Democrats are struggling to reverse the rightward shift among Latino voters seen in November, when President Trump made significant gains with the once reliably blue voting bloc.

While a majority of Latino voters cast their ballots for former Vice President Kamala Harris in November, the share supporting Trump climbed roughly 8 points between 2020 and 2024, according to data from AP VoteCast. Latino men shifted to Trump by double digits, even as the president was criticized along the campaign trail for anti-immigrant rhetoric and controversial deportation plans.

“The Biden campaign and then, by connection, the Kamala Harris campaign, had a lot of work to do with all of the groups, but I was surprised that so many Latino men were so disillusioned with Joe Biden and what happened in the last four years that they were willing to go to Donald Trump even with all of the crazy, xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric,” Democratic political strategist Maria Cardona said.

Back in 2016, when he won his first term in the Oval Office, Trump brought in just 28 percent of Latino voters, according to Pew Research Center. In 2020, his support climbed to roughly 35 percent, per AP VoteCast. This fall, about 43 percent support helped secure him a second term.

The 2024 numbers, part of a broader shift to the right in almost every state and across demographic groups, underscore that Democrats have been steadily ceding ground with the bloc that sided with former President Obama over Republican Mitt Romney by a staggering 71 percent to 27 percent in 2012, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

It was Trump’s messaging on the economy that convinced many voters, experts said.

“Trump did a fantastic job at messaging,” Cardona said. “A lot of it was misinformation, lies and conspiracy theories that, frankly, a lot of people believed. But at the end of the day, they believed that Trump was going to give them the economy that they had at the beginning........

© The Hill