Latino voters are shifting away from both parties, Madrid says
Political consultant Mike Madrid told NPR host Leila Fadel that Republican efforts to redraw maps for electoral advantage may backfire. Madrid, who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats and studied Latino voters for 35 years, said assumptions about Latino voting had not borne out as acute economic problems pushed those voters toward rejecting both parties.
Madrid, the author of “The Latino Century,” teaches at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Irvine. In the October 26 interview, he said the new MAGA coalition had been abandoning virtually every demographic it relied on for at least 18 months, if not more. He did not see a single demographic in which Republicans had consolidated or increased support, rendering most of those map lines “basically useless” because the maps were not producing the outcomes Republicans sought.
His forecast was that many of the 17 races redrawn for Republican advantage would produce a Republican loss or leave the race extremely competitive, not what the Republicans drew the maps for at all. Madrid called the overall strategy “a colossal mistake” and said he expected the maps to “backfire spectacularly.”
Madrid said the failed assumptions concerned Latino voters, specifically, whom the parties referred to as “new minority voters,” and that these voters “have not been voting along traditional minority lines.” He said that point applied to both parties. He attributed Latinos’ rejection of both parties to the pervasiveness of economic problems and said Republicans, because they held power, would suffer most from the shift.
Madrid placed the shift in a longer partisan history. He said both sides of the aisle had long assumed that “demographics is destiny,” a term that gained popularity during the Obama years. He said the belief attached to the term was that all nonwhite voters were somehow born with “Democratic Party DNA” and would always be anti-Republican voters.
He also drew a distinction between dealignment and realignment. Madrid said Latinos had moved toward Republicans, or more accurately away from Democrats, for much of the past decade, reaching a roughly 50/50 split in the 2024 election. Most data, he said, suggested this was “a dealignment, not a realignment,” because the movement away from Democrats had not represented a durable commitment to Republicans.
Madrid said Latinos had begun moving away from Republicans as well, as both parties failed to provide meaningful results on policies important to an upwardly mobile economic constituency. He said the continuing rejection of both parties, rather than a straight transfer of Latino votes to one side, could define American politics going forward.
Madrid said party alliances were the most fascinating feature of the change. Black voters and white, non-college-educated working-class voters tended to be extraordinarily loyal and very hyperpartisan, he said. He added that this hyperpartisanship had defined American politics for “at least 30, maybe 40, 50 years.” Latino voters were rejecting that racial polarization.
Latino voters were also the most likely to be independents moving away from both parties, Madrid said. Even when registered with one party, they had an extremely high propensity to vote against it.
When Fadel asked whether Latinos would vote for neither party or remain true swing voters, Madrid said the two possibilities overlapped. He described Latinos as the country’s last major swing-voter bloc and said their willingness to vote against a party could operate independently of their party registration.
Madrid said exit polls showed vote shifts of over 20% in some cases in the 2026 midterms. He compared the scale with the historic shift two years earlier, which had moved in the opposite direction.
Madrid described the tendency to vote for or against either party as anomalous. He said the anomalous tendency was “the whole reason, the whole purpose, the whole framework” from which elections were set up in the first place. He also said Latinos were rejecting partisanship and polarization and “what it means to be a minority voter in America.”
The discussion offered a forecast rather than an election result. Madrid expected a historic showing within days and said the dealignment would continue to shape American politics if both parties kept falling short on economic policy. His case for the maps backfiring rested on three linked observations: targeted demographic support had not consolidated, Latinos were shifting away from both parties, and 2026 exit polls showed movement exceeding 20% in some races.