In 2024, economic anxiety and immigration concerns drove Latino voters to President Donald Trump. Those same issues are beginning to push them away.
Across the country, the cost-of-living woes and immigration enforcement overshadowing Trump’s first year back in office are souring Hispanic businesspeople, a key constituency that helped propel him to the White House. In a recent survey of Hispanic business owners conducted by the U.S. Hispanic Business Council and shared exclusively with POLITICO, 42 percent said their economic situation is getting worse, while only 24 said it was getting better. Seventy percent of respondents ranked the cost of living as a top-three issue facing the country, more than double the number that selected any other issue.
That’s a particularly striking number from this group: nearly two-thirds of respondents in the organization’s final survey before the 2024 election said they trusted Trump more than then-Vice President Kamala Harris to handle the economy.
“The broader Hispanic community certainly feels let down,” said Javier Palomarez, the organization’s president and CEO. “It would be different if immigration and the economy had not been principal talking points for [Trump]. On both fronts, we didn't get what we thought we were going to get.”
The combination of ongoing economic uncertainty and stubbornly high prices driven by Trump’s tariffs — coupled with the economic impact of the Trump administration’s ongoing raids in immigrant-heavy communities — makes the situation increasingly dire for some Hispanic business owners.
Trump and his allies argue that they're just cleaning up the mess left by the previous president.
"Republicans are putting in the work to fix the Bidenflation mess we inherited. From lowering inflation to creating a housing plan, President Trump is fighting for the working families Democrats left behind," said Republican National Committee spokeswoman Delanie Bomar.
Monica Villalobos, president and CEO of the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, told POLITICO about a South Phoenix restaurant hit hard by tariffs and labor shortages. Then, a series of ICE raids in the parking lot in front of the restaurant caused customers and workers to stop showing up and forced the owners to shut it down for several days. She predicted this kind of situation will blow back on Republicans in the next election.
“We certainly do sense that our members — our clients in Arizona and across the country — feel a sense of betrayal by this administration, given its excessive overreach,” Villalobos said. “Now that we've had a taste of [the Trump administration], I think you're going to see a big shift [in the vote].”
In 2024, Trump won 48 percent of self-described Hispanic or Latino voters, the highest mark for a Republican presidential candidate in at least a half-century, driven largely by economic anxiety. But polling shows Trump’s approval among Latino voters cratering as their satisfaction with the economy and immigration enforcement plummet.
In a November POLITICO Poll, a plurality — 48 percent — of Hispanic respondents said the cost of living in the U.S. is “the worst I can ever remember it being,” and a majority (67 percent) said responsibility lies with the president to fix it.
According to a November Pew Research poll, about two-thirds (68 percent) of U.S. Hispanics say their situation today is worse than it was a year ago, and just nine percent say it is better; 65 percent of Latinos disagree with this administration’s approach to immigration, and a majority (52 percent) said they worried they, a family member or a close friend could be deported, a ten-point increase since March.
Trump’s net favorability rating among Hispanics is now at 28 percent, per a recent The Economist/YouGov poll, 13 points lower than it was in February of last year.
“Small business owners are becoming a swing constituency, when you think about the midterms coming up,” said Tayde Aburto, president and CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of E-Commerce. “And not because their values have changed—it's just because their costs did.”
Latino voters have swung hard back toward Democrats in recent elections as well. In Passaic County, New Jersey, Latinos voted narrowly for Trump in 2024 but in November backed Democratic Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill by double digits. And in Miami, where over 70 percent of residents are Hispanic, a Democratic mayor was elected last month for the first time in 28 years last month.
Those elections are a referendum on Trump’s economy, said Christian Ulvert, a Democratic strategist and adviser to newly-elected Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins’ campaign.
“[Trump’s] agenda literally does little to nothing to help Hispanic families,” Ulvert said. “Worse, it preys on Hispanic families. And what we heard on the campaign trail most pointedly is the old adage: is my life better today than it was yesterday under new leaders? And resoundingly, not only verbally, but through the ballot box throughout the year, Hispanic families are saying, ‘no, my life is actually worse.’”
Joe Vichot, the Republican Party chair in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, said he knows many Hispanic Republicans in Allentown who are supportive of curbing illegal immigration and fighting crime. “But there's also stories of people who have been here for 10 years or more with their family, but they've never been legal, that are now caught up into the [deportation] system,” he said.
“There should be a way to find some type of common ground where that won't happen.”
The White House has tried to ease the ailing economic sentiment by sending Trump and Vice President JD Vance on the road, delivering a series of stump speeches on affordability in working-class areas, including Vance’s Dec. 16 stop in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, which includes the Hispanic-majority city of Allentown. They insist the economy deserves an “A+++” grade, and are now buoyed by a December consumer price index report released Tuesday that showed inflation rising at a slower pace than expected.
“Joe Biden gave us a colossal catastrophe, but my administration has rapidly and very decisively ended that,” Trump said during a speech in Detroit Tuesday. “We have quickly achieved the exact opposite of stagflation — almost no inflation and super high growth.”
But cooling inflation rates just mean prices aren’t rising as fast as they had been — prices still remain much higher on many goods than they had been in recent years. And improving macroeconomic trends are not yet being felt by consumers, said Massey Villarreal, a business executive in Houston.
“I'm like most Americans. I hear the inflation number and I don’t translate it to my going to the grocery store, when I look at the cost of hamburger meat,” said Villarreal, a former chair of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly.
Palomarez, the U.S. Hispanic Business Council president, compared it to the Biden administration’s insistence that the post-Covid economy was healthy, even as consumer sentiment plunged. “While we were talking about GDP and unemployment and jobs growth rates, people were worried about the rent and the price of gas and the price of eggs. And we've got kind of the same thing here," he said.
In Chicago, where some of the most-publicized immigration enforcement occurred last year, Hispanic-run businesses have been hit hard. Sam Sanchez, CEO of Third Coast Hospitality, said 2025 was the hardest period for business of his four decades in restauranteering, aside from the COVID pandemic.
“It sends a really negative message to the 48 percent of Hispanic voters that voted for President Trump,” Sanchez said. “Everything’s just starting to fall apart.”
