Trump’s Gains with Hispanics May Not Last for Republicans

One of the key reasons Donald Trump won a second term was the significant inroads he made with Hispanic voters. Post-election estimates indicate that relative to 2024, they swung rightward by 17.7 points. And though Trump did not win these voters outright, he still captured around 45 percent of them—a modern-day record for a Republican presidential nominee. This followed another large, rightward shift between 2016 and 2020.

Pre-election evidence suggested that Hispanics’ growing support for Trump stemmed primarily from prioritizing the economy in their vote choice, which was in rough shape heading into the election. A sizable share also favored his immigration policies, like building a wall at the southern border and deporting people living in the U.S. illegally. All this was subsequently confirmed in election post-mortems.

Given the crucial role Hispanics played in Trump’s second win, Republicans are banking on retaining his gains as they work to build power in the years ahead. The Texas state legislature offers the latest evidence of this. The GOP-dominated body is working to redraw the state’s congressional maps to boost the party’s chances of keeping its majority in the U.S. House of Representatives—and they’re hoping Hispanic Texans will aid them.

The new map is targeting two heavily Hispanic, Democratic-controlled districts in the Rio Grande Valley—the 28th and the 34th—by incorporating more rural and Trump-leaning areas into them. Some parts of these districts saw dramatic rightward swings during Trump’s elections. For example, TX-28 includes Zapata County, a 94 percent Hispanic county. Though it had voted overwhelmingly Democratic since 1920, Trump narrowly flipped it in 2020, and it voted for him again in 2024.

However, there are a few reasons to suspect that Trump’s gains with Hispanics may not stick for his party moving forward. First, it’s not yet clear that the Hispanics Trump brought into his coalition will all turn out when he is not on the ballot. Consider TX-28. Though most of the counties within it swung massively rightward in 2020, several of them shifted back to Democrats in the 2022 midterms as turnout in key counties dropped significantly and even as the state overall shifted to the right from 2020. But when Trump ran again in 2024, all counties in the district swung back to the right.

This same dynamic has played out elsewhere. In Arizona, Hispanic voters broke for the Democrats in the statewide U.S. House vote by 24 points, but in the midterms two years later that margin increased to 32 points. If Trump’s presence is responsible for turning out some number of Hispanic voters not just in Texas but elsewhere too, this could pose a problem for Republicans in a post-Trump future.

As far as the new Texas maps are concerned, it’s simply not yet clear that adding new, heavily Hispanic areas that went for Trump to TX-28 and TX-34 will give Republicans a boost in next year’s midterm election. According to New York Times political analyst Nate Cohn, “Even as redrawn, these districts voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Add in a favorable midterm environment, subtract the relatively Trump-friendly general election turnout, and add the variable of a less predictable Hispanic vote, and suddenly there are a lot of ways Democrats could hang tough in these seats next year.”

There is also growing evidence that many Hispanics are souring on Trump’s second term. After winning 45 percent in last year’s election, his average approval rating with them sits at just 35 percent today. A July survey by Equis Research, a Democratic-affiliated organization, found that just 31 percent of Hispanic voters approve of how Trump is handling the economy, while an earlier Equis poll from May showed that two-thirds (including 36 percent of his own voters) believe his actions on immigration have gone “too far”—a view notably beginning to take hold in the Rio Grande Valley.

These sentiments are evident in other surveys as well. A June YouGov poll found that large majorities of Hispanics think Trump’s deportation policy should prioritize violent criminals rather than non-violent people who have been in the country for years and contributed to their communities, and CBS News reported that a majority of Hispanics believe the administration is focusing on the latter group. Looking ahead, Equis’ results show that around one-third of Hispanics who voted for Trump last year are not set on voting Republican in the 2026 congressional races.

However, even in the face of these developments, it is still possible that the GOP could retain a decent share of Trump’s Hispanic support moving forward: namely, these voters tend to be ideologically moderate. Many are patriotic, religious, and upwardly mobile—values that might lead some to align themselves more with the Republican Party (or at least make Hispanics more open to voting for them).

As TLP has covered extensively, the electorate under Trump has become less racially polarized. One result has been that Hispanics who are ideologically moderate or conservative are starting to vote more in line with their beliefs than their ethnicity (the second of which has historically aligned them more with the Democrats). In 2024, for instance, a meager 17 percent of conservative Hispanic voters supported Kamala Harris, down from 24 percent for Joe Biden in 2020 and 34 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Even moderates swung 23 points rightward between 2016 and 2024, moving from 81 percent (Clinton) to 70 percent (Biden) to just 58 percent (Harris).

Despite these shifts, it’s not a given that this trajectory will persist post-Trump. It is likely more prudent to think of Hispanics as a Democratic-leaning swing group—one that Republicans can be competitive with but that, for now, still defaults to the Democrats. And given how Trump’s early moves have antagonized many Hispanic Americans, it remains to be seen whether they will continue supporting his party, especially after he is out of the picture.

Editor’s note: a version of this piece first appeared in UnHerd.