Support from Latino voters was a huge factor in President Donald Trump’s victory last fall. He won close to 50% of Latinos in 2024 — a major pickup from 2020, when just 36% voted for him.
In the wake of the election, it seemed like we were in the midst of a seismic shift in traditional political alignments, and Democrats were in a panic about whether they could reclaim their traditional majorities of Latino support.
But now, several months into the second Trump administration, the picture is more complicated — at least according to a recent focus group conducted by reporter Adrian Carrasquillo.
Carrasquillo writes the Huddled Masses newsletter for the Bulwark, and he recently spoke with a number of Latino voters who supported Trump in 2024. They hail from all over the country — Nevada, California, Florida, New Jersey — and their reviews of Trump’s policies are pretty bad.
“I’ve been in this country for what, 45 years now? And I love America, but I’m just getting depressed here,” one voter told Carrasquillo. “You know what I mean? You kind of just get all the negative.
“My wife is Colombian. Every time we go to Colombia, people are like, ‘Oh, I hate America.’ Like nobody wants to come here,” he continued. “It’s kind of sad, right? We’re not the country like we used to be. People loved this country. They wanted to come here, and it’s just going in the wrong direction.
“And I don’t know what’s going to change it, I don’t know. Is he really going to make a difference in the next three years? Three months? God knows. But right now, it’s just he hasn’t lived up to any of my expectations.”
For more on the takeaways from this focus group, Carrasquillo joined The Show.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Thank you for being here. So before we get to this shift in these voters' perceptions of Trump, can you talk a little bit about why they told you they voted for him in the first place?
ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO: Yeah, I wanted to start with saying that our publisher Sarah Longwell conducts these focus groups, and they've got a great team. But as soon as I heard them and I was on her podcast to talk about them, I knew that we had some really, really interesting stuff here. And so that's why I wanted to do it for my newsletter.
I think the economy — and we know this and we hear this every few years — the economy is just this huge piece of why people were making their decisions, you know, grocery prices and things like that. And as far as the immigration that we're going to get into, I think there was a part of people saying, OK, the border — insert your adjective. Either it's here is out of control or your description, or needs to be tightened up or Biden's weak on the border. So some of that stuff was totally happening.
I think what we've seen is in these few months, there were some immediate sort of people being like OK, doubting, but early on I saw that Donald Trump with Latino voters still was holding fine. It was still early. People had just voted a few months earlier, but now as we got past this 100 days and into the summer and things started piling up, I think people, that has led to regretting some of their votes.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, so listening to what these folks had to say about how things have unfolded, as you were just alluding to there, I got the strong sense that there was this way in which personal experiences that folks were having counteracted the rhetoric that they were hearing from Trump on the trail. Let's listen to one more clip.
[AUDIO CLIP]
Like a week or so ago, somebody in our area, in our neighborhood got picked up from ICE. And I mean it's just like you see it more and more and there's like in our neighborhood, they have announcements like ICE is here today, and it's just a big thing. My family's not worried about it, but my kids go to school here, and they have friends that they're worried about it. Like for kids, that's not OK to be worried that they're gonna come home and not have their parents home.
[AUDIO CLIP ENDS]
DINGMAN: I mean, is that a fair characterization, Adrian? Would you say that once folks have this kind of front row seat, it's when their views start to change?
CARRASQUILLO: I'm really glad you picked that clip because that was the one that for me crystallized what was happening here with the focus group participants, when they were smacked in the face with reality. You know, we have to like think if we take a step back, people, when everything's a binary choice in politics: less immigration, more or — in the case of MAGA Republicans— zero immigration. And so people are just like, OK, what's going on currently is not good.
But I mean, a lot of the pushback, frankly, and when people get upset at these folks that are having regrets — and I've been hearing it for the last week, by the way, in comments and people reaching out to me — is saying what did they think was going to happen?
So now confronted by a woman who clearly says, "Look, my family doesn't have immigration problems, but we're getting letters to our house that they're not going to let ICE into the school. There was just someone picked up in the neighborhood recently. My kids are concerned because they, their parents, the parents of, of, you know, their kids' friends are now going to be taken away."
And so the being hit with that reality of the cruelty, the punishment, the human suffering is what has made people say, “Well, I didn't sign up for this.”
DINGMAN: Yeah, that makes me think of, if I'm not mistaken, one of the other folks in the focus group tells a story about his friend whose father gets deported and then the family doesn't hear anything about him for, was it two months?
CARRASQUILLO: Yeah, and, and we have so become conditioned and accustomed to the "cruelty is the point" concept being just like sort of a part like a, you know, feature not a bug of any Trump administration.
But now people are seeing that, you know, self-deportation sort of hurt Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign, but now it's like a huge part of the effort, which is, "We're going to make the situation so bad for you. We're going to disappear your loved one. By the way, we're going to send them to a detention center that's infamous — in Louisiana as an example — where you don't have access to counsel and you don't have access to family members." And so people get taken off the street, and you don't know where they are.
And just that kind of stuff, I think that we see it in the news, but to hear the voters talk about it and to hear — and I guess what one of my takeaways is that I'm not a Democratic consultant. I don't know, but the sense that I get is that immigration probably won't be a leading ad necessarily in 2026 in the midterms.
But immigration is sort of like this really strong No. 2 thing that's coming in behind the economic concerns, and they're saying, "Prices are still high. Tariffs are a mess. This is not helping me. My family's not doing better. Oh, and by the way, I work in construction and they're taking people away. I've seen this happen in my community."
And so that to me, it was is really powerful and you see it in these focus groups.
DINGMAN: Well, just about a minute left here, Adrian. I'm curious to know from your perspective, you have been covering Trump's popularity — or lack thereof — amongst Latino voters for a long time, right? You wrote some of the first stories about this back in 2016. How do you think the conversations with these voters have changed over that almost 10-year period now?
CARRASQUILLO: Powerful question. I mean, look, I appreciate you saying that because I remember when everybody thought that Hispanics were just going to hate Trump. And if you go look back at polling and stories, he did have extremely low approval rating with Latinos in 2016.
But there were these pockets, and it was men in the military, people who said they literally wanted a strong man, people who said they didn't want a woman, people who would make jokes about “Oh, you know, is there going to be a war every 30 days because a woman every 30 days is going to start a war?” I mean, just stuff that sort of caught my attention early on.
And I think as time has passed when there are two choices and when he is the Republican standard bearer and in his first term, so many Republicans fought him like Paul Ryan and now everybody has gotten in line. You know, now you see that, yes, his support has grown, but the same way that Democrats couldn't count on keeping Latino voters for infinity forever, Republicans are going to have some trouble for them in 2026 and in 2028 explaining to voters why what they said didn't happen. Instead we were just showered with cruelty.
