Voters and analysts tie the shift to ICE deportations of family members
Hispanic voters delivered the largest swing of any demographic group in Tuesday’s midterm elections, cutting Republican support among Latino voters from 48 percent in 2024 to 30 percent and helping Democrats win control of the House of Representatives and the Senate as well as governorships in states including Texas, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. A New York Times analysis of voter trends put the shift toward Democrats among Latino voters nationwide at 28 points; the next largest, 17 points, came from Asian Americans.
The Guardian reported that Hispanic Americans turned out in record numbers in key battlegrounds, their fury at the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement helping supercharge the Republican losses.
Benny Melendez, the owner of a small housebuilding company in Weslaco in south Texas, was among those who switched. Melendez said he voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, drawn by his promises to secure the Mexican border and improve the economy. This time, he said, he cast his ballot for Democrats.
“Trump went against us,” Melendez said. “He made us the target of ICE operations, so we decided to punish him by voting against his party. That’s what happened.”
Two of Melendez’s cousins and as many as 15 of his building workers have been detained and deported to Mexico by ICE, he said. When he voted for Trump in 2024, he said, he expected immigration raids to focus on people with criminal records — not his relatives and employees. “They’re taking our neighbors. They’re taking our friends. They’re taking our workers, and they’re taking our family members. This is an attack against our community,” he said.
The reversal came two years after Trump courted Hispanic voters directly in the closing days of the 2024 campaign. “I love Hispanics,” he told them then, “and Hispanics love Trump.” That pitch produced measurable results: Trump took 48 percent of the Latino vote in 2024, according to Pew Research — 12 points higher than four years earlier.
“People have called us the sleeping giant for a long time, and now we’re really the swinging giant,” said Stephanie Valencia, co-founder of Equis Research, a Latino polling firm. “The vociferous message that voters sent last night was an F-U to Trump and Republicans and their misplaced priorities and broken promises.”
The results produced a series of firsts. Texas, the state with the second-largest Hispanic population after California, elected its first Latino governor, Democrat Gina Hinojosa, a Rio Grande Valley native whose mother immigrated from Mexico. In California, the world’s fourth-largest economy, Democrat Xavier Becerra, the son of immigrants from Mexico, won election as the state’s first elected Latino governor. Hinojosa, Pulido and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico appeared together at a Voto Latino rally in Weslaco on October 25, ahead of the election.
At Becerra’s final campaign stop at the Palladium in Los Angeles on Sunday, Senator Alex Padilla of California, himself the son of Mexican immigrants, told the crowd: “We’ve known better than anybody what these last two years have been like. We have endured relentless attacks on our communities by Donald Trump and his rogue ICE agents.” Angelica Salas, an immigration activist who leads the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, called Becerra “familia” and said, “Xavier Becerra dreams the way we dream.”
The Democratic sweep ran strongest along the Texas-Mexico border, where Trump made some of his greatest gains two years ago. Democrats won all four congressional districts along the border, including the three that Republicans had gerrymandered in an attempt to bolster their control of the U.S. House. Democratic incumbents Henry Cuellar in Texas 28 and Vicente Gonzalez in Texas 34 held their seats, and the 15th District — 81 percent Hispanic — flipped to Bobby Pulido, a Tejano music star who defeated Republican incumbent Monica De La Cruz by 24 percentage points with 95 percent of ballots counted. Trump had carried the district in 2024. “Not bad for a quinceañera singer,” Pulido said at his victory event.
Abel Prado, Pulido’s campaign manager, attributed the margin in part to Trump’s mass deportation drive, which has seen thousands of undocumented Hispanic people detained and deported by ICE in Texas. “When you implement policies with such cruelty and malice, then this is what you get,” Prado said. Of the 48,000 people in the campaign’s voter database, nearly 40 percent were members of mixed-status families, he said. “These are people whose parents couldn’t vote, but they could, and so when my dad got deported, or my mom got deported, that became a crystallizing moment,” Prado said.
Many residents of the district who voted for Trump in 2024, Prado said, “came to their senses and realized the consequences of their previous vote.” “Tuesday night was a correction to what happens when one party is allowed to run rampant and do whatever they want without fear of consequences,” he said.
The rejection crossed the boundaries of a diverse electorate. The 30 million registered Latino voters are as diverse politically, culturally and economically as any other group, and years of talk of a Latino monolith have led analysts to oversimplified conclusions about their voting patterns. Yet Tuesday’s results showed a similar rejection of Trump’s policies across distinct communities. In Florida, Latino voters swung toward Democrats in the Cuban and Venezuelan communities of Miami-Dade County and equally in the heavily Puerto Rican areas around Orlando. In Miami-Dade, which Trump won by 15 points in 2024, Republican incumbent Maria Elvira Salazar fought a neck-and-neck race against Eliott Rodriguez, a Cuban American newscaster and the Democratic candidate.
Salazar had warned in a September campaign advertisement that Trump’s mass deportation of Hispanic immigrants had “gone too far” and that the voters who put him back in the White House now “feel betrayed.” Trump accused Salazar of backstabbing him and claimed his “Latino support hasn’t wavered.”
Valencia said Democratic leaders, as they prepare to take control of Congress and search for a presidential nominee, should heed Hispanic voters’ demands for policies that reflect their needs. “This was a cry for help from voters to focus on the right things: the economy and inflation, immigration, and wars abroad,” she said. “Democrats are entering a probationary period with voters, they should not make the mistake of thinking that this swing is permanent.”
The election also brought forward a generation of young Hispanic politicians and organizers. Pulido’s entire campaign staff was under 25. “These are people who have never had a seat at the table who can now become a new voice in how we do things,” Prado said. “We absolutely rejected anybody parachuting into the district, out-of-towners telling us how to do things.” Prado dismissed any outside operatives who might claim credit for the result.