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Trends in Latino attitudes in Texas foreshadowed Trump’s gains in 2024
January 13, 2025 | By: Jim Henson, Joshua Blank

One of the biggest stories of the 2024 election cycle was Donald Trump’s success in increasing his support among Latino voters. The exit polls in Texas suggest that Trump won 55% of the Latino vote in the state – a 13-point increase from 2020, a record high for a Republican presidential candidate and a 27-point increase over 2016. (Texas was part of Trump's 45% of the Latino vote nationally.) Even allowing for apparent signs of success from Republican aligned efforts in the state to identify and turnout likely Republican voters in heavily Latino counties, the magnitude of the swing toward Trump in 2024, especially in Texas, was still striking as it became apparent in the days after the election.

A review of extensive data on Latino attitudes in the Texas Politics Project polling archive in conjunction with election returns and exit polling suggests that the signs of Trump’s success in 2024 were hiding in plain sight, albeit amidst fluctuations in the data attributable to both methodological and empirical factors (which we flag in the more extensive discussions below).

The data compiled below suggests key areas that foreshadowed the swing in the Latino vote toward Trump. Many of the results shifts among Latinos reflect the similarity of the attitudes of Latino subgroups – for example, Latino Republicans, suburbanites, and conservatives – to the attitudes among the same subgroups in the overall electorate.

Donald Trump Vote Share Among Latinos According to Exit Polling
  Nationally Texas
2024 46% 55%
2020 32% 41%
2016 28% 34%

In summary:

  1. Party identification data reveals a decline in Democratic identification among Latinos amid signs of a gradual, incremental increase in Republican identification since 2016, with a clear increase in the GOP’s baseline support in the year preceding the election. 
  2. Despite prevalent expectations, Latinos’ views of Donald Trump on the cusp of the election were closely divided, with a large share holding favorable views. 
  3. Conversely, Latinos’ opinions about Joe Biden’s job performance were in net-negative territory, with a high degree of intensity evident among those who disapproved.
  4. On the key campaign issues of the economy and border security, which were most salient to Latinos (as they were to Texas’ overall electorate), Latino attitudes favored the positions most associated with Republicans, and trusted Trump more than Biden to handle those issues.

The polling thus provided clear indications that Democrats were likely to have a problem retaining  their existing vote targets among Texas Latinos given the relative strengths and weaknesses of the respective presidential candidates, the political climate, and the issue environment that defined the election (let alone improving upon past performance).

A close look at the data provides some hints about why expectations were behind the curve on these changes, and why general thinking about Latinos in U.S. politics in the 2020s lags the reality of their attitudes and their place in the political firmament. The singularity of Donald Trump notwithstanding, the data also informs the ongoing discussion of the relative electoral power of the two major parties. The news is mostly bad for those harboring ambitions of the Democratic Party becoming a competitive force in the state.

Loosened Democratic Attachment: Patterns in Latino Party Identification in Texas

Between 2016 and the middle of 2019, no fewer than 50% of Hispanic registered voters in Texas identified as Democrats, while no more than 39% identified as Republican.

During much of this period defined by continued Republican dominance in the state, it was fair to think that Democratic candidates were striving to capture about two-thirds of the Hispanic vote, while also keeping Republican candidates well below a 40% threshold that seemed to guarantee GOP electoral success when combined with the significant Republican advantage among White/Anglo voters.

But it was less generally appreciated that these efforts took place within a period in which Republicans could only firmly count on the support of at least a third of Latinos. During much of this period, but also long before, Democrats publicly wondered what it would take, or, often, simply how long it would take, to solidify their advantage, and even how high the ceiling might be. Republicans, especially in the wake of the 2018 elections that saw Beto O’Rourke within 3-points of defeating Ted Cruz, started to make real efforts to increase their relatively consistent base levels of support among key groups, especially Latinos.

In University of Texas/Texas Politics Project polling since 2020, the share of Latinos identifying as Democrats hasn’t broken 53%, while the share identifying as Republicans has varied between a low of 29% and a high of 51% on the eve of early voting in October of this year. The October results may end up being something of an outlier given that Latino Republicanism hasn’t grown dramatically when we look at a longer time window of data. Nonetheless, there is a clear trend towards higher baseline Republican identification among Latinos.

But potentially more telling is the decline in Democratic identification, which, though still somewhat constrained, is also apparent in the data.

Why wasn’t this more apparent to more people, including the Texas Democratic Party, in the lead up to the 2024 election?

While this question is being heavily discussed in Democratic circles, the fluctuation in party identification made this movement hard to parse in real-time. Were the fluctuations a result of some kind of durable underlying shift, or simply the kind of variance we might expect to see from one poll to the next? There was no way to know for sure at the time. Here, too, the overall time series can’t render any sort of final verdict on the durability of the decline in Democratic identification, or on the likely success of future GOP overtures to Latino voters in a less favorable campaign environment for Republicans.

Nonetheless, this data, and especially the election results, raise difficult questions about how much the Texas Democratic Party has overestimated the strength of Latino attachments to their brand. Is the movement apparent in the data a sign of a durable shift in party identification, or simply a reflection of the macro features of this election (i.e. the issue set, economic attitudes, these specific presidential candidates, and Democratic incumbency), and their influence among a group whose partisan attachments weren’t very strong at the outset of the Trump era? Evidence in the polling data strongly suggests a general overestimation of Latinos’ attachment to the Democratic Party. But it’s difficult to know how much this loosened attachment was further shaken by short-term factors.

Views of Donald Trump and Joe Biden

One obvious answer to some of these questions will involve understanding Latinos’ response to Donald Trump. In the October 2024 survey, views of Trump among Latinos were evenly split: 48% each held a favorable or unfavorable view, with similar levels of intensity in those views (37% very favorable, 42% very unfavorable).

Trump was evaluated most highly by Latino Republicans (83% favorable) and Latino conservatives (72%). But there is evidence of a lot of variance among other key Latino electoral groups who also clearly responded positively to Trump in significant numbers, even where he was in net-negative territory (i.e. more holding an unfavorable than a favorable view).

As the table below illustrates, in addition to appealing to the same subgroups of Latinos that continue to fuel Trump’s support among the overall electorate (e.g. rural and male voters), Trump also attracted favorable ratings from sizable shares of college degree holders and suburbanites, for example.

Favorability Ratings of Donald Trump
Within Latino Subgroups

(October 2024 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll)
  Favorable Unfavorable Net
Rural 57 43 +14
Male 55 42 +13
College educated 53 39 +14
Income >$60K 49 46 +3
Income <$60K 45 50 -5
Under 44 years old 45 50 -5
No college degree 45 51 -6
Suburban 44 50 -6
Female 40 52 -12

While Trump has mostly remained in the net-negative territory among Latino voters, he also significantly improved his position among this group over time, particularly during the 2024 campaign.

Trends in Texas polling also reveal the flipside of Trump’s appeal to Latinos: they cooled on Biden relatively quickly. More than half of Latinos, 56%, disapproved of Biden’s overall job performance in October. And while this did represent Biden’s low water mark, it was part of a pattern of at best tepid ratings of Biden among Texas Latinos.

Biden only received net-positive job approval ratings from Latinos on 7 of 22 surveys starting in February 2022, and on none after August of 2022. In the five surveys conducted before the election in 2024, no fewer than 45% disapproved of Biden’s job performance while no more than 43% approved.

So it’s unsurprising that the UT/TXPP polling never found a Democratic advantage among Latino voters in the presidential race. In all 6 trial ballot questions presented to voters between December 2023 and October 2024, Trump led Biden among Hispanics on each (often within the margin of error save the June poll before Biden's debate performance) — and only trailed Harris in August polling (also by 1 point, 43% to 44%, and, therefore, also within the margin of sampling error).

During the early stages of the campaign, it may have been easy to ignore some of these numbers because they seemed reasonably explainable. There were reasons to think that shifts in the dynamics of the election might move Latino support back toward Biden and/or the Democrats as the campaign unfolded. 

But the opposite happened. As Spring moved to Summer, Biden’s low profile, followed by his disastrous debate performance, provided the kind of shock to the system that one would expect to impact the race, especially considering voters’ already apparent concerns about his age and mental capacity. At this point in the race, shifts in preferences were plausible and easy enough to explain given the disastrous state of Biden’t candidacy. Yet again, the likelihood that Biden would be replaced by a fitter alternative — a discussion that began immediately after the debate – provided grounds for a hedge that Latinos might “come home” should what clearly had become “the Biden Problem” be resolved by replacing him on the ticket.

Nonetheless, the numbers didn’t move much after Harris replaced Biden in July. UT/TXPP polling conducted in August did pick up evidence of a slight shift (Latino support for the Democratic ticket increased from 43% in June to 45% in August, a time which was, in retrospect, likely the height of enthusiasm for Harris). This slight surge in enthusiasm for Harris relative to Biden provided some grounds for considering the possibility that expected patterns of partisanship would reemerge. As the campaigns began spending big dollars in earnest as summer turned to fall, the thinking went, Democratic-leaning voters, including Latinos, would re-engage with their traditional partisanship.

They didn't.

A final X-factor was Trump himself, and whether his increasingly unrestrained brand of campaigning, or one or more of his particular policy positions, would turn off a large (or large enough) share of the Latino electorate. But again, and to many observers’ surprise, this didn’t happen, either. In fact, amidst Trump’s hijinks in the final two weeks of the campaign, late deciders appear to have swung decisively toward the former president.

Views on salient campaign issues and who Latinos trusted more on those issues

While it was widely recognized that the issues that dominated the presidential election, the economy and immigration, worked to Democrats’ disadvantage, the extent to which this disadvantage extended to Latino voters was underappreciated, particularly when it comes to immigration and border issues – and especially in Texas.

No set of issues have been as subject to misconceptions about Latino attitudes than immigration and border security. UT/TXPP Polling illustrates that speculation that Trump’s rhetoric and positions on immigration and border enforcement would alienate the lion’s share of Latino voters proved fatally wrong for Democrats. (For a broadside against some of the national polling that this belief has long been based upon, see Rogé Karma’s recent piece in The Atlantic on the politics of the institutionalized Democratic polling of Latinos, and the strategies that were shaped by it).

The notion that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and policy proposals for immigration and the border would stifle doubts about the Democrats and drive Latinos toward their presidential candidate (either one) finds no support in the Texas data. Exhibit A: In response to a question asked intermittently on the UT/TXPP Poll over the last decade, at least 43% of Texas Latinos have agreed with the concept of immediate deportation of all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S.

Latinos didn’t express overwhelming support for legal immigration, either. Asked three times this year whether or not the U.S. allows too many, too few, or the right amount of legal immigrants into the U.S., 49%, 50%, and 49% of Hispanics said “too many” in February, June, and October of this year.

These results largely align with underlying beliefs among Latinos about the characteristics of immigrants and their social and economic impact

  • 68% of Latinos said that immigrants are generally hard working people; 
  • 63% said that they fill jobs Americans won’t do; and 
  • 62% said that they are part of what makes America special; but 
  • 50% said that immigrants put a strain on local resources.

Latinos were less likely to embrace the more egregious negative stereotypes about their ethnic group, which have been repeatedly found to be without empirical foundation, even though they remain frequent GOP talking points and mainstays of most Texas candidates’ campaign rhetoric. But while Latinos embraced these beliefs at lower levels than White/Anglo voters, sizable minorities nonetheless agreed with these views:

  • 43% of Latinos said that immigrants are looking for handouts and welfare;
  • 36% that they are more likely to commit crimes; and
  • 31% that they take jobs and wages away from U.S. citizens.

This is all to say that while Trump’s more aggressive policy ideas and language towards undocumented immigrants might be off-putting, if not offensive, to large numbers of Latinos, there is also a significant wellspring of agreement among between a third and a half of these voters on many of the key negative characterizations of immigrants that Republican politicians – Donald Trump above all –  espouse about the undocumented population.

[[nid:153003 exclude=White,Black&display=right]]

These attitudinal patterns project onto Latinos’ trust in the two candidates’ handling of these issues. Asked in October who they trusted more to handle immigration and border security, Trump finished the campaign in October polling leading Harris on this issue among Latinos 53% to 33%.

Expectations about Latinos’ responses to GOP messaging on immigration and the border should also have been tempered by the fact that the economy was of greater concern to Latinos in Texas than immigration issues, with the plurality, 39%, saying that the economy or prices and the cost of living were the most important issue determining their vote (compared to 13% who said the same about immigration or border security issues). And their views of the economy were negative.

Prices and the economy were of prime importance to Latino voters and views of Biden’s handling of those issues remained very disapproving. These views had the potential to change with a shift in both the underlying economic conditions (particularly as inflation cooled), and/or as those voters developed views about who would better handle the economy. But by the time voting began in October, more Latino voters trusted Trump to handle the issues they cared about most over Harris.

Latino attitudes about the national economy mirrored the views of the overall electorate, with at least 44% of Latinos saying that the national economy was worse than the prior year during the entirety of 2024 and no more than 28% saying the economy had improved.

While national economic views are notoriously influenced by partisanship and which party controls the White House, Latinos’ views of their personal economic situation didn’t fare much better, with 37% to 44% of Latinos saying that they were worse off during 5 polls conducted in 2024, and no more than a quarter saying that they were doing better economically.

Rural Latinos were more likely to view the national economy and their personal economic situation negatively compared with urban and suburban Hispanics. But overall, with 73% of Latinos saying that they were “very concerned” about the price of food and consumer goods, there was little economic news that was likely to shift this group’s preferences dramatically in the favor of the incumbent party.

Asked in August and October who they trusted more to handle the economy between Trump and Harris, 46% and 49% picked Trump compared to 39% and 40% who picked Harris. On inflation and prices, Trump bested Harris 45% to 38% in August and 49% to 40% in October.

Putting these attitudes in context

The period after elections in which professionals as well as observers are still interested about what exactly happened remains a brief one, with interested actors (usually working for both winners and losers) spinning narratives about “what just happened” that usually accrue some sort of professional benefit — whether the role of a particular technology and its deployment, or the determinative impact of a key group in the electorate. The voting behavior and partisan alignment of Latinos will be a big part of these discussion far beyond the immediate post-game analysis.

This election is no different, but what the public opinion data in Texas make clear is that there were multiple factors at play that aided GOP efforts to maximize their share of the Latino vote. These included national factors like Democratic presidential incumbency during a time of economic dissatisfaction, along with state level factors, including increased GOP organizing and outreach buttressed by Democratic dysfunction, miscalculation, or their combination. Add in short-term factors including more identifiably consistent GOP messaging on the economy and immigration and the singularity of Trump’s particular appeal, which continues to disorient his political opponents, and the daunting nature of Democratic difficulties in maintaining Latino attachments to their candidates in 2024 becomes far more explicable.

Whether these factors combine to create a realignment of the electoral coalitions of the parties, or even some kind of a durable shorter-term shift in voting preferences, won't be clear until we see what happens in at least a couple of subsequent elections. But the data indicate three conclusions about the state of play with Latinos in Texas in the immediate term: (1) Republicans have improved their standing with Latino voters in Texas compared to the pre-Trump era; (2) the overall electoral dynamic clearly favored Republican candidates given the issues most important to Latinos; and (3) Latino party identification is in flux, making this group of key electoral concern for both parties in future elections.

Both parties face serious challenges given the loosened party attachments of Latinos. Republican governance at both the national and state level in the often difficult policy areas Latino voters care about will matter, especially to those with weak party attachments. Democrats’ ability to fully internalize the lessons contained in polling results, and to abandon their misconceptions as they attempt to regroup while shut out of power, will influence their ability to rebuild old ties and establish new ones with a key constituency that is in serious danger of drifting further out of their orbit. 

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