latino voter

California voters are sharply divided along partisan lines over the Trump administration’s immigration raids this year in Los Angeles and across the nation, according to a new poll.

Just over half of the state’s registered voters oppose federal efforts to reduce undocumented immigration, and 61% are against deporting everyone in the nation who doesn’t have legal status, according to a recent poll by UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab released to The Times on Wednesday.

But there is an acute difference in opinions based on political leanings.

Nearly 80% of Democrats oppose reducing the number of people entering the United States illegally, and 90% are against deporting everyone in the country who is undocumented, according to the poll. Among Republicans, 5% are against reducing the entries and 10% don’t believe all undocumented immigrants should be forced to leave.

“The big thing that we find, not surprisingly, is that Democrats and Republicans look really different,” said political scientist Amy Lerman, director of UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab, who studies race, public opinion and political behavior. “On these perspectives, they fall pretty clearly along party lines. While there’s some variation within the parties by things like age and race, really, the big divide is between Democrats and Republicans.”

While there were some differences based on gender, age, income, geography and race, the results largely mirrored the partisan divide in the state, Lerman said.

One remarkable finding was that nearly a quarter of survey respondents personally knew or were acquainted with someone in their family or friend groups directly affected by the deportation efforts, Lerman said.

“That’s a really substantial proportion,” she said. “Similarly, the extent to which we see people reporting that people in their communities are concerned enough about deportation efforts that they’re not sending their kids to school, not shopping in local stores, not going to work,” not seeking medical care or attending church services.

The poll surveyed a sample of the state’s registered voters and did not include the sentiments of the most affected communities — unregistered voters or those who are ineligible to cast ballots because they are not citizens.

A little more than 23 million of California’s 39.5 million residents were registered to vote as of late October, according to the secretary of state’s office.

“So if we think about the California population generally, this is a really significant underestimate of the effects, even though we’re seeing really substantial effects on communities,” she said.

Earlier this year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched a series of raids in Los Angeles and surrounding communities that spiked in June, creating both fear and outrage in Latino communities. Despite opposition from Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other elected Democrats, the Trump administration also deployed the National Guard to the streets of the nation’s second-largest city to, federal officials said, protect federal immigration officials.

The months since have been chaotic, with masked, armed agents randomly pulling people — most of whom are Latino — off the streets and out of their workplaces and sending many to detention facilities, where some have died. Some deportees were flown to an El Salvador prison. Multiple lawsuits have been filed by state officials and civil rights groups.

In one notable local case, a federal district judge issued a ruling temporarily blocking federal agents from using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate immigration arrests in the Los Angeles area. The Supreme Court granted an emergency appeal and lifted that order, while the case moves forward.

More than 7,100 undocumented immigrants have been arrested in the Los Angeles area by federal authorities since June 6, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

On Monday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), Bass and other elected officials hosted a congressional hearing on the impact of immigration raids that have taken place across the country. Garcia, the top Democrat on the House’s oversight committee, also announced the creation of a tracker to document misconduct and abuse during ICE raids.

While Republican voters largely aligned with Trump’s actions on deportations, 16% said that they believed that the deportations will worsen the state’s economy.

Lerman said the university planned to study whether these numbers changed as the impacts on the economy are felt more greatly.

“If it continues to affect people, particularly, as we see really high rates of effects on the workforce, so construction, agriculture, all of the places where we’re as an economy really reliant [on immigrant labor], I can imagine some of these starting to shift even among Republicans,” she said.

Among Latinos, whose support of Trump grew in the 2024 election, there are multiple indications of growing dissatisfaction with the president, according to separate national polls.

Nearly eight in 10 Latinos said Trump’s policies have harmed their community, compared to 69% in 2019 during his first term, according to a national poll of adults in the United States released by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center on Monday. About 71% said the administration’s deportation efforts had gone too far, an increase from 56% in March. And it was the first time in the two decades that Pew has conducted its survey of Latino voters that the number of Latinos who said their standing in the United States had worsened increased, with more than two-thirds expressing the sentiment.

Another poll released earlier this month by Somos Votantes, a liberal group that urges Latino voters to support Democratic candidates, found that one-third of Latino voters who previously supported Trump rue their decision, according to a national poll.

Small business owner Brian Gavidia is among the Latino voters who supported Trump in November because of financial struggles.

“I was tired of struggling, I was tired of seeing my friends closing businesses,” the 30-year-old said. “When [President] Biden ran again I’m like, ‘I’m not going to vote for the same four years we just had’ … I was sad and I was heartbroken that our economy was failing and that’s the reason why I went that way.”

The East L.A. native, the son of immigrants from Colombia and El Salvador, said he wasn’t concerned about Trump’s immigration policies because the president promised to deport the “worst of the worst.”

He grew disgusted watching the raids that unfolded in Los Angeles earlier this year.

“They’re taking fruit vendors, day laborers, that’s the worst of the worst to you?” he remembered thinking.

Over a lunch of asada tortas and horchata in East L.A., Gavidia recounted being detained by Border Patrol agents in June while working at a Montebello tow yard. Agents shoved him against a metal gate, demanding to know what hospital he was born at after he said he was an American citizen, according to video of the incident.

After reviewing his ID, the agents eventually let Gavidia go. The Department of Homeland Security later claimed that Gavidia was detained for investigation for interference and released after being confirmed to be a U.S. citizen with no outstanding warrants. He is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and immigrant advocacy groups alleging racial profiling during immigration raids.

“At that moment, I was the criminal, at that moment I was the worst of the worst, which is crazy because I went to go see who they were getting — the worst of the worst like they said they were going to get,” Gavidia said. “But turns out when I got there, I was the worst of the worst.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump made historic gains with Latinos when he won reelection last year, boosting Republicans’ confidence that their economic message was helping them make inroads with a group of voters who had long leaned toward Democrats.

But in this week’s election, Democrats in key states were able to disrupt that rightward shift by gaining back Latino support, exit polls showed.

In New Jersey and Virginia, the Democrats running for governor made gains in counties with large Latino populations, and overall won two-thirds of the Latino vote in their states, according to an NBC News poll.

And in California, a CNN exit poll showed about 70% of Latinos voting in favor of Proposition 50, a Democratic redistricting initiative designed to counter Trump’s plans to reshape congressional maps in an effort to keep GOP control of the House.

The results mark the first concrete example at the ballot box of Latino voters turning away from the GOP — a shift foreshadowed by recent polling as their concerns about the economy and immigration raids have grown.

Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill celebrates with supporters after being elected New Jersey governor.

(Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

If the trend continues, it could spell trouble for Republicans in next year’s midterm elections, said Gary Segura, a professor of public policy, political science and Chicana/o studies at UCLA. This could be especially true in California and Texas, where both parties are banking on Latino voters to help them pick up seats in the House, Segura said.

“A year is a long time in politics, but certainly the vote on Prop. 50 is a very, very good sign for the Democrats’ ability to pick up the newly drawn congressional districts,” Segura said. “I think Latino voters will be really instrumental in the outcome.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are feeling optimistic that their warnings about Trump’s immigration crackdown and a bad economy are resonating with Latinos.

Republicans are wondering to what degree the party can maintain support among Latinos without Trump on the ticket. In 2024, Trump won roughly 48% of the Latino vote nationally — a record for any Republican presidential candidate.

Some Republicans saw this week’s trends among Latino voters as a “wakeup call.”

“The Hispanic vote is not guaranteed. Hispanics married President Donald Trump but are only dating the GOP,” Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida said in a social media video the day after the election. “I’ve been warning it: If the GOP does not deliver, we will lose the Hispanic vote all over the country.”

Economic issues a main driver

Last year Trump was able to leverage widespread frustration with the economy to win the support of Latinos. He promised to create jobs and lower the costs of living.

But polling shows that a majority of Latino voters now disapprove of how Trump and the Republicans in control of Congress are handling the economy. Half of Latinos said they expected Trump’s economic policies to leave them worse off a year from now in a Unidos poll released last week.

In New Jersey, that sentiment was exemplified by voters like Rumaldo Gomez. He told MSNBC he voted for Trump last year but this week went for for the Democratic candidate for governor, Rep. Mikie Sherrill.

“Now, I look at Trump different,” Gomez said. “The economy does not look good.”

Gomez added he is “very sad” about immigration raids led by the Trump administration that have split up hardworking families.

While Latino voters fear being affected by immigration enforcement actions, polling suggests they are more concerned about cost of living, jobs and housing. The Unidos poll showed immigration ranking fifth on the list of concerns.

In New Jersey and Virginia, Democrats’ double-digit victories were built on promises to reduce the cost of living, while blaming Trump for their economic pain.

Marcus Robinson, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said Democrats “expanded margins and flipped key counties by earning back Latino voters who know Trump’s economy leaves them behind.”

“These results show that Latino communities want progress, not a return to chaos and broken promises,” he said.

Republicans see a different Trump issue

GOP strategist Matt Terrill, who was chief of staff for then-Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said the election results are not a referendum on Trump.

Latino voters swung left because Trump wasn’t on the ballot, he said.

Last year “it wasn’t Latino voters turning out for the Republican party, it was Latino voters turning out for President Trump,” he said. “Like him or not, he’s able to fire up voters that the Republican party traditionally does not get.”

With Trump barred by the Constitution from running for a third term, Republicans are left to wonder if they can get the Latino vote back when he is not on the ballot. Terrill believes Republicans need to hammer on the issue of affordability as a top priority.

Mike Madrid, a “never Trump” Republican and former political director of the California Republican Party, has a different theory.

“They’re abandoning both parties,” Madrid said of Latinos. “They abandoned the Republican party for the same reasons they abandoned the Democratic party in November: not addressing economic concerns.”

The economy has long been the top concern for Latinos, Madrid said, yet both parties continue to frame the Latino political agenda around immigration.

“Latinos aren’t voting for Democrats or Republicans — they’re voting against Democrats and against Republicans,” Madrid said. “It’s a very big difference. The partisans are all looking at us as if we’re this peculiar exotic little creature.”

The work ahead

Democrat Abigail Spanberger was elected governor in Virginia in part because of big gains in Latino-heavy communities. One of the biggest gains was in Manassas Park, where more than 40% of residents are Latino. She won the city by 42 points, doubling the Democrats’ performance there in last year’s election.

The shift toward Democrats happened because Latinos believed Trump when he promised to bring down high costs of living and that he would only go after violent criminals in immigration raids, said Democratic strategist Maria Cardona, who worked with Spanberger’s campaign on outreach to Spanish-language media.

Instead, she argued, Trump betrayed them.

Cardona said Medicaid cuts under Trump’s massive spending package this year, along with the reduction of supplemental nutrition assistance amid the government shutdown, have Latinos families panicking.

“What Republicans misguidedly and mistakenly thought was a realignment of Latino voters just turned out to be a blip,” she said. “Latinos should never be considered a base vote.”

Political scientists caution that the election outcomes this week are not necessarily indicative of how races will play out a year from now.

“It’s just one election, but certainly the seeds have been planted for strong Latino Democratic turnouts in 2026,” said Brad Jones, a political science professor at UC Davis.

Now, both parties need to explain how they expect to carry out their promises if elected.

“They can’t sit on their laurels and say, ‘well surely the Latinos are coming back because the economy is bad and immigration enforcement is bad,’” Jones said. “The job of the Democratic party is now to reach out to Latino voters in ways that are more than just symbolic.”