The voters who helped put Donald Trump back in the White House are now, to put it plainly, furious at him. According to a September New York Times/Siena University poll, 65% of Hispanic voters disapprove of Trump's job performance, and 78% want Democrats running Congress. That is not a crack in the coalition. That is the coalition falling through the floor.
The Numbers Are Not Subtle
The New York Times/Siena University poll is bad enough on its own. But it is not alone. According to a Fox News survey from September, approximately 63% of Hispanic respondents said they plan to vote for the Democratic congressional candidate in their district. Fox News. That poll. Those numbers.
An UnidosUS poll from April and May found 54% of Hispanic voters would back the Democratic House candidate, compared to just 27% who said they would favor the Republican. Between October 2025 and May 2026, Democratic favorability among Hispanic voters grew by three points, while Republican favorability gained just one. Every data point is pointing in the same direction, and none of it is good for the GOP.
This is what a realignment looks like on the way back out. Trump gained historic ground with Hispanic voters in 2024. What he did with that trust once he got it is the whole story.
What Actually Flipped Them
Ask people what drove Hispanic voters toward Trump in 2024 and you will hear a lot of theories. Ask what is driving them away now and you get actual data. Clarissa Martinez De Castro, the vice-president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS, spelled it out plainly: cost of living was the number one concern, immigration enforcement and deportations came second, and wages and the broader economy rounded out the top three.
The Iran war has pushed gas prices past $4 per gallon on average, according to The Guardian's reporting. Inflation has sat stubbornly at 3.4%, keeping grocery bills painful month after month. Trump ran on economic populism. What Latino working families got instead was expensive gas, elevated grocery costs, and federal agents showing up in their neighborhoods.
That last part matters. The Trump administration has deployed federal immigration agents into Latino and Hispanic communities across the country, and some people caught up in those sweeps have accused agents of racial profiling. That is not a policy dispute. That is your neighbors disappearing.
The White House Response Was Exactly What You'd Expect
When The Guardian asked the White House about any of this, spokesperson Allison Schuster said that "hard-working Hispanic Americans are beginning to have some breathing room after four years of economic pain under the Democrats" and cited middle-class tax cuts, no tax on tips, overtime, social security, and "defeating Biden's inflation crisis."
Inflation is currently at 3.4% and gas is over four dollars a gallon. The breathing room is not visible to the naked eye.
Schuster also noted that Trump was "honored to receive a record level of support from Hispanic Americans" in 2024. Sure. He did. That is true. And now 78% of them want the other party running Congress. Both of those things can be true simultaneously, and together they tell a story the White House press office would rather not sit with.
This Is Not a Love Story for Democrats Either
Here is where it gets genuinely complicated, and where any Democrat reading this should put down their victory champagne. Mike Madrid, a campaign consultant who has studied Latino voting patterns for 35 years, told The Guardian plainly: "There's no renewed affinity or love for the Democratic party. They're just extremely upset and disillusioned and angry with Donald Trump."
He went further. "They're gonna leave the Republicans for the exact same reasons that they left the Democrats two years ago." That sentence should be stapled to the desk of every Democratic campaign strategist in the country. These are not converts. They are angry swing voters who will move again the moment they feel taken for granted.
Martinez De Castro estimates that roughly 40% of the Hispanic electorate are genuine swing voters with no fixed party loyalty. "You have 40% of voters here for whom many of them say they don't see the difference between the parties in terms of who really is going to be better," she said. That is not an opening Democrats get to close by showing up once every four years.
The Immigration Misconception Politicians Keep Making
One thing buried in all of this deserves to be said loudly: immigration is not the defining issue for most Latino voters, and politicians keep getting this wrong. In UnidosUS's poll of 3,000 Hispanic voters, only 17% said they wanted elected officials to prioritize increasing border security, and just 13% supported deporting all undocumented immigrants regardless of how long they had been in the country.
The economy is the issue. The cost of living is the issue. Wages are the issue. Immigration enforcement is a concern, but it lands differently when it is abstract policy versus when federal agents are working your community and people are alleging racial profiling.
Madrid told The Guardian that the political system has done "a massive disservice with fake polling, with organizations that were advocating an agenda, not facts and science, and politicians that were trying to benefit from that." He has consulted for both parties. He is not being partisan. He is describing a structural failure that has made both parties consistently bad at understanding what Latino voters actually want.
The Dingo Take
Trump got record Hispanic support in 2024 by promising to fix the economy and make life more affordable. Eighteen months into his second term, gas is over four dollars, inflation is grinding at 3.4%, immigration agents are working Latino neighborhoods under accusations of racial profiling, and 78% of Hispanic voters want the other party in charge of Congress. You do not need a political science degree to see what happened here. He made promises, the promises did not pan out, and the people who believed him are now among his sharpest critics. That is not spin. That is arithmetic.
But the Democratic party should not read this as a permission slip to coast. Madrid's warning is about as clear as political analysis gets: these voters left Democrats in 2024 for the same reasons they are leaving Republicans now. They are not switching teams. They are punishing failure. The moment Democrats assume the Latino vote is locked in for 2028, they will spend the next two years earning another painful lesson about what "swing voter" actually means.
The clock Martinez De Castro mentioned is real. November 2026 is close. The voters are moveable. What neither party seems capable of grasping is that moveable voters eventually get tired of being moved and start wondering why no one is actually building something worth staying for.
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