Early voting signs on the doors of the Miami Beach North Shore Branch Public Library in Miami Beach, Florida, on December 7, 2025. | Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images In 2024, Donald Trump’s victory was powered in large part by massive gains with Latino voters. He won 48 percent of those voters that year, up from 36 percent in 2020 and 28 percent in 2016. But now, that support is plummeting; Trump’s approval rating among Latinos who voted for him recently fell from 93 percent to 66 percent, where it was at the beginning of his second term. Why? It has a lot to do, as with everything these days, with the economy. It was the same in 2024. During that election, voters were experiencing rising costs and stagnant wages — the same trend that has continued until today. In 2024, though, Joe Biden and his administration — which also meant Vice President Kamala Harris — took the blame from all voters, and particularly Latinos. Today, the blame is falling on Trump. America, Actually host Astead Herndon caught up with Stephanie Valencia, who co-founded Equis Research, a political research firm that specializes in Latino voters, to unpack some of these recent shifts and explain them. “I think one important data point to understand about the Latino voter is Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other part or any other racial subgroup,” she said on the podcast. “And so what that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more.” That’s why, when the economy is bad, this group is primed to be a “swinging giant” in US politics, Valencia explains — and right now, it appears to be swinging hard against Trump. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel. Equis has called Latinos one of the last great wild cards in American politics. Is that because of some of the double-digit swings that we’ve seen among this voting group over the past few elections? Yes, it absolutely has to do with that. Latinos often get given the title the “sleeping giant,” which I just want to get rid of from everybody’s vocabulary. We should be called the “swinging giant” based on how much shift we have seen election to election. A third of Latinos consider themselves kind of independent or apolitical, and that swinging middle really is deciding every single election. Your playbook gets into messengers and particularly how we reach folks where they are. It makes a Spanish-Spanglish distinction talking about the different types of media that Latino voters consume. I wanted to ask, in that vein, what’s the single biggest mistake campaigns make in terms of not reaching folks where they are? Oh man, how long do we have so I can tell you how many mistakes? They’re really simple unforced errors. I’m going to give a very concrete and simple example that I think illustrates that. Look, I’m Latina. I grew up speaking mostly English, but I listen to Spanish-language radio. I watch a lot of YouTube, and on YouTube I’m watching people like Karol G and Carin León. A lot of people — a lot of Latino swing voters — have the same media consumption habits that I do. The first problem or challenge that a lot of candidates make is they just simply translate their English ad into Spanish. And that is, to me, one of the biggest mistakes because there are a lot of things that people want to be communicating in Spanish that don’t translate word for word. There are sayings in Spanish that don’t translate directly from English or more direct ways you can communicate. I’m sure it immediately reads Google Translate rather than an original message for said community. Exactly. So that’s mistake No. 1. Mistake No. 2 is when they’re deploying that ad digitally, as a proxy for talking to people, they’re going to use Spanish-language browser settings. So they say, “We don’t want people who speak English to see the Spanish-language ad.” So the way they find that set of voters is just by going to people who have Spanish-language browser settings. Like I said, I don’t have a Spanish-language browser setting. Everything I consume online is set in English on Chrome, but I still watch a lot of content in Spanish on YouTube. So you’re missing a voter like me who’s going to see a Spanish language ad from a James Talarico or a Manny Rutinel and be turned on by it because I’m going to say, “Hey, that candidate’s speaking to our community. That candidate has enough respect to develop a Spanish-language ad.” We did some testing a couple of years ago that showed that over 70 percent of Latinos who see an ad in Spanish think that party or candidate cares more about Latinos. It matters that much. Let’s stay in 2024 for a second longer. Your research found that Project 2025 and Trump’s mass deportation plans were not top of mind for most people, and that they were thinking about the economy. I wanted to ask about that because I remember the RNC signs at the convention saying, “Mass deportations now.” One number says that 62 percent of Latinos now think that Trump wants to deport undocumented immigrants broadly. Why did it take till post-election to realize those threats of mass deportation were real considering they were so front and center during his campaign? I think this is really important for us as avid news consumers to understand the kind of news that the average voter, and especially that voter who’s coming in and out of elections, is consuming. What they were seeing on mainstream media, perhaps even Fox News at the time, was a focus on people or Trump surrogates who said he was going to focus on serious criminals, securing the border, and violent criminals. And so that’s what people bought. Fast-forward to 2026; the people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there. They were told he was going to focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was going to focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that. And then add that to the litany of broken promises. I’m hearing a distinction between a focus on the border, which Republicans did try to prioritize rather than the interior deportations that may have been more attributed to Stephen Miller than Donald Trump. But we have certainly seen that be a focus of the administration once they came back into office. You mentioned the shift that has happened since 2024, and that’s really important, of course. Trump’s approval rating with Latinos is now worse than with non-Latinos, a stunning reversal in 18 months. You mentioned the factors that have contributed there, but is this really just the economy? It’s the economy, it’s the war, and it’s immigration. It’s those three things. One thing that is really interesting to note about Trump’s approval, other than that it’s at basement levels — and he’s very much pulled down the GOP with him broadly and with Latino voters — is that in Trump 1.0, his approval on the economy and the cost of living was actually better than his everyday approval on his total job. And he has been underwater with Latinos almost this entire term so far on the cost of living and the economy. It’s almost been a complete and total reversal. Listen, you tell people you’re going to fix egg prices and gas is going to go down, and then you do the opposite, and we’re hearing that story universally across different electorate groups. You’re saying that’s still the main story when it comes to Latinos also? Yes, it’s still the main story. I think one important data point to understand about the Latino voter is Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other part or any other racial subgroup. What that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more. We have less savings. We have lower rates of home ownership. So the safety nets that other people might have, we just don’t have. That really has exacerbated the kind of impact that people are feeling right now as they’re trying to make ends meet. You mentioned the exponential growth in the terms of people who now regret or are disappointed with their vote for Donald Trump. Does that mean a preference for Democrats? How should we think about the binary choice between D and R versus what is a clear story about a backlash to Donald Trump’s actions? I think it is a huge mistake for Democrats to rest on their laurels and think that because of what people are feeling about Trump and Republicans and the sense of disappointment and promises broken that that is automatically going to translate for them as a party and as a brand. Right now, the Democratic brand has suffered a repeated set of blows among Latino voters. Twenty years of comprehensive immigration reform hasn’t been delivered. It’s a thing that comes up in almost every focus group. And part of what the build-up to 2024 was, was not only 20 years of a promise undelivered; it was the chaos at the border, it was feeling like Democrats were focused on everything but Latinos and their families, or everyday Americans and their families, and that they had lost that thread.