Latino voters are moving away from Donald Trump after helping send him back to the White House in 2024, and the newest NBC News and Telemundo poll shows the drop is sharp. Trump’s approval among Latino voters now sits at 27%, a level that leaves him with far less room to rely on the coalition that helped carry him last year.
The timing matters because the survey was collected Sept. 21-28, when Republicans are already thinking about the next round of House and statewide races. In that setting, the numbers point to a warning sign for the Republican Party: two-thirds of Latino voters say Trump’s deportation policies have gone too far, and three-quarters disapprove of how he has handled the economy and the cost of living.
The economic numbers are especially damaging. Democrats now hold a 21-point advantage over Republicans on handling the economy among Latino voters, a reversal from two years ago when Latino voters gave Trump a 4-point edge over Kamala Harris on the same issue. Democrats also lead by 24 points on who should control Congress, with Latino voters favoring Democrats over Republicans by 59% to 35%.
Aileen Cardona-Arroyo, who helped conduct the poll, said the results indicate a striking reversal of Republican gains with Latino voters and point to trouble ahead for Republican candidates in the midterms. Her warning lands because Republicans made Trump’s 2024 gains central to their plan to keep the House majority, betting that the same voters who broke their way once would keep doing it.
That bet now looks weaker, but not erased. Nearly a fifth of Latino voters who backed Trump in 2024 do not prefer a Republican-controlled Congress, including 14% who now say they support Democrats for Congress and 8% who are unsure. That is the friction inside the numbers: Democrats are improving, but Republicans are still drawing more Latino support than in any NBC News poll before the 2024 cycle.
The split matters because Latino voters do not move as one bloc everywhere. In Florida and Texas, the Republican Party drew new, heavily Latino districts that looked deep red in 2024, but many of those districts are shaping up to be competitive in the midterms. Statewide races in Texas and Nevada will also be shaped by the changing Latino vote, and Latino voters, who made up around a tenth of the total vote in recent midterm elections, could again decide contests that look close on paper and even closer in practice.
Micah Roberts called Latino voters the swingiest of swing groups and said the reversal since 2024 was stunning. He said 2024 was the outlier, and argued that Trump is such a central figure that without him, these changes would not be visible in the data among Latinos. That leaves the clearest read for Democrats and Republicans alike: the Republican gains that seemed durable after 2024 are already slipping, but the Democratic recovery is still more a rejection of Trump and the economy than a full embrace of Democrats.
