A Preliminary Look at the 2024 Latino Vote‍

Since Election Day, the Equis team has been collecting precinct-level data to try and make sense of the shift in support we saw among Latino voters. Below is a preliminary analysis. But first, remember: studying big Latino shifts is separate from a diagnosis of how Trump won, which can't be pegged on any single demographic. 

1. Let’s get this out of the way: this looks and sounds like a realignment.

‍Trump’s Latino support will be at least 13 points higher in 2024 than it was in 2016 (from ~30% to ~43-48%). ‍The realignment may be unique to Trump… but functionally it doesn’t matter as the Trump Era continues.

2. Latinos are not a monolith, but they are still moving as a group.  

It appears that the 2024 shift, like the one in 2020, again cuts across geographies, urbanicity, and country of origin. Broad-based shifts like these challenge the use of provincial theories to explain them. But a word of caution: we should wait for more data to confirm these trends. Precinct analysis is noisy, and voters in densely Latino areas are likely different than Hispanics elsewhere.

3. The shifts among Puerto Rican voters (in Osceola County in Florida and in Berks/Lehigh counties in Pennsylvania) have been most surprising to some.

‍Clearly the “garbage” “joke” about Puerto Rico at Trump’s notorious Madison Square Garden rally, which garnered much attention and even drew Bad Bunny into the fray, was not enough to overcome other Democratic disadvantages, and/or came too late to turn around results. 

4. Polls told us to expect vote-switching among Latinos — in our last poll, 9% of Latinos who said they had voted for Biden in 2020 were telling us they would vote for Trump in 2024.

And indeed it seems key. But some of that persuasion effect comes out in turnout too: voters who were disgruntled with Democrats but would rather sit out than vote for Trump. In most places, the drop in Democratic votes was larger than the Trump hike, signs of both crossover voters and demoralized Democrats.

To clarify the thinking: we don't know, and will never know with any certainty, how much of the shift was about vote-switching vs. turnout. But where you have a Trump hike roughly in line with a Democratic drop, vote-switching is a more probable culprit than a turnout differential (where Dem turnout drops and GOP turnout increases). Persuasion and turnout tend to point in the same direction.

For comparison, this is what 2016->2020 changes looked like in the same locales. It was a mixed story. In some places (Reading/Philly/Lawrence), there appeared to be both defection & depression at play, as in 2024. In other places (Allentown/New Mexico/Arizona), there seemed to be competing surges from both sides (both Biden and Trump increased their vote totals relative to 2016). In Florida and Texas, there were signs of both switching and aTrump surge (even if you assumed that every vote subtracted from the Democratic column was added to the Trump column, Trump still found more votes beyond that.).

Again, this is an inexact science at this stage. Voter files will help us flesh this story out a bit.

5. There appears to be a (very preliminary) hint of a campaign effect.

‍The average shift in Trump’s share of the two-way vote is +8.9 in the parts of the battleground states we looked at. In non-battleground areas, it is +9.6. That difference is in the range of what you would expect from an effective campaign. Additionally, the shifts between battleground locales are less varied than those between non-battleground locales; outside the battleground, there is a wider range of swing. 

6. Most importantly: Republicans should not assume the whole of these Latino gains will stick for all Republicans going forward, especially when Trump isn’t on top of the ballot.

‍Across major senate races, Senate Republicans under-performed Trump in densely Hispanic areas.

In Arizona, we see one of the smallest shifts from 2016 to 2020, then a big drop for Harris as precincts in Maricopa (Phoenix) and Pima (Tucson) counties get more Hispanic. Gallego under-performed Biden, but by less – he hews closer to that 2020 line.

The down ballot dynamic appears to go beyond the Senate. House Republicans also under-performed Trump — more in densely-Hispanic precincts than in other precincts, as in the charts below. (See also NM-02, TX-34, etc. We are continuing to look elsewhere.)

This is consistent with the story from 2022, when Senate Republicans did not improve on Trump’s 2020 Hispanic support, outside of Florida. 

As dangerous as it is to deny a realignment as it is happening, so it is to assume it is inevitable or irreversible — especially with a group this dynamic (both swingy and fast-growing). 

“Demographics is destiny” takes don’t age well, in either direction. 

What happens next

As of November 15, we are still waiting for the entirety of the results. There are two huge missing pieces of the puzzle: Nevada, which insists on making us wait longer than anyone else for precinct results, and California, which is still counting.

From there, to truly understand the outcomes of this election, we will have to wait for voter files to come back from the states, which will give us a better read on who turned out, and for the Catalist and Pew analyses that will follow.

And stay tuned for further post-mortem analysis from Equis in 2025.