As we talked, Pérez imagined what he’d do if he walked into a polling booth today and looked down at a ballot with Trump and Harris on it. He wouldn’t hesitate: he’d vote for Trump again. I asked Pérez to think about all the Trump voters he knew who told him that they were anxious or disappointed. Would they make the same decision? “If Kamala and Trump ran again, most of these people would vote for Trump again, in spite of the immigration thing,” he said. “You hold your nose and do it, because you have to.”
Surveys back up what Pérez is saying about his views and those of his congregation. In Equis’s polling, just eleven per cent of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 said that they would now support a Democrat. That’s hardly a sea change. “We’ve seen pretty tepid favorability ratings for the Democratic Party,” María Ísabel Di Franco Quiñonez, a senior research director for Equis, said. The poll numbers are “primarily driven by rejection of the Trump Administration, not enthusiasm about the Democratic Party or the Democratic brand.” In them, you don’t see a group of prodigal Latinos making their way back to Democrats; instead, you see a group of voters wandering into a political wilderness. “They’re de-aligning, not realigning—it’s, like, we can be against both of you,” Mike Madrid, a former Republican campaign manager and now an anti-Trump conservative strategist, told me.
In Madrid’s eyes, both major parties, by trying to organize and mobilize Latinos as an ethnic group, neglect the degree to which class determines how they vote. Communities as distinct as Mexicans and Peruvians are overrepresented in blue-collar professions compared with non-Latino Americans. Latinos are also, on average, much younger than the general population, as a result of collapsing birth rates among white Americans. This puts many into the under-forty generation who are trying to buy their first house and find some financial stability. Those voters had a brutal four years under Biden. Even as blue-collar wages increased, housing prices in most parts of the country exploded, keeping many Latinos who had been saving up locked out of the market.
When I talked with Pérez this month, he blamed Democrats for a more than fifty-per-cent increase in housing prices in Pennsylvania over the past six years. (Housing costs have, of course, increased all over the country. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis show that, between 2020 and 2024, in deep-red South Carolina, they were up sixty-five per cent; in Tennessee, they were up sixty-six per cent.) Now Pérez is seeing Democrats, such as Representative Chrissy Houlahan, whose U.S. House district includes Reading, unveil “affordability” messaging. He isn’t buying it. “I heard this quote, ‘It’s like an arsonist becoming a fireman,’ ” he said. “They would love to run on affordability, but when gas was four bucks and Biden was in office, you didn’t hear them complain.”
At the same time, Latinos’ dismay with Trump is profound enough that it has stunned pollsters. In 2025, Di Franco Quiñonez, the senior research director at Equis, and a colleague personally interviewed Latino Trump supporters. They returned to talk with the interviewees multiple times throughout the year as part of an ongoing ethnographic study that Equis called Beyond the Ballot.
“We really wanted to understand what their journey of the first year of the Administration would look like,” Di Franco Quiñonez said. “I think it would be difficult for any of us to have predicted the level of disappointment and the level of rejection of the Administration that we have heard.”
One of the participants, a Cornell grad whom Equis called Juan, worked as a government contractor in Phoenix, Arizona. Juan voted for Biden in 2020 before defecting to Trump in 2024. He told Di Franco Quiñonez and her team that, though he identified with Democrats’ message of inclusion, in particular for immigrants, he found Biden’s economy untenable. He saw Trump as a leader who would take control and bring down costs. After the attempted assassination of Trump in July, 2024, “he was putting his fists up, like, ‘Let’s fight, let’s fight, I have more fight in me,’ ” Juan told the Equis team. “I was, like, I have to commend this man for the amount of vigor and strength.”
