A new poll shows that President Donald Trump is hemorrhaging Latino support at an extraordinary rate — a foreboding development for the GOP ahead of the midterm elections. This survey, combined with previous polling showing Trump struggling with Latinos, suggests that a popular narrative that Trump’s 2024 election victory fundamentally realigned American political coalitions may be mistaken.
Third Way and UnidosUS commissioned the poll of likely voters, which was conducted in March and oversampled Latino voters. They found that these voters are souring on Trump at a rate that outpaces the general electorate’s growing disenchantment with the president.
While Trump’s overall favorability rating in the poll was 44% favorable to 55% unfavorable, among Latino voters it was 34% favorable and 66% unfavorable.
The GOP should be nervous about what this portends for their performance in the midterms.
Two major factors appear to be driving disapproval of Trump — his immigration policies and his handling of the economy. On both issues, the disparity between all voters and Latino voters mirrored the gap in favorability between the groups. When asked to rate the job Trump is doing on immigration, 44% of all voters expressed positive feelings (“excellent” or “good”), while 54% reported negative feelings (“not so good” or “poor”). But among Latino voters, 32% reported positive feelings and 67% held negative ones. There was an almost identical gap in views of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And when asked to rate the economy, 40% reported positive feelings and 59% negative. Among Latinos, it was 33% positive, 66% negative.
Along with other polls showing similar trends, the GOP should be nervous about what this portends for their performance in the midterms. Trump’s Latino support was a crucial part of what put him over the edge in 2024 — and every week brings more polls showing that support eroding.
The Third Way/UnidosUS poll shows that on the generic congressional ballot, Democrats lead Republicans 45% to 41%. But among Latinos, the divide is huge: Democrats lead 61% to 31%. In its memo on the survey, Third Way notes that the 22-point advantage that Democrats have with Latino men on the congressional ballot is “more in line with historical voting patterns for Hispanics and far better than Kamala Harris did in 2024 with Hispanics.”
That Trump gained more than 10 points of Latino support between the 2020 and 2024 elections upended a lot of the conventional wisdom about what it meant to appeal to this rapidly growing and swingy part of the electorate. It suggested, among other things, that Trump’s extremist rhetoric about immigration was either desirable or at least not disqualifying for Latino voters, and that anger over inflation during President Joe Biden’s term was motivating many Latinos to turn to Trump.
But as with so many other voters — including a significant chunk of Republicans — Trump’s execution of his immigration agenda has looked overly aggressive to many. Indeed, 70% of the Latino respondents to the Third Way/UnidosUS poll said Trump’s immigration agenda had “gone too far.” To be clear, Trump did plenty to telegraph how aggressive his immigration crackdown would be on the 2024 campaign trail. But it seems some voters are less accepting of it when seeing it in practice compared to hearing about it in speeches.
And Trump has chosen, entirely unnecessarily, to make the affordability crisis worse through his tariffs and a war in the Middle East. This has done immense damage among the Trump voters in 2024 who were not part of his base, but who recalled his fairly strong first-term economy when in the voting booth.
Polls are a snapshot in time and don’t necessarily tell us how people will vote. But if Republicans ignore this data — and the many other signs that they have alienated the general public — it will not be surprising if they get clobbered in the midterms.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.