The surprise of the 2024 elections was Donald Trump’s gains with Latino voters despite his anti-immigrant fearmongering. The entirely predictable development of the 2025 elections is that those gains are slipping away.
Nate Cohn of The New York Times noted that “the exit polls in New Jersey found that [Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mikie] Sherrill won a whopping 18 percent of Mr. Trump’s Hispanic support in the state.” Furthermore, Sherrill “also seemed to benefit from a much stronger turnout among Democratic-leaning Hispanic voters. In the New Jersey exit poll, Hispanic voters who cast ballots in 2025 reported backing Ms. Harris by 25 points; in the actual 2024 election, Ms. Harris won Hispanic voters by just nine points, according to New York Times estimates.”
While exit poll data is notoriously imperfect, Cohn determined that it is “consistent with other available data,” namely the “individual-level records of who voted in an election,” which were available in half of New Jersey’s counties. They showed a 2.5-point shift toward Democrats, compared to 2024, in the electorate’s party registration. As that’s not enough to account for Sherrill’s 13-point victory, a reasonable conclusion is that she also flipped Trump voters, and the exit poll data suggests a significant number of those were Latino.
California didn’t have a gubernatorial election; instead, it held a referendum on congressional redistricting, which temporarily suspended the work of the state’s independent redistricting commission. Governor Gavin Newsom pushed Proposition 50 to counter July’s Republican redistricting of Texas. Texas Republicans had hoped to gain five House seats through their redistricting, and now California legislators have the power to do the same for Democrats.
Proposition 50 passed handily, and it seems with the help of Latinos who voted for Trump last year. Thirteen California counties have a majority-Latino population, and Trump won 11 of them in the 2024 election. In five of those counties—Imperial, Merced, San Bernardino, Fresno, Riverside—a majority voted for Proposition 50. In the other six, the margin for opposition to Proposition 50 is smaller than Trump’s 2024 victory margin.
The Latino vote is far from monolithic. For example, New Jersey Latinos are mainly Puerto Rican (and therefore, not from immigrant families) and Dominican. In contrast, Latinos in the West are primarily Mexican. Yet in 2024, we saw broad shifts toward Trump across Latino communities, and in 2025—after Trump unleashed ICE and the military to lead a massive and haphazard deportation campaign, while doing nothing to lower the cost of living as promised in the 2024 campaign—we appear to be seeing that pendulum swing back. So that means what we’re seeing in New Jersey and California may also apply to Texas. And that should terrify Republicans.
As I wrote for the Washington Monthly three months ago, when Republicans redrew the Texas congressional map, they placed a dangerous bet:
According to The Texas Tribune, “Four of the five districts that Republicans have drawn intending to flip would be majority Hispanic.” Historically, a majority-Hispanic district would be a sure bet to vote Democratic. But in 2024, Donald Trump romped in the heavily Latino South Texas, flipping seven counties south of San Antonio. Exit polls pegged Trump’s support among Latinos statewide at 55 percent.
However, a gerrymander moves reliably partisan voters into the districts you want to flip, and moving swing voters is a gamble.
At the time, Trump’s approval among Hispanics in several national polls was weak, and it hasn’t gotten any better, ranging from 29 to 34 percent in recent Washington Post-ABC, The Economist-YouGov, and CBS News-YouGov polls. And it’s going south in Texas. A new survey, conducted in mid-October by the University of Texas and the Texas Politics Project, indicates that Hispanic approval of Trump stands at 32 percent, down from 38 percent in June. Banking on Hispanic votes to help Republicans gain five House seats, when Texas Hispanics have never been a reliable GOP voting bloc and are souring on Trump by the day, is short-sighted.
But I’m not saying anything about which Texas Republicans didn’t warn Trump. The Texas Tribune previously reported: “Gov. Greg Abbott was initially resistant to the plan pushed by President Donald Trump’s political team to pick up new GOP seats through a rare mid-decade redistricting … The majority of Texas’s GOP congressional delegation was also wary of the idea, with many members concerned that Republican map-drawers could miscalculate and spread their voters too thin—thus putting their jobs in jeopardy—while trying to flip Democratic seats, six people involved in internal delegation discussions told The Texas Tribune.”
Of course, standard caveats apply. Much can change between November 2025 and November 2026. Even Trump seems to recognize he’s painted himself into a political corner, telling reporters after Election Day: “The shutdown was a big factor, negative for the Republicans … We must get the government back open soon—and really, immediately.” But off-year elections are often bellwethers for midterm elections. Considering that Trump has done nothing for Latinos, but done plenty to Latinos, don’t be surprised if Latino embrace of Trump proves short-lived, and the gerrymandered Texas map becomes a humiliating own goal.
