The group of men who helped Trump take back the White House

Donald Trump’s second election victory was remarkably broad and decisive: he appears on track to win more votes than his opponent, unlike in 2016 when he snuck into the White House thanks to the anomalies of the US electoral college system.

One group, however, stands out for a massive shift between 2020 and 2024: Latino voters, and specifically, men.

The crowd at Trump’s August 17 rally in Pennsylvania.Credit: The New York Times

According to the exit polls, Kamala Harris picked up support among white women while holding steady with black and white men.

However, she attracted only 55 per cent of support among Latino voters, down from the 65 per cent Biden achieved four years ago.

The big reason for that shift was a stunning swing to the right among Latino men. In this election, 54 per cent of them voted for Trump, up from 36 per cent four years ago. This was impossible to imagine when Trump first ran for office, promising to build a border wall and decrying a flood of Mexican “rapists” illegally entering the country.

It’s an alarming development for Democrats, who have relied on big margins among voters of colour to offset the party’s declining popularity with white working-class Americans.

In a much-discussed 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, political analysts Jon Juris and Ruy Teixeira foresaw a new era of Democratic dominance because of the party’s rising support among college-educated and non-white voters.

A more multicultural America, so the theory went, would inevitably benefit the left side of politics.

One flaw in this theory is that non-white voters do not vote as a block and cannot be expected to remain loyal to one side of politics. As we saw in this election, the gender divide can also be just as electorally powerful as the racial divide.

Republicans used to believe they had a strong chance of appealing to Latino voters because of social issues: many Latinos are Christian, they believed, so they should be open to anti-abortion policies and a conservative message.

Important Hispanic groupings – such as Cuban Americans and Venezuelan Americans who have fled far-left dictatorships – have also proved natural Republican constituencies because of their aversion to politicians with even a whiff of socialism.

This time around, though, it appears that the economy was the key to Trump’s success among Latino men, who are overwhelmingly working class and have not attended college. They have been battered by high inflation over recent years, and many have fond memories of the US economy under Trump before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Many Latino men were also angered by the increase in unauthorised migration across the southern border early in Biden’s term, even if they or their relatives arrived in the country illegally themselves.

This was most evident in Trump’s remarkable victory in Starr County, a community on the border in south Texas where 97 per cent of residents are Hispanic. The county had not voted for a Republican since 1892 and Hillary Clinton won almost 80 per cent of the vote there in 2016.

In short, this group has started to vote more like white working-class men – especially as they become more integrated into American society and identify more as American workers than as migrants.

In October, a New York Times poll asked Hispanic respondents born in the US whether they felt that Trump was talking about them when he spoke about problems with migration in the country.

Sixty-seven per cent said they did not feel that Trump was talking about them, a finding that helps explain why Latino voters did not recoil en masse at Trump’s promise to deport illegal immigrants.

Trump’s machismo style appears to have resonated with many Latino men, who were clearly unexcited by the prospect of making Harris the first woman in the White House. This helps explain why Trump gained so much more support among them than Latina women.

The much-hyped comments by a comedian at a Trump rally last week in which he compared Puerto Rico to a floating island of garbage did not turn the dial. Neither did endorsements for Harris by prominent Hispanic Americans like Jennifer Lopez.

The question now is whether the rightward shift among Latino men is a one-off, Trump-specific phenomenon or whether a long-term demographic realignment is taking place in the US.

If it’s the latter, Trump’s victory may be just the beginning of a period of electoral pain for Democrats.

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