Why Latino men voted for Trump: ‘It’s the economy, stupid’

Tomas Garcia and Maria Viesca-Garcia toasted the presidential win with an old fashioned and a martini inside the opulent, 64-story Trump International Hotel Las Vegas as the sun shone the day after a historic presidential election.

Around the hotel bar, people donned “Make America Great Again” hats and one woman wore a red shirt with the numbers “45” and “47” printed above a flag. Garcia and his wife, from San Antonio, voted for Trump in 2016, again in 2020 and in this election.

“Why am I for Trump? Because I’m an American first of all,” said Garcia, 70, whose great-grandparents emigrated from Mexico to the U.S.

Garcia grew up poor in San Antonio. And for 40 years he poured his life savings into a retirement fund.

“When Biden came into presidency I lost $80,000 of my investment, but that’s OK, I’m looking for rosier times,” he said. “I know that I’m going to do good with Trump.”

Trump’s economic populism and promises to “make America great again” have deeply resonated with some Latinos who turned sharply right on Tuesday amid concerns over inflation, the border and safety. They brushed off anti-immigrant language and backed him by 46%, compared with 2020 when he received 34% of their vote.

Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.

(Brittny Mejia / Los Angeles Times)

In some of the most heavily Latino corners of the country voters came out roaring for Trump. In Starr County, Texas, along the U.S.-Mexico border, where 98% of the population is Latino and immigration is in their frontyard, Trump pulled in 58% of the vote. In the heavily Latino Miami-Dade County, Trump won 56%.

“What we’re witnessing is Trump ushering a major realignment in American politics, when it comes to the Latino vote,” said Alfonso Aguilar, Hispanic engagement director at the American Principles Project and a Trump campaign surrogate.

Latinos certainly weren’t the only demographic that voted in droves for Trump, but what was striking was how Latino men embraced Trump compared with the last two elections. They favored Trump 55% to 43%, according to Edison Research. Four years earlier, Biden won Latino men’s votes by a 23% margin. In 2016, Hillary Clinton pulled in 63% of their vote, while Trump got 32%. It was an “extraordinary shift,” as pollsters put it, and a sign of the changing views of a Latino population increasingly distanced from the immigrant experience and more focused on pocketbook issues. But it also signaled the stronger showing of men among Trump supporters.

Former President Trump participates in a roundtable discussion with Latino leaders in Doral, Fla.

(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

On social media, people blamed the swing toward Trump on machismo. Or Latinos, they said, were desperate to be white. Or they were self-loathing. Anti-blackness and colorism swayed their vote, they said.

Others stressed the fact that despite Latino men moving toward Trump, there was a much larger margin of White men who voted him into office.

The reality of why some voted the way they did, in many ways, was as nuanced and diverse as Latinos themselves, with differing views on immigration, trade, policing, LGBTQ+ rights, Gaza.

But resoundingly, Latinos, who make up a wide spectrum of cultures and people, felt they struggled more economically during the Biden administration, experts say. The COVID shutdowns — which began during the Trump administration but were the most strict under the governors of blue states — kneecapped the economy and gave way to inflation. Working families scrambled to find work as housing prices jumped. These factors dovetailed with historic immigration highs, said Mike Madrid, a strategist who co-founded the Lincoln Project, a Republican anti-Trump political action committee.

“One in five Hispanic men work in the construction industry,” he said. They enjoyed low interest rates under the first Trump administration and lower housing costs, whether those had anything to do with his policies or not. “If you’re one of the Latino men who work in the construction industry, you were quantifiably better off under the Trump administration.”

And it wasn’t just Latino men. Trump also picked up support among Latinas, at 38% — up from 30% in 2020.

Poll after poll has shown that the economy is a top issue for Latino men and women. “It’s the economy, stupid,” Madrid later posted on X, in a throwback to former President Clinton’s campaign mantra. Latino voters were increasingly voting based on pocketbook issues, he said.

The irony for Michael Fienup, who heads the Center for Economic Research & Forecasting at California Lutheran University and was one of the authors of the 2024 U.S. Latino GDP, is that under both parties Latino wages grow and Latinos see big surges in labor force participation.

“You’re going to find very challenging to argue that Latinos suffered differential economic harm,” he said. “Latinos are hard-working, they’re self-sufficient, they’re entrepreneurial, they’re patriotic, they’re optimistic. Guess what? Those are fundamentally American characters,” he said. And he said they have been a major driver of the economy.

But some still feel left behind. With a disproportionate number of Latinos in the service industry, they are vulnerable to economic headwinds. And with an overall lower educational attainment compared with white people, they have lower long-term earning power.

“Hispanics are about the American dream,” said Abraham Enriquez, who was raised by the children of Mexican immigrant parents in a small west Texas town. He recalls his parents and grandparents talking about how former Republican President Reagan “loved Hispanics.”

President-elect Donald Trump, joined by Melania Trump and son Barron Trump, arrives to speak at an election night watch party on Wednesday in West Palm Beach, Fla.

(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

“[Trump] being a billionaire from New York, with a beautiful family and a beautiful wife, as a young Hispanic man, that is the American dream, that is what you one day want to be like,” said Enriquez, 29.

After graduating from college in Abilene, Texas, Enriquez founded Bienvenido US, a conservative Latino advocacy group now working in Texas, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia. “When we were looking at how we were going to organize the Hispanic vote, we kind of saw that the low-hanging fruit was Hispanic men. They are the most conservative by nature, but yet we vote at a record-low number.”

Trump has promised a sweeping departure from the Biden administration on the economy. He said he will institute tax cuts, particularly eliminating taxes on tips and on overtime — a potentially critical wage boost for union workers. He promised to deregulate industry and embolden the oil and auto industries. And most controversially, he said he plans to impose strict tariffs, denying economists’ warnings that they could cause massive inflation.

“For ordinary working-class Hispanic men, we are locked out of homeownership,” Enriquez said. “President Trump talking about that and saying, ‘I want you to achieve the American dream,’ he’s speaking directly to Hispanic men who feel like their masculinity is now in question because they aren’t able to be providers for their families.”

Trump has also blamed immigrants for the woes of Latino citizens and longtime residents — as immigration into the U.S. reached record highs under the Biden administration after more than a decade of declines. Trump vowed to launch a mass deportation program on Day One in the Oval Office .

“They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs,” Trump said in a CNN debate this summer.

As Trump touted deportation, Govs. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida had been carrying out their own displacement campaign, shipping migrants to California, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois, pounding a message of a failed Biden administration that allowed people and drugs to cross the border. The pressure to crack down on the border pushed Democrats to shift strategy.

Although economists say migration tends to improve the overall economy, it can sow fear among those struggling to make ends meet in low-wage jobs.

Rafael Romero, a 30 year-old Cuban immigrant who works as a Lyft driver in Las Vegas, said Trump’s words resonated with him.

Supporters hold a sign before Trump arrives to speak during a campaign event Sept.12 in Tucson.

(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

“I think that if you’re here legally, if you’re doing things the right way, there’s no reason you’d get kicked out of the country,” he said. “If you want a country where you can get ahead, why would you destroy it by doing things illegally?”

Latinos who are against Trump, he concluded, are those in the country illegally and rightfully fear deportation.

What has galled many Trump detractors is the apparent indifference Latino supporters of the president-elect have about his loyalty to right-wing, racist groups, his immigrant scapegoating and his own racist remarks.

“If you tell a people so many times that they are horrible and criminals, they will turn away from their own people and run towards whiteness,” Maria Hinojosa, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Mexican American journalist and founder of Futuro Media, posted on X after the elections.

But experts say that many Latinos have long held conservative values, even as they leaned toward the Democratic Party, which was viewed as fighting for workers. Trump flipped the script by assuming the mantle of saving American jobs from waves of new migrants, while playing off those traditional values.

A pro-Trump ad that painted Harris as a radical liberal, out of touch with the working class, seemed to strike a chord with men. “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” said one ad released in the months before election.

“I remember when I was in elementary school, they used to bring a firefighter, a police officer, to inspire people, now they bring drag queens,” said Ernie Quintana, 44, who voted for the first time.

Aguilar, with the American Principles Project, referred to liberal views on gender as “a sleeper issue that had a great deal of impact with the Hispanic community.”

A Fox News projection of the presidential election results broadcast early Wednesday.

(Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Although the loss has plunged some Democrats into recriminations and soul searching about the future of their party, experts are urging them not to place the blame on Latinos.

“The overwhelming lesson of this election was that a large majority of white men and white women voted to elect Donald Trump. That is the headline,” Matt A. Barreto, a pollster and advisor to the Harris-Walz presidential campaign, wrote in an email. “We should be careful not to scape goat minorities because of shifts in their voting patterns when a clear majority of people of color voted Democrat.”

To win, the party will have to bring more Latino men back into its fold by speaking for their interests.

“There needs to be a reckoning,” said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who helped Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) draw the Hispanic vote during his presidential bids.

“We’ve allowed the Republicans to steal the messages that got me as a non-college-educated Latino male to join the party in 1990 and we’ve got to get that back on our side and be the party of the working class,” he said. “People are anxious about where they are in their personal lives, they’re working harder and they’re getting less money in their paycheck and Donald Trump has tricked them into thinking that he’ll make it better for them.”