Tuesday’s midterm election was a bloodbath for the Republican Party. Democrats captured both chambers of Congress and flipped both the governor’s office and a Senate seat in Texas for the first time in more than three decades, among other stunning gains.
While the results may have been a shock, they should not come as a surprise. In 2024, voters gave Republicans a mandate to restore control over America’s borders and reverse the failed immigration policy of the Biden administration, which had stood by as illegal border encounters surged by nearly 11 million over four years.
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The Trump administration severely misunderstood this immigration mandate, confusing America’s desire for a strong border policy and nationwide immigration enforcement with a wish for a dramatic expansion of the enforcement duties of the federal government. By doing so, they squandered Republican’s long-standing messaging advantage on immigration and lost one of the largest voter demographics that helped Trump and the GOP cruise to victory in 2024: Hispanics and Latinos, who now make up one in five Americans.
Trump won 43 percent of the Latino vote in 2024, up from 35 percent in 2020. Two years later, Republicans wiped out these gains and then some. Only about one-third of Latino voters backed Republican House candidates in this week’s midterms; roughly six in ten supported Democrats. Exit polls imply that Latino men, in particular, swung 25 points toward Democrats—a decisive shift.
The effect was palpable in specific races. Democrat James Talarico’s Senate win in Texas was especially striking along the border, where immigration enforcement has been particularly visible. Cameron County, home to Brownsville, Texas, backed Trump with 52.5 percent of the vote in 2024. On Tuesday, Talarico took 68.4 percent of the county’s vote against Ken Paxton’s 29.9 percent.
In South Florida, Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar, a Republican who criticized the Trump’s administration overreach on immigration, won by nearly 21 points in 2024. On Tuesday night, she barely survived Democratic challenger Eliott Rodriguez by less than 100 votes (and those results may change as the race heads into a recount). The race of Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, another Cuban-American Republican, also remained too close to call as of Wednesday morning.
The warning signs began to appear well before Election Day. Among Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2024, the president’s approval fell from 93 percent early in his second term to 57 percent this fall.
Did the GOP lose with Hispanics because it followed through on its immigration enforcement promises? Not at all. Hispanics and Latinos still favor enforcement. In an April survey, for example, 62 percent of Hispanic voters supported strong border enforcement. And last November, more than two-thirds of Hispanic Americans said they supported deporting at least some illegal immigrants.
But these views are nuanced. In the April poll, 85 percent backed creating more pathways for people seeking to immigrate legally. And eight in ten said that Trump should focus on deporting those who committed serious crimes. Many Hispanic voters, in other words, favor enforcement, but not indiscriminate enforcement, and want it alongside expanded immigration.
There’s reason to believe these views drove Hispanics’ leftward shift. In a poll from just before the election, “immigration policy, deportations, and ICE” were the top priority for Latino voters—40.7 percent of respondents put these issues among their top three concerns, compared to 39.6 percent who identified combating corruption and 37.8 prioritizing abortion.
Republicans used to understand better the delicate politics of immigration. George H. W. Bush, for example, signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which expanded lawful admissions while strengthening nationwide immigration enforcement. Though Republicans have traditionally sided with immigration restrictionists, they have also recognized that America benefits by welcoming legal immigrants. The American people get to choose whom to admit, and those admitted will get a fair shot at building a new life in the greatest country on earth.
The Trump administration’s narrow immigration vision has damaged that bargain. In January, it paused immigrant visa issuance for dozens of countries, including Venezuela and Cuba, whose people overwhelmingly vote Republican after achieving citizenship. (A court order ended the pause in August.) Republicans in the House and Senate had a hard time selling the message to their Hispanic constituencies that immigrants should get in line and wait their turn while the White House was essentially proposing to stop the line from moving at all.
The Trump administration also erred in allowing images of masked agents making arrests in public to define its enforcement agenda. Sixty-three percent of Americans considered identity-concealing face coverings unacceptable for immigration officers. Public support for law enforcement depends on public confidence, and a government that demands accountability from immigrants should also ensure that its own agents are held accountable for their actions.
Moreover, while deportations are a legitimate and necessary enforcement tool, the White House’s reliance on public roundups as its principal approach has undermined that legitimacy. The Trump administration could have instead ramped up tracking of visa overstays by verifying departures, or pursued legislation to punish employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. There was plenty of room for improvement on visa overstays when Trump took office: between 2021 and 2024, more than 21,885 visa overstays had produced just 496 investigations and eight arrests.
Republicans can win back Hispanic Americans’ trust on immigration policy by returning to the original bargain. That means combining secure borders with a legal immigration system that prioritizes immigrants who are likely to be a net economic benefit. It also means enforcing final removal orders with due process, prioritizing public safety, and no longer imposing sweeping barriers on eligible visa applicants.
The Hispanic voters who supported Trump and the GOP in 2024 were entitled to expect competent government. Making lawful immigration harder was no substitute for delivering it.