Over 36 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in the midterm cycle this November, with sizable populations in states with the most competitive House races in the country, including California, Florida, Nevada, and Texas. New research from the Pew Research Center reveals that Latino identity is closely tied to how Hispanics vote, with those who identify as Americans first favoring conservative candidates.
For years, the Democratic Party has relied on rallying Latino voters through identity-politics tactics to isolate Hispanics as a separate group, implying their lives are worse than those of other Americans and rallying them to socialist-style redistribution policies.
At the core of the strategy was a thinly veiled attempt to categorize Latinos as separate from other Americans. The problem? Many Latinos don’t identify that way, find the pandering offensive, and consider themselves Americans before any other label.
The Democratic Party’s pandering is not subtle. In the 2019 Democratic primary debates, several prominent Democratic presidential candidates, including Beto O’Rourke, Julián Castro, and Cory Booker, switched to speaking Spanish in an attempt to win Latinos over on the debate stage. The switch was met with controversy, with some considering it inauthentic. This coincided with the academic left’s unveiling of the unpopular term “Latinx” to describe Latinos, only to find that many believe the term is offensive.
These isolating and pandering tactics may have worked to retain a share of the progressive Latino vote, but that share is dwindling. The latest Economist/YouGov survey has Democrats winning just 38 percent of Latinos. This is down from 60 percent in 2022, a startling twenty-two-point decline in four years.
Democrats have been steadily losing the Latino vote with their identity-politics methodology. New data from the Pew Research Center shows Latinos who identify as Americans first, and do not view themselves as victims, favor Republicans.
A July 9 study from the Pew Research Center finds Latinos who supported President Donald Trump in 2024 are most likely to say their identity is “American,” while Latino Harris voters are more likely to identify with their country of origin. The report shows 43 percent of Latino Trump supporters use the term “American” as their primary identity, and 54 percent of Hispanic Harris voters identify by their country of origin first.
The survey also finds 69 percent of Latino Harris voters say being Latino is very important to their identity, compared to 42 percent of Trump voters.
This data strongly suggests that moderates and conservatives looking to reach and activate Latinos should not attempt to mimic the Democratic Party’s identity-politics approach.
The survey found Latinos who voted for Kamala Harris largely see their Hispanic identity as a disadvantage, with the largest share (39 percent) saying being Latino is a disadvantage. Trump voters largely see their Hispanic identity as neither hurting nor helping them (57 percent), with only 15 percent saying it hurts them.
What this data indicates is that for Latinos, messaging that addresses core concerns — such as inflation, taxes, healthcare, education, immigration, and local and state issues — is much more likely to move voters toward Republicans. Meanwhile, messages that focus on Latino identity, particularly messaging that frames the Latino experience as a struggle, are more likely to activate Democrats.
The Democrat Party’s approach to Latinos has not been working, considering the share of the vote the party has earned has been shrinking with each election cycle.
In the 2022 midterm cycle, Democrats won Latinos 60 percent to 39 percent. In the 2018 midterm cycle, Democrats won Latinos 69 percent to 29 percent. Current polling shows Democrats will be lucky if they can get 40 percent of the Latino vote in November.
The same trend has played out over the last two presidential election cycles. In 2024, President Trump won a historic 46 percent of the Latino vote nationwide, losing Latinos by just five points. In 2020, Trump lost Latinos by a full 33 percentage points, 65 percent to 32 percent.
Ten years ago, in 2016, Trump won only 29 percent of Latinos in the presidential election, losing Latinos by 36 points to Hillary Clinton (65 percent to 29 percent).
President Trump went from losing Latinos in his first run for president by a 36-point margin to losing them by five points in 2024. That shift proves that the Democrat identity-politics strategy is failing. There are progressive factions within the Latino electorate — those who believe their identity is a hardship that must be overcome with socialist redistribution policies — but the Latino vote is not a monolith. Those who identify as Americans and chose the United States because of its opportunities are much more open to conservatives. And with the Democratic Party’s tactics failing, an increasing share of Latinos will be looking for a new political home.
Manzanita Miller is the senior political analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
