Rumors of a multicultural Republican coalition have been greatly exaggerated.
Much was made of President Trump’s success with Latino voters after the president won a groundbreaking 42 percent of them last year, flipping blue districts even as he committed to an immigration crackdown on the campaign trail.
Tuesday’s elections showed just how flimsy that support actually was.
In New Jersey, Hudson County is a town with a large Latino population that saw a big swing to Trump from 2020 to 2024, with Vice President Kamala Harris only winning it by 28 percent against Trump, while Biden won it by 46 four years earlier. But on Tuesday, New Jersey Democratic Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli by 49 points, eclipsing even Biden, and beating back any gains that Trump had made with the nonwhite voters there.
“Middlesex County NJ (~61% nonwhite) is a great example of how Republican Jack Ciattarelli failed to replicate Trump’s massive gains with nonwhite voters,” political analyst Ryan Matsumoto wrote in another example. “2020 President: Biden +22, 2024 President: Harris +8, 2025 Governor: Sherrill +25.”Latino voters didn’t just break from Trump and the GOP in New Jersey.
“The clearest sign I can find of Latinos abandoning the GOP after Trump’s big gains in 2024 is Manassas Park, Va., a city of 17,000 people with a 46% Latino plurality population,” HuffPost’s Kevin Robillard wrote. “Harris won it by 20 in 2024. Spanberger is winning it by 42 tonight.”
There was certainly reason for alarm last year over a potential Latino exodus from the Democratic Party. But whatever momentum or goodwill Trump and the GOP had with those voters has more or less been squandered. It only took nearly 10 months of violent arrests, kidnappings, shootings, pepper balls, and federal agents crashing their cars into innocent people for them to back out. It seems that many of those voters thought Trump’s deportation crackdown would only target violent gangs, not their friends, family, and neighbors. In May, an Equis poll came out that showed that 15 percent of Latinos who voted for Trump completely disapproved of his presidential actions by that point. An additional 66 percent of all Latino voters believed that his “actions are going too far and targeting the types of immigrants who strengthen our nation.”
“A very large share of Latinos believe mass deportations will ‘tear families apart, many of whom have been in the US for a long time’ (73% agree, 53% strongly) and will ‘unfairly impact undocumented immigrants who are law-abiding members of society, work hard and pay taxes’ (71% agree, 52% strongly),” the poll continued.
“We don’t really want people who have committed any type of crime, even more if they are illegal,” Cuban American and Republican Florida Representative María Salazar said in June. “But we do know that unfortunately what’s happening right now after six months of Mr. President being in office, that we’re losing thousands and thousands of workers [that] the ICE leadership has called ‘collateral damage.’”
