Tipsheet

By the Numbers: Trump's Extraordinary Gains Among Latinos, From Texas to...California?

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  November 21, 2024 10:35 AM

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, there were warning signs galore for Democrats.  One of them was polling pointing to strong gains for Donald Trump among Hispanic and other groups voters, which -- if they materialized -- would need to be offset elsewhere by Kamala Harris.  In many cases, they did materialize, and Harris failed to offset them with women and college-educated suburban whites.  These dynamics helped Trump not only win the presidency, but also the popular vote.  Grabbing all seven targeted swing states, winning them by between one and five points, was a major achievement, but Trump's national victory was also fueled elsewhere.  

Indeed, some of his biggest swings that aided the latter feat happened in the bluest of states:


Florida and Texas were each in the top six, in part, due to movement among Latino voters.  As was also foretold by polling, Trump carried Latinos in Florida by 16 points, per CNN exits.  In Texas, Trump won Latinos by ten points. This sort of thing doesn't happen in a vacuum: 

President-elect Donald Trump won a historic victory in a border county with a 97% Hispanic population on Tuesday night — ending a Democratic voting streak that began in 1896. Trump’s take over of the blue bastion was made evident Wednesday morning as he won Starr County with more than 57% of the vote — the first time a Republican has claimed the border community in 128 years. The outcome reveals the surge in popularity Trump has received from Latino voters, especially among men, with issues around the border and illegal immigration...Starr County, with a population of nearly 66,000 people, had served as a key support for Democrats, with Biden winning the county in 2020 with 52% of the vote, and Hillary Clinton with 79% in 2016. Despite being in a red state, the county has the longest Democratic voting streak of anywhere in the US, according to the San Antonio Express-News.

And while California remains solidly blue, we also saw substantial movement in some heavily-Latino areas. Look at this trajectory:


The vote-counting isn't quite over yet, because California.  But that is a wild swing from 2016 to 2024.  And in the local state assembly district, the Republican candidate flipped the seat:

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Republican Jeff Gonzalez emerged victorious in the 36th Assembly District on Monday, as Democratic candidate Joey Acuña conceded in the competitive race to represent the eastern Coachella Valley and a large swath of southeastern California. The race to replace long-time Democratic lawmaker Eduardo Garcia in a sprawling district that includes Indio and Coachella was decided nearly two weeks after Election Day as ballots were still being counted, with Gonzalez leading Acuña by roughly 4,000 votes out of about 141,000 tallied so far. The victory for Gonzalez marks a win for local GOP officials in flipping the district, which has been represented by Democrats since 2008. Currently, Democrats comprise about 42% of the district’s registered voters, while Republicans account for about 29%, while the remainder are third-party and “no party preference” voters.

That's a D+13 district.  It's an overwhelmingly Hispanic community.  And Trump basically fought Harris to a tie there, with a Republican winning the local seat.  These are nightmare coalitions for Democrats, though Republicans shouldn't get overly confident, as gains can regress rather quickly, depending on events.  But in 2024, the trend line was undeniable:

The working-class voters Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign needed were not moved by talk of joy. They were too angry about feeling broke...Black voters, on the whole, still voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, as did a narrower majority of Latinos and Asian Americans. But Republicans made gains in big cities and diverse suburbs. Hispanic-majority counties shifted to the right by 13 percentage points, preliminary results showed, as did counties with large numbers of Asian American voters; Black-majority counties shifted to the G.O.P. by about three points. Though Republicans were quick to celebrate a long-sought political realignment, interviews this year with working-class voters suggest that the shifts may not prove so enduring. For many, their choices were as much a message-sending rejection of Democrats as an embrace of Mr. Trump, his policies and his party...When Mr. Trump spoke of immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” critics cried fascism and xenophobia. But many naturalized citizens, and children and grandchildren of immigrants, said they heard a leader promising to protect his own. Far from feeling threatened by such rhetoric, they said they felt affirmed in their identity as Americans.

Finally, based on the CNN national exits, Trump won white voters by 16 points, came within six points among Hispanics (52/46), drew closer among Asians (54/39), won 13 percent of black voters (including 21 percent of black men), and won all "other" ethnic and racial groups by 12 points. On that last score, I'll leave you with this: