A Party Abandoned: Making Sense of the Latino Vote
There is deep confusion regarding the Latino vote showing up in droves to re-elect former President Donald Trump, and understanding this requires understanding Latinos.
Latina Trump supporters at a 2020 Proud Boys rally in Raleigh. Photo by Anthony Crider on Flickr.
46% of the Latino vote voted for Donald Trump, a man who has repeatedly disparaged ethnic (among other) minority groups in the U.S., especially immigrant groups coming from Central and South America. His mass deportation plan projects the forced removal of 15-20 million undocumented immigrants, particularly scapegoating Latin American immigrants who, according to Fox News, “engaged in a series of high-profile crimes [in 2024].”
Therefore, when the Democratic party has the worst performance with Latino voters in 44 years, and its competition is a candidate who actively fosters anti-Latino immigrant sentiment in the U.S., it’s easy to be confused, but it’s imperative to be understanding.
Why in the hell did so many Latinos vote for Trump?
What must be remembered about this voting cohort is that Latinos are entrepreneurial, traditionally Catholic and escaping countries where economic prosperity is limited by dictatorship, corruption and hyperinflation. Understanding the values that Latinos uphold and the context surrounding their migration to the U.S. is key to understanding the cohort's affinity towards Trump.
Latinos start businesses, Trump seems pro-business; therefore, Latino business owners will vote for the man who, on the surface, will help their business.
According to the Latino Donor Collaborative, 5.1 million Latino-owned businesses generated $766.8 billion in revenue in 2021. If there are 62.5 million Latinos in the U.S., then that means that for every 12 Latinos, at least one is a business owner.
In sum, Latinos are entrepreneurs. They are a class of voters who, despite being half as likely as white Americans to graduate from college, are 1.7 times more likely to start a business. Because of this, it makes sense for business owners, Latino or not, to support a man who relieved small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic and who proposes to expand his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — an act that, on its surface, helps all businesses, but has in practice only favored the top 1% of firms. Trump is pro-business, and pro-small-business enough, to influence the vote of Latino entrepreneurs.
Trump is a businessman and a representation of the Capitalist ideal that has allowed these small Latino businesses to flourish. This becomes more pertinent with the consideration that many of these Latino immigrants, especially naturalized Latinos, have created a life of prosperity in this country that couldn’t have existed in the countries they emigrated from.
Cuba and Venezuela are still reeling from the effects of their authoritarian regimes, while a 2022 survey conducted by the United Nations found that 90% of Mexican immigrants left the country due to “violence, extortion, or organized crime.” Guatemalan, Ecuadorian and Colombian immigrants all escaped their countries for similar reasons.
How can a family develop a sense of economic viability, let alone economic prosperity, if they are fearing for their lives and unsure of where their next meal will come from? Those who have been fortunate to cross the border and start a life in this country will feel a love for this country fueled by a disillusionment with their countries of origin.
In conversations with my father, a Colombian immigrant who voted for Trump, he expressed difficulty disagreeing with Trump when he questioned why the U.S. would accept more immigrants from “shithole countries,” with our conversation implicitly inserting Colombia into the “shithole” country category.
My father, and many Latinos like him, love the U.S. for everything that this country has given them and their families, relative to everything that couldn’t be given by their former countries. Trump, ironically as a prosperous, white, business mogul billionaire, represents the America that gave my father these opportunities more than Vice President Kamala Harris ever would, despite Harris being an example of middle-class American progress — which brings me to my final point.
Harris is a woman, a Black woman; a Black, South Asian woman who is aligning herself with a party representative of ‘identity politics’ to its opponents. Latino voters, and Latinos generally, are not free from the ghosts of Spanish colonialism.
Conquistadors brought the language, the Catholic religion, the racial caste coming in the form of their encomienda system, machisimo, marianismo and all of these factors first introduced in the 1400s, that have now developed into a voter base that is devoutly Catholic — devoutly pro-life, and devoutly anti-gay — that recognizes the power that whiteness holds, so much so that Dominicans are known to be a group of Latinos that actively deny their own blackness, and that has socialized women, especially adult women, to be passive, self-sacrificial, family-centered and extraordinarily spiritual, holding the Virgin Mary as the ideal for womanhood.
It’s a perfect storm of conservative values and ideals that, despite the remarks made towards Latinos and Latino immigrants, creates a space for the God, Gold and Glory colonial ideals embedded within the Latino population to bear fruit, manifesting in an overwhelming support for Trump — someone who has, at least vocally, made clear his alignment with these values.
Harris made Latinos uncomfortable; Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was overshadowed by what his administration represents: a traditionalist, religious, pro-business America that parallels the vision of an America that has given Latino families the soil for them to take root and eventually bear the fruit of economic prosperity.
This vote was an emotional decision, not a rational one; despite how confusing it initially is, Latinos for Trump makes an unfortunate amount of fundamental sense.