US President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during a Hispanic Heritage Month reception in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., US, September 30, 2026.
The midterms are eight days from now, and the story of the election is probably going to be about Hispanic voters. They moved toward Donald Trump in record numbers in 2024. They are now swinging back to the Democrats. Gerrymander efforts by the GOP to hold the House could backfire because of Hispanic voters. They could end up deciding control of the Senate.
The conventional wisdom is that they flipped back because of inflation, but it’s clear Trump’s broken promise is about more than that. Many Hispanic voters believed the president would not deport peaceful, law-abiding immigrants. He was lying, but many didn't believe the truth. They believe it now. A new Times poll found that more than a quarter of Hispanic voters personally know someone who has been arrested, detained and deported by ICE.
“The very inhumane way our current administration goes about immigration enforcement is terrible,” a Hispanic voter, a Democrat, told the Times. “People are being treated like hardened criminals, when they hadn’t done anything actually wrong while they’re here.”
This is an important distinction. If the reason for their flipping is inflation, the Republicans can conceivably hope to win them back in time by following through on a future promise of lowering costs. But if the reason is not about anything tangible but instead about trust in the GOP's intentions, Donald Trump may have crossed a line beyond which there is no return.
Time will tell whether I’m right, obviously, but we’ve been here before. In California, prior to 1994, Hispanic voters supported Republican candidates in robust numbers. The party was conservative. It produced Ronald Reagan. It sent Republicans to the Senate. Yet Hispanics found a home there. Many believed it was a means of achieving the American dream.
That changed dramatically after Pete Wilson was elected in 1991. The Republican governor set in motion a series of actions making it clear what his party really thought of the state and the place of Hispanics in it – California was a white man’s republic and they did not belong.
The most notorious of these was Proposition 187. It was a ballot initiative Wilson pushed for while running for reelection. It denied state services to undocumented immigrants, including health care and public education. To their shock, voters approved the measure in 1994.
Beforehand, Hispanics could believe the GOP's party line – if immigrants work hard and play by the rules, the doors of opportunity and freedom would open to them. Afterward, it was no longer possible to believe that. The welcome mat had been pulled. The truth has been revealed. Prop 187 triggered a political backlash that has defined the Golden State since.
California hasn't voted for a Republican presidential nominee since 1988. The last Republican senator, John Seymour, was defeated in 1992. And Pete Wilson was the last Republican governor. (Arnold Schwarzenegger's tenure doesn't really count.) It's widely believed that Wilson permanently enfeebled the state's GOP. He did so with a profound act of betrayal.
Comparing Trump to Wilson is tricky. California isn’t America. But the betrayal is similar, if you’re being charitable, or acutely worse, if you’re just following the facts. Nearly a million immigrants have been deported since Trump returned to power. Most of them are from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia and Venezuela. As many as 80 percent of them do not have a criminal record. More than 500 US citizens, most of them Hispanic, have been detained by ICE. Some immigrants have been deported to places they have never known. (Cubans in South Florida, for instance, are being sent to Africa.) Legal immigration has dropped by half, according to Cato. The government is denying virtually all asylum seekers.
That’s not to mention what this president has done to the children of immigrants. Over the summer, The Marshall Projectcompiled the numbers from January 2025 to August: “8,592 children arrested by ICE; 8,755 children detained by ICE; 562 babies and toddlers detained by ICE; 198 children in ICE custody per day on average; 54 percent of child releases from ICE detention ended with the child being deported; 22,565 deportations of children by the federal government; 1,460 deportations of children taken from the interior of the US.”
It's not that Donald Trump wants to get rid of a few bad apples. It's that he wants to get rid of all apples. The apples have clearly heard the message. And they are now making choices.
Last week, the AP reported that states deciding Senate control are seeing a surge in early voting. “In Texas, early voting is up 74 percent compared with 2022,” the AP said. “In Kansas it’s more than doubled. Maine, North Carolina and Ohio also have seen increases of more than 30 percent in early in-person and mail voting compared with the same point in 2022.”
Pollster Tom Bonier said Saturday early voting in Texas is nearly 3 million. “More Hispanics have voted than did at this point in the 2024 presidential election,” he said. Young voters are driving the surge. “Hispanics under the age of 30 have not only exceeded their total turnout at this point in 2024, they have almost doubled it.” Of the vote totals in Texas so far, Bonier estimated 217,000 were cast by people who did not vote in 2024, half of them being Hispanic.
A common explanation is Hispanic voters are mad about the economy. Prices are too high. Wages are too low. It's harder to get by. But that's almost insulting, as it cheapens the scale of the injustice. Pete Wilson undermined people's material conditions, too, but that's not all he did. He profaned hope. He sabotaged the American dream. His party was punished for it.
To be sure, it's too early to know if Donald Trump's party will face the same or similar fate. However, what we do know is this: no Republican can win the presidency without Texas. If the Republicans are not worried about losing the Hispanic vote there, they should be.