Barrels of ink were spilled for interviews with White working-class voters after President Donald Trump first captured the White House in 2016 as the press rushed to report why this coveted constituency had embraced the Republican Party. But the shift among working-class Hispanics has been even more dramatic — and has received only a fraction of the attention.

In 2024, Trump won 55% of Hispanic voters earning $50,000 annually or less, an income cohort commonly defined as working class, defeating then-Vice President Kamala Harris by 11 percentage points , according to CNN exit polling. For the president, that’s 22 points better than the 33% he received from blue-collar Hispanics in 2020, while topping the 50% he garnered from working class voters across all demographics last November.

Democrats have been losing support among this cohort for years: Among Latino voters without a college degree, support for Democrats plunged from 69% in 2012 to just 53% in 2024, according to Catalist, a progressive organization that analyzes precinct-level voting results. Among Latino men, support for Democrats fell from 63% to 47% over the same period.

Democrats have largely themselves — and their faulty strategic choices — to blame, political analysts and operatives have told me.

“There are a lot of reasons why these voters have swung right over the last few cycles, but I think that a major one is that Democrats assumed that these voters were going to stick with their party on identity issues, while Republicans wooed them with cultural and economic issues,” said nonpartisan elections guru Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.

Trump won 46% of the overall Hispanic vote nationwide , holding Harris to just 51%. That solid performance was up from an abysmal 32% in 2020 and an even worse 28% four years prior .

Here’s another way to view the dramatic move rightward by Hispanic voters in 2024: Seven of the 10 most Hispanic counties in the United States voted for Trump over Harris after backing former President Joe Biden in 2020. In these counties, all in Texas and mostly working class, Hispanics are an overwhelming majority, constituting 88% to 98% of the electorate.

Figuring out why blue-collar Hispanics abandoned the Democratic Party after decades of reliable support is the charge of the Working Class Project, an initiative established by American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super PAC. What the effort has learned about working class Hispanics, via extensive polling and focus groups, is eye-opening. This cohort has the same reasons for supporting Trump as blue-collar Whites.

“They think Democrats are prioritizing what they see as niche and liberal social and cultural issues over real ideas to make life more affordable,” wrote Working Class Project spokesman Ian Sams in a Substack memorandum detailing the findings from focus groups with working-class Hispanics in McAllen, Texas, a border community in the once deep-blue Rio Grande Valley.

According to Sams, the sessions also found that blue collar Hispanics believe “Democrats were too soft on border security and immigration and cared more about letting people into the country illegally than helping people already here legally.”

In reading voters’ comments from the McAllen, Texas, focus groups, it’s clear Sams isn’t overstating Democrats’ problems with this growing voting bloc.

“With the past four years of Biden, they were pretty lenient and they were giving thousands of dollars to people, immigrants that couldn’t work,” an unnamed Hispanic woman said during a discussion about illegal immigration. “Since they’re getting amnesty because they come from a country that has a lot of violence, they’re letting them stay here but they’re supporting them with money from hardworking people.”

“I’ll still take a bad economy over the social war stuff about, like, trans, trying to shove stuff down our throats to make it okay,” added an unnamed Hispanic man, during a discussion about culture. “It’s like: ‘Hey, yeah sure bro, you can do whatever you want, you don’t have to be showing me 24/7.”

Democrats can perhaps be forgiven for landing in this predicament. Historically, Hispanics tended to support Democrats because they backed comprehensive legislation linking border security and interior enforcement measures with a pathway to regularization, possibly citizenship, for the millions of illegal immigrants living in the US. Latinos typically opposed Republicans in part because the GOP demanded securing the border first, after which certain illegal immigrants might be regularized.

But the Hispanic electorate has evolved, Republican strategist and prominent Trump critic Mike Madrid explained to me last week. Madrid, who specializes in Hispanic messaging and turnout, said this voting bloc is more assimilated than earlier this century, is filled with more native-born Americans, and has therefore taken on the political character of any other ethnic or racial group that has spent decades (or longer) in the U.S.

It’s therefore quite natural, Madrid said, that working-class Hispanics have started behaving politically like blue-collar whites, which in 2024 meant voting Trump over Harris because of concerns about inflation, border security and various cultural issues.

“This has been happening, demographically, for the better part of a decade. It’s just people realizing it because, it was basically — you couldn’t ignore it anymore. Democrats have been ignoring it for a very long time,” said Madrid, author of The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy. “Ten years ago, this was a more racially, ethnically focused group. Immigration was much more of a touchstone issue because more of us were immigrants.”

“There was this assumption during the Obama years that all nonwhite people vote a certain way. That’s not how this works. This is all very dynamic,” Madrid added, emphasizing that American-born Hispanics are not focused on immigration. They view themselves, he said, “as Americans first — because they are.”

It’s a good reminder that politics is never static. But that cuts both ways. The focus groups were conducted in May, weeks before this past weekend’s federal raids to round up illegal immigrants and the resulting unrest in Los Angeles County. Harsh immigration policy has hurt Republicans with Hispanics before, including during Trump’s first term.

In 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney positioned himself as a border hawk to burnish his conservative credentials. The effort was costly. Romney received 27% of the Hispanic vote to Obama’s 71% in what was described as a consolidation, by Democrats, of this crucial minority.

Romney was criticized for being too hardline by no less than a certain New York businessman named Donald Trump, who told Newsmax in a November 2012 interview: “The Democrats didn’t have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited,” he said. “What they were is, they were kind.”

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

David M. Drucker is columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of "In Trump's Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP."

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