to what he calls “Latino mirage” — surveys where the sample size is too small to reliably represent the broader Latino electorate. “The results usually skew more right-leaning than actual voter sentiment, giving such polls a more ‘conservative’ or ‘Republican’ bias [...] Republicans often think they’re more competitive than they are, creating significant surprises on Election Day,” Madrid writes in The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy. Madrid warns that many polls tend to overrepresent Latinos who have been in the U.S. the longest, often overlooking those who are harder to reach — such as Hispanics who migrate frequently, following economic opportunities.

Some voters are turning their backs on the Democratic Party, including Israel Uribe, the owner of a Tex-Mex restaurant in Harlingen, Texas, a city in the Rio Grande Valley near the Mexican border. In 2022, Uribe helped elect the town’s first female mayor, a Democrat and immigration lawyer. However, this year he plans to vote for the Republican candidate for Congress and for Trump, whom he did not support in 2020 due to Trump’s handling of the pandemic. “These last three years have been very difficult for me and my business. Things have to change,” Uribe explains over the phone.

Uribe admits he came close to shutting down his restaurant, which he opened in 2019 with a business partner he met while serving as a local official. Harlingen has always been a Democratic stronghold in Texas — the most Republican state in the country — but conservatives have been gaining ground in recent elections. Uribe believes that the Biden administration’s handling of the border has negatively impacted the local economy. “We’ve always been welcoming to those who arrive here, but we’ve had very bad press, and one gets tired of repeating that this is still a good place to work and invest,” he explains.

“Latinos are aware Harris is the face that launched a thousand price hikes,” Daniel Garza recently told Fox. Garza is the president of Libre, one of several initiatives aimed at bringing more Hispanics into the Republican fold, which have gained significant traction on social media. Another such organization is Lexit, a group of Hispanics who left the Democratic Party to join the conservative, pro-Trump movement, that has over 200,000 followers on Instagram.

Mass deportation

Efrén Pérez, a political psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), states in a recent study that 27% of Latinos identify themselves as Americans rather than Hispanics. “The more that Latino prioritize American identity over their own ethnic identity, the more likely they are to think of themselves as Republican [...] In contrast, the more Latino adults identify with their ethnic group, the more they will identify as Democratic,” writes the academic. Pérez and his team of researchers believe that 27% fall into the former category.

The potential shift to the right could particularly affect Harris and Democrats in states like Nevada and Arizona, where Latinos were key to Biden’s victory in 2020. This campaign, however, has been marked by Trump’s promise to carry out the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in history.

“During the first Trump administration, many of his anti-immigration gestures were symbolic, like the border wall. This did not impact Latinos born here, but rather future immigrants trying to get here through the desert,” says Chris Zepeda-Millán, a professor of public policy and Chicano studies at UCLA, who warns of the threats posed by a second Trump presidency. “It would be an existential crisis for the migrant rights movement due to his mass deportation promise. If he starts doing that, we will begin to see large mobilizations of Latinos across the country,” he adds. But first Trump has to win the November 5 election.

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