Was historically-high Latino support for Donald Trump in the 2024 election evidence of an enduring realignment — or a fluke? That remains unclear, but one thing is undeniable: overall Hispanic support for Trump and the Republican Party is collapsing.

The latest sign came in yesterday’s Florida special election results. In heavily Hispanic Miami, which Kamala Harris won by a single point in 2024, Democrat Eileen Higgins just won the mayoral election by 19 points. She performed strongly with Latinos across Miami, and only lost in the most Cuban-dominant areas on the west end of the city.

This is a sign of a widening national trend. Some of the biggest swings in last month’s special elections in Virginia and New Jersey were among Hispanic voters, a development that suggests that Trump may be losing his grip on the group. That the President was not on the ballot is no excuse either; on the contrary, his personal ratings — lower than at any time since 2021 — seem to be dragging down Republicans in general.

Until this year, Trump had steadily gained ground with Latino voters over the past three elections. He performed particularly well among the same segments of Hispanic voters who typically back Republicans in the non-Hispanic white electorate: those with a high-school education, evangelical Protestants, conservative Catholics, and Hispanic men. In 2024, he captured the votes of working-class Hispanic men under 45 by a margin of seven points.

But the main factor behind the Rightward shift among Hispanic swing voters in 2024 may have been what drove the electorate Rightward as a whole: anger at the Biden administration for post-Covid inflation. Rising food, gas, and rent prices hit working-class Hispanic families especially hard, turning economic anxiety into political anger.

The implosion of Hispanic support can, in part, be attributed to the Trump administration’s theatrically brutal mass deportation policy. Some Hispanic Trump voters who approved of his promise to deport criminal illegal immigrants strongly oppose round-ups of non-violent illegal immigrant workers in farms and factories. For many, the optics of the raids — and the relish with which they were conducted — were too horrifying to stomach.

But to treat immigration policy as the sole issue of concern for Hispanic voters would be to repeat the mistake of the last generation of Democratic strategists, who sought to buy Hispanic votes with a lenient approach to immigration enforcement. Like all voters, Hispanic voters are more worried about affordability and the economy, citing it as their top concern in poll after poll.

Rather than indicating Trump’s unique personal appeal to Hispanic voters or the group’s support for most of his policies, his gains in 2024 may have merely represented a backlash against Biden-era inflation. After all, George W. Bush, whose personal style and immigration, trade, and foreign policies were the opposite of Trump’s, won as much as 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004, comparable to Trump’s 45-6% in 2024. Following Bush’s departure from the White House, Hispanics moved back toward their historic home in the Democratic Party, and they may do the same in the 2028 presidential election regardless of the GOP candidate.

Barring a dramatic reversal, Trump’s plummeting popularity among American voters of Latin American descent may help the Democrats regain the House in next year’s midterm elections, turning Trump for the remainder of his term into a weakened pato cojo, or “lame duck”. It would mark a profound shift in a constituency Republicans once believed was drifting decisively into their column.