According to exit polling, President-elect Donald J. Trump captured 46 percent of the Latino vote on his way back to the White House. This percentage is the highest for any Republican presidential candidate in recent history.
Mr. Trump improved considerably over his 2020 performance when he captured 32 percent of the Latino vote. In 2016, Mr. Trump received the support of 28 percent of Latinos.
Some commentators have been quick to attribute Mr. Trump’s success to voters prioritizing the economy and inflation in this year’s election. But Sergio González, a history professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis., urged caution when reading exit polls.
Insights from organizations like the Pew Research Center and Equis, a research firm that focuses on Latino voters, are forthcoming and will be more reliable, he said. While these studies take more time to develop, they offer more nuances, including geographical discrepancies, and questions of gender and religious differences.
“But even on first read, I think it’s impossible to not recognize the fact that there were some pretty dramatic shifts happening among Latino voters,” Mr. González told America. Such shifts, he said, challenge American society to stop thinking of the Latino population as a monolith.
“It’s something that polling experts and academics have been trying to remind us of for some time,” he said. “The umbrella term of ‘Latinos’ is perhaps not the most useful when we start to dig into the particulars of how people develop their political identities.”
Many have questioned, for example, how so many Latinos could support a candidate like Mr. Trump, who promised restrictive immigration policies.
“And the answer is that, of course, Latinos are complicated people,” Mr. González said. “They have different things on their plates when they’re going to the voting booth. And perhaps immigration is not the number one priority.”
The numbers so far suggest that all voters prioritized economic concerns, he said. Further, he added, Latinos’ views on immigration are not uniform.
“When you talk about Latinos, you’re talking about different nationality groups, different generational cohorts, different relationships to immigration and immigration status and all that,” Mr. González said.
The Latino vote is also complicated by religious affiliation. Overall, a majority of voters who are Christians supported Mr. Trump—including 58 percent of Catholics. Voters who are not Christian tended to support Vice President Kamala Harris.
“That shouldn’t be surprising to us,” Mr. González said. “If a person’s faith informs the way in which they view the world, then it would follow that it also informs the way in which they vote.”
In an interview with PBS News, the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference argued that Latinos turned to Mr. Trump over cultural issues like gender and abortion.
“We perceive an intrusion,” he said. “There’s government intrusion into both our faith and our family apparatus.”
Exit polling suggests that Latino men, in particular, supported Mr. Trump. Mr. González said that more in-depth polling can help decipher how much of this support is related to social class and education, and whether the trend among Latino men mirrors that among white men.
Another consideration is how political campaigns carry out their outreach. Latinos living in the Midwest tend to have different sensibilities to those living in Florida, Mr. González said.
In the past, President George W. Bush had notably attracted the largest amount of Latino support from a Republican candidate. In 2004, Mr. Bush won support from 44 percent of Latino voters, according to exit polls. This far surpassed, for example, the 21 percent of Latinos who backed Bob Dole in 1996.
Mr. Bush “campaigned on this idea of a compassionate conservative,” Mr. González said, noting that the 43rd president viewed immigration similarly to Ronald Reagan and to his father, George H.W. Bush.
The younger Mr. Bush served as governor of Texas before becoming president. Mr. González believes that his experience leading a border state gave him a closer connection with Mexican Americans.
After Mr. Bush, Latino support for the Republican presidential candidate dropped significantly. John McCain received 31 percent of the Latino vote, and Mitt Romney only received 27 percent.
“But I think the biggest thing we have to remember is that Latino voters in 2024 are from a different cohort than Latino voters in 2004,” Mr. González said. “We’re talking about a different generation. And it’s a lot of people who have become American citizens in the last 20 years.”
Those voters include, for example, a growing number of Puerto Ricans and Venezuelans.
Jeb Bush, who in 2015 ran a similar campaign as his older brother, did not gain much traction with voters.
“Most people want a tidy narrative, especially right after the election, that helps explain what’s happening,” Mr. González said. “But there isn’t a one-dimensional answer. Political parties have to continue to be nimble and to listen to the different groups in the different spaces in which they are trying to reach them.”
Is Mr. Trump’s election in 2024 a turning point or is it an outlier? Those who study Latinos and politics, Mr. González said, will likely have to wait years to find out.
