“They’re moving away from Republicans. Notice I’m not saying to Democrats,” Republican strategist Mike Madrid told reporters during a national briefing on the Latino electorate.
That distinction ran through an Aug. 28 discussion hosted by American Community Media as the 2026 midterm elections approach. Latino voters who helped lift Donald Trump in 2024 are showing signs of moving away from the president. The panelists said the change looks less like a return to the Democratic Party than a warning to both parties.
María Isabel Di Franco Quiñonez, senior research director at Equis Research, said the 2024 result prompted sweeping claims of a political realignment. More recent polling and election results point to a more fluid electorate. Fewer Latino voters identify as Democrats, she said, while more call themselves independents. Republican candidates have gained support without producing the same growth in Republican identification.
In Equis Research’s latest polling, about 14 percent of Latino voters who backed Trump in 2024 said they planned to support a Democrat in November. Another 10 percent were undecided. The movement crossed age, gender and geography, though it was strongest among irregular voters, many of whom were new to voting in 2024 or had skipped the 2020 election.
“Latinos are lost. Latinos are back,” Di Franco Quiñonez said, describing the headlines that follow each election. She cautioned that one result does not establish a lasting party shift. Early evidence from Latino-heavy areas in New Jersey’s 2025 gubernatorial election showed Democratic support recovering from its 2024 low, but skepticism toward both parties remains.
Madrid, co-founder of the Lincoln Project and author of “The Latino Century,” said the weakening of Democratic loyalty began well before 2024. He traced it to 2016 and a growing divide between Latino voters and party institutions. Trump benefited from that opening, but Madrid rejected the idea that those voters had embraced the Republican Party or MAGA politics as a permanent identity.
The stronger current, he said, is an anti-establishment populism tied to economic frustration. That helps explain how Latino neighborhoods can support candidates with sharply different political labels from one election to the next. Eli Valentin, a Virginia Union University administrator and author of “Politicking in the Barrio,” called it “a material movement before it is an ideological movement.”
Valentin pointed to New York City precincts that backed Trump in 2024 and then voted for democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani a year later. Recent primary defeats of longtime Latino Democratic officeholders also reflected dissatisfaction with established leadership, he said. The votes did not amount to a broad conversion to democratic socialism. They showed that economic messages and a record of delivering for a neighborhood may matter more than party labels.
Clarissa Martínez De Castro, vice president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS, said Latino voters have long split tickets and moved between candidates. That flexibility is growing as younger voters enter the electorate. Between 20 and 25 percent of Latinos who vote in each election cycle are new to the electorate, she said.
Their immediate concerns are familiar. Eight in 10 Hispanic working adults are part of the working class, Martínez De Castro said. Four of their top five issues are tied to household finances: the cost of living, wages and jobs, housing, and health care. Immigration ranks fifth. Small increases in basic expenses can determine whether a household stays afloat.
Immigration still carries political weight, particularly as voters react to federal enforcement inside U.S. cities. Martínez De Castro said many Latino Trump voters expected deportations to focus on people with violent criminal records or recent arrivals. They did not expect long-established residents to become the main targets. Latino voters continue to favor an orderly border while supporting legal status for undocumented residents who have lived and worked in the country for years. Seven in 10 Latino Republicans support such a path even when pollsters describe it as amnesty, she said.
Campaign contact remains strikingly weak. UnidosUS found that 53 percent of Latino Texans who voted in this year’s primary had heard from no candidate or political party. Primary voters tend to be among the most reliable participants, making the lack of outreach more notable. The figure helps explain why party attachments remain thin and newer voters are especially willing to move.
Turnout may carry as much meaning in November as the division between Democrats and Republicans. Martínez De Castro said Latino presidential participation had grown by roughly 1 million voters from one cycle to the next for years. In 2024, the increase was only about 115,000, the smallest in more than two decades. Some dissatisfied voters changed sides. Others stayed home.
The panelists differed over the best term for the change. Di Franco Quiñonez called it dealignment. Valentin preferred repudiation. Their point was much the same: Latino voters are not waiting for either party to claim them. The midterms will show whether candidates understood the message, or simply mistook rejection of one party for loyalty to the other.
