DOWN IN THE VALLEY

How Democrats lost Latino support in California—and the House of Representatives

- Noah Lanard

KEYES, CALIFORNIA, a working-class town 80 miles south of Sacramento, is not the kind of place where a Republican traditionally spends the precious final week of a close campaign. Yet six days before the election, John Duarte, the district's incumbent GOP congressman, was there going door to door to make his case.

About two-thirds of Keyes' roughly 6,000 residents are Latino, and Duarte was hoping to capitalize on data showing their startling decrease in support for Democrats. The largely positive reception he got, and the ensuing election results, suggests he was right to try.

In Latino-majority counties across the country, Donald Trump won—big. Along the US-Mexico border in Texas, he became the first Republican since 1896 to win Starr County, which is 97 percent Latino. Hillary Clinton and her Democratic predecessors prevailed there by massive margins; Starr has moved more than 70 points to the right since 2016. Even after a comedian called Puerto Rico “garbage” at his Madison Square Garden rally, Trump saw big jumps in some of the country’s most Puerto Rican counties. And in the most heavily Latino areas of Queens and North Jersey, once assumed to be impenetrable for Republicans, it was a similar story: Latinos switched to Trump.

This shift wasn’t entirely unexpected. In 2020, Latino support for Democrats dropped in places like South Florida and Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. But preelection surveys and exit polls that year showed Joe Biden winning California’s Latino voters, the large majority of whom are of Mexican ancestry, by about 50 points.

2024 was different. The final three polls from the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, had Kamala Harris up by only 25 points among Latinos. Mark DiCamillo, the institute’s poll director, said support for a Republican presidential candidate among California Latinos hadn’t been that high since Ronald Reagan.