Three Camps and a Volatile Voice: Latinos as a Ticking Time Bomb in the Next US Election
Latino American voters are experiencing significant political divisions, particularly following the 2024 presidential election.
Political advisers and polling experts told Axios that after the shift toward Donald Trump in 2024, the nation’s fastest-growing electorate is now splitting into competing political identities, lacking a single partisan anchor after decades of relative Democratic reliability.
This division helped reshape the 2024 electoral map and stands as one of the major uncertainties heading into 2026 and 2028, even as economic conditions and Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement have provided momentum for Democrats.
Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist and author of The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy, told Axios, “It’s a fracture, not a realignment.”
He added that Latinos — an ethnically diverse group representing 15 percent of US voters — now exhibit the lowest level of party loyalty of any major voting bloc, making them the group most likely to identify as independent.
Based on election data analysis and interviews with political consultants, Axios identified three distinct segments of Latino voters heading into 2026: pro-Trump Latinos, movement-driven progressives, and disengaged non-voters.
Three Camps
Pro-Trump Latinos align with Republican policies in the Trump era, often driven by economic populism, cultural conservatism, and anti-establishment sentiment rather than traditional Republican ideology.
This group includes working-class men, small business owners, and evangelical or Catholic voters. They emphasize order, religion, and skepticism toward elites, and obtain most of their political information through YouTube, Spanish-language radio, WhatsApp, and podcasts.
Progressive movement voters are rooted in left-leaning social and economic movements, including labor rights, racial justice, climate activism, and student debt relief. They tend to be younger, urban, college-educated, and often women. They are more likely to vote but withdraw quickly if candidates fail to uphold declared values.
Politically active online through TikTok, Instagram, and activist networks, they have little tolerance for what they perceive as political inauthenticity.
Disengaged voters are politically aware but largely uninvolved. They frequently abstain or vote inconsistently and are overrepresented among working-class communities, young voters, and habitual non-participants.
They consume information through YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, and peer networks. They have minimal trust in either major party, institutions, or traditional media. Their primary motivation is economic pressure rather than ideology, and when they do vote, their alignment is uncertain.
The Latino voting bloc has long been more complex than often portrayed, ranging from conservative Cuban Americans in South Florida to moderate Puerto Ricans in New York and ideologically diverse Latino communities in Texas, California, and beyond.
Polls showed that many Latino voters were drawn to Trump in 2024 because they prioritized the economy, jobs, and cost of living over cultural or traditional immigration issues. However, this pattern was not uniform across regions and age groups.
According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, sharply negative evaluations of Trump’s performance emerged among Latino adults, with nearly 70 percent expressing dissatisfaction with his handling of immigration and the economy.
Detentions of US citizens, images of aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and the shooting of two American citizens in Minneapolis reportedly angered Latinos who had previously supported Trump.
Republican analysts told Reuters that criticism by Trump and other Republicans of Puerto Rican star Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance is not politically helpful.
Fianka Rodriguez, a former Trump administration official, said such criticism “will do us more harm than good” and should not have become a cultural battle.
In a Yahoo/YouGov poll conducted from February 9 to 12 among 1,704 US adults, 42 percent said Bad Bunny “represents America better,” compared with 39 percent who said Trump represents it better.
