The Latino Realignment Looks Real. But It May Not Be Permanent.

In the hours after the election was called for Donald Trump, some of the finger-pointing started quickly: Latinos were to blame. Democrats lost Latinos, and it cost them the election.

According to Carlos Odio, co-founder of the firm Equis Research, which focuses on Latino polling, that’s not quite true. While Kamala Harris won Latinos by much smaller margins than Joe Biden did in 2020, she still won a majority of them — and her losses among the group didn’t cost her the election.

“You could erase the Latino shift in those [Blue Wall] states, and Trump would still win,” Odio said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine.

That should still be cold comfort for Democrats. Trump made gains across every group in this critical demographic, cutting into Harris’ wins with Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Central Americans. He did well in Florida and Texas and New York and New Jersey.

Even though many analysts expected a shift toward Trump this year, its extent was remarkable.

“You have to say it certainly looks and sounds like a realignment,” Odio said, before giving Democrats some slim hope. “Realignments are neither inevitable nor irreversible, especially when you’re talking about an electorate like Latinos that have been very swingy and very dynamic.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Since the election, there's been a lot of conversation that Latinos were to blame for electing Trump, or at least that Democrats lost Latinos as a group. What's been your reaction to that?

There's a few levels here. One, it was entirely justified for people to jump on these eye-popping shifts we were seeing among Latino voters. It's meaningful. It is, in some regard, historic, and has real consequences for elections going forward. At the same time, those shifts were not why Trump won, and it's helpful to separate out our interest in understanding his Latino shifts from an analysis of the 2024 election.

What happened this election is that Trump improved on his margins in nine out of 10 counties. There was a 6-point uniform swing across the country. He swept the Blue Wall states, in fact, the entire battleground. And so the story of how Trump won is not a demographic story. You cannot narrow in on any single demographic to explain it. That mingles with a personal element, which is that it was very disheartening when you get into finger-pointing. To some extent, I'm always down to have a debate about the impact of different factors in an election. That's an empirical conversation, and that's a data debate. This got personal in a way we have to move past to get to any kind of real understanding going forward.

Look at the Blue Wall states, right? Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, where Latinos are 3 to 5 percent of the vote. You could erase the Latino shift in those states, and Trump would still win them.

What does your data tell you about how this Latino vote broke down in different states and among different countries of origin? 

Our early indications, from precinct analysis and looking at other heavily Latino locales, is that the shift cut across geographies, urbanicity, country of origin. There were shifts of similar magnitude in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which is heavily Dominican, as there were in Allentown and Reading, Pennsylvania, which are heavily Puerto Rican, as there were among South American communities of Broward County in Florida, or Mexican American communities in Michigan, Wisconsin and the Tejano Rio Grande Valley in South Texas.

As we contend with what happened, provincial theories that explain some unique element of some subset of Latinos in one place are totally insufficient to explain the broader movement.

That's really interesting, because it feels like there's this entire conversation that gets repeated in recent elections, where we say Latinos are not a monolith, and that we can't think of them as one cohesive group, but then we also keep wanting to know: Who won or lost Latinos? What you're saying is whether it's Dominicans, whether it's Puerto Ricans, whether it's third- or fourth-generation Mexican Americans, Trump is making inroads with all of these communities in one way or another. 

Yeah, in similar magnitude, and those shifts are greater than they are in the rest of the electorate.

Latinos are not a monolith, but they moved as a group for two elections in a row, and it's because of what they have in common across all the differences. It’s this Hispanic identification. It's not a biological reality, it is to help people situate themselves in American politics. It is an understanding about how other people view you, and thus how candidates and parties view you and how they're going to consider you when it comes time to make decisions.

A lot of Democrats believed that this pro-Trump comedian's comments calling Puerto Rico an “island of garbage” was going to swing voters toward their camp. But it seems like that's not what happened. Is that right? And why not?

Our sense now is that Puerto Ricans in Lehigh and Berks counties, in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, as well as in Osceola County in Florida, shifted significantly [toward Trump]. Clearly you look at that and say, whatever happened at the rally and the way it was amplified after, it could not make up for some of the Democratic disadvantages, or it came too late.

I think there's reason to believe that actually it helped [Harris], that the numbers could have been worse had it not been for a late surge you saw among Puerto Rican Democrats in these areas. But the honest answer at this point is, we don't really know. You can look at it and say, as you can say with a lot of other moments in the Trump era, that individual things that he or his allies say just don't move the needle very much because they're already baked into the calculus. People know he's a racist. That's not new information, and they've already made a calculation about him that either rejects that or works around it.

What was the biggest motivator for this shift of Latinos moving toward Trump, according to your research? Why did Trump appeal to them so much, despite the fact that he has made a lot of claims that are arguably very harmful to the Latino community? 

Let me bring it back to the values we see among these voters. People voted for Biden in 2020 in the hopes that it would bring us back to normalcy. That there would be an end to the crisis era. And then, of course, we were hit by crisis upon crisis upon crisis.

The one that really stuck with people was inflation. Of course, this has hit incumbents throughout the world, as many people have been talking about. The question is, did the Biden White House step up to the challenge? And what we were hearing from voters is they didn't even seem to believe it was real, and so there wasn't a sense that Biden understood what they were going through when the price of groceries was going up, when buying a home started seeming like an impossibility beyond any aspiration.

A part of that was Biden himself. He didn't seem like he had the vitality to steer us out of these crises. I remember a focus group, it was in Texas, where someone who was a Democrat was saying, “Look, I didn't agree with much of what Trump did, but I knew he was doing things. He was out there every day.” He was active in a way that they didn't see Biden. Biden couldn't be a messenger in the way that they've come to expect it. Trump may have been reality TV, but when people get hooked on reality TV, it's hard to switch to PBS NewsHour. They came to expect a certain level of showmanship and visibility that they weren't getting from the White House in a period when they were struggling and they were worried.

I think the migration crisis, which again they felt like the Biden White House was essentially ignoring, comes at a point where it just stokes the feelings they already had about inflation. It felt like we are struggling, and there are people arriving today who are getting benefits that we're not. We heard it also in the context of Ukraine, that there's money going to fight the war in Ukraine and there doesn't seem to be money to help us here at home. I think what's dangerous is to ignore anxieties of that sort.

But the other thing is, a perception that some voters got of Trump in the middle of Covid was of someone who was going to prioritize the economy above literally everything else. If you are a person who is finding that they have to prioritize the economic well-being of their family above everything else, they see in him a kindred spirit. And I think it's important to say, for those of us who are immigrants or descended from immigrants, that a big part of our origin story was about risking everything to be able to seek out economic opportunity to take care of our families. That's really central to the story. And that's why when we talk about the economy, it's not just the economy. It's about something so much deeper, about electing leaders who you feel get it and ultimately are going to help you be able to take care of yourself and your family.

One of the big questions out there right now as Latinos move toward Trump and away from Democrats: Is this a realignment that we're witnessing? What do you think?

We're in a situation where we thought coming into this election it was erosion, not realignment. When you look at these numbers, and you look at what was an 8.2 way shift from 2016 to 2020 and then maybe something similar now again, you have to say it certainly looks and sounds like a realignment.

Knowing, of course, that realignments are neither inevitable nor irreversible, especially when you're talking about an electorate like Latinos that have been very swingy and very dynamic, especially because it's so fast-changing. I think we don't know yet, but traditionally speaking, 30 to 40 percent of Latinos who vote in a given election hadn't voted in the previous one. I expect something like that will hold up. And so that’s got a lot of churn. That's a lot of change.

I think it's a mistake for either side to take for granted that what happened here is going to continue in a linear trend, as much as you'd have to say it certainly trended in Trump's direction.

Is this unique to Trump? It could be, but at this point, I'm almost putting that debate aside for a second, because we've got another four years with Trump. Had the Trump era ended last Tuesday, we could have sat back and said, “OK, now let's see if this changes when it's not him at the top,” but given that he's still here — whether it's a realignment for Republicans or for him — is a futile debate. At the end of the day, he is going to be the party leader for the foreseeable future.

What are the takeaways here for Democrats? What should the new strategy be for them to reverse some of this damage with Latinos in in 2026 and 2028?

First of all, I think it's helpful to understand that we're not having a policy debate. This is a debate about culture and values, even though it's about the economy. The economy is never just about the economy. It's about understanding people's priorities in their lives, what they're going through and that they want leaders who are fighting on their side. That's not always communicated via policy proposals. A lot of that is about showing up. It's about them being seen in your party.

I think one thing for the Democrats going forward is the example of Ruben Gallego, and other candidates like him. The future is in not shying away from being multiracial, quite the opposite — leaning into a multiracial but class-conscious kind of candidate who is progressive in their substance, but also more moderate in their style and willing to show independence.

Looking at this precinct data that you've been collecting, what surprised you the most? 

I'd say we more than expected the shifts. We saw outright vote-switching in our polling fairly consistently, where people, a significant share, who said that they had voted for Biden in 2020 were saying they would vote for Trump this time around. So it didn't surprise us that there would be a drop.

I think the magnitude of the drop in the places we weren't looking at were, in some ways, more surprising. I wasn't surprised by Florida. I wasn't surprised by anything in Texas. But I was surprised by New Jersey, Hudson County where I live. And New York. And these larger shifts in places like Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Where do Republicans go from here? Are there any warning signs for them? 

I think the question for Republicans is, first of all, so many of these voters who were shifting toward him were doing that because of the twin crises of inflation and migration that hit starting in 2021, and a feeling that the Biden White House wasn't up to tackling them. A lot of what Latinos want to see is prices going down. Even in the context of migration, it was about prices going down. Trump's got lots of big plans. He's putting Stephen Miller in power, he's putting all of his loyalists around him and yet these voters we're talking about are going to judge him on economic performance, and specifically on the cost of living.

I think a warning sign for Republicans is in a way, what will be the takeaway for a low-information voter? Is it going to be about the economy? Or is it going to be about the kind of antics that we saw during the first Trump presidency?

Is there something that you think has become part of the conventional wisdom that you don't agree with or that you think needs to change?

There's so much I don't like about conventional wisdom. I don't think this is new, but I think we are so used to applying these large theoretical frameworks and long-term thinking during an era in which everything has been unpredictable.

The idea that anything would all of a sudden become more predictable seems to be unsubstantiated by the evidence. Things can change fast. I think the mistake that anybody makes is to assume that anything that happened in 2024 is a prophecy of what is to come in the future.