FORT WORTH, TEXAS, Nov 5 (Reuters) - When Geronimo Perez pulled up to vote at the Worth Heights Community Center in South Fort Worth, Texas, one thing was on his mind: a friend who had been deported just a week earlier.
Perez, 56, cast his ballot for the entire Democratic ticket in this year's midterm elections. He lamented the high cost of living, but said President Donald Trump's aggressive immigration enforcement agenda drove him to support Democratic state representatives Gina Hinojosa for governor
and James Talarico for US Senate.
"I represented my family, my culture," said Perez. "The United States is made up of immigrants of different colors."
Perez's vote reflected a broader shift among millions of Latino voters across the country, from the border counties of Texas and the meatpacking towns of southwest Kansas to Miami-Dade, Colorado and Arizona. After helping fuel Republican gains in recent elections, many swung back toward Democrats.
Affordability remained a major concern, but outside polling places on Election Day immigration was mentioned repeatedly in Reuters interviews with Latino voters.
Nationally, however, the economy remained the dominant issue among Hispanic voters. In exit polling conducted by SSRS, 45% named the economy as the country's top issue. Nearly 65% of Latinos voted for US House candidates, according to the data.
Additionally, record numbers of Latinos voted nationwide, reaching as many as 14.5 million, said Janet Murguía, CEO of UnidosUS, the largest US Latino civil rights organization.
“Latino voters sent a clear message about their anger and concern about the direction of our country,” she said.
That shift among Latino voters was part of a broader multiracial coalition that propelled Democrats back to power, helping the party capture both chambers of Congress in victories stretching from coast to coast.
Across the 64 majority-Latino counties with Senate races that were mostly counted, Republicans lost 14 points off their 2024 share, outpacing national trends, according to a Reuters analysis of county-level voting trends. In Hidalgo County, Texas, support for Republicans dropped about 25 points, and in Miami-Dade, Florida — a county Trump won in 2024 — it fell 10 points.
Nowhere was that picture clearer than in Texas, where Hinojosa defeated three-term Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who has served in Texas state politics for more than 30 years. Yet, Hinojosa's "Latino voter strategy" was simple: Treat the electorate, one of the swingiest in the country, as if they're no different from non-Latino voters.
She defeated Abbott by about 6.5 percentage points, 52.5% to 46%, according to the most recent vote totals.
Her message to Latino Texans would be the same as to non-Latinos — she would just say it in Spanish, she told Reuters in January. And in an interview at her Austin-based campaign headquarters in July, she said it shouldn't be odd to have a Latina as governor of Texas.
She won't be alone: Democrat Xavier Becerra, who was health and human services secretary under President Joe Biden, won his gubernatorial race in California. It will be the first time in modern history that the two most populous states, California and Texas, will both be led by Latino governors at the same time.
In Texas, Talarico made an effort to engage with Latino voters across the state throughout his campaign, said Daniel Alegre, CEO of Spanish-language media giant TelevisaUnivision. He said that was one of the keys to Talarico's victory.
"It's up to the campaigns to realize this and not fall into 2014 or 2016 methodology; that doesn't work anymore," he said.
RAIDS HELP DRIVE VOTER REGISTRATIONS
In southwest Kansas, three solidly red counties turned blue in the US Senate race following ICE raids on towns dominated by meatpacking plants staffed by a largely immigrant workforce.
ICE agents descended on Ford, Finney and Seward counties in September for an operation that detained more than 100 people, state officials said.
The raids slowed operations at plants and delayed shipments of thousands of cattle, according to livestock associations, at a time of record high beef prices in the United States.
When Reuters visited a week after the raids, local organizers had seized the moment and, as a result, those three counties saw among the five highest increases in voter registrations in the state, according to data from the IKE Lab, a research project of Wichita State University.
“You can tell people are angry,” said Angelica Plata, a community organizer with New Frontiers, a local non-profit focused on racial and economic inequities.
That anger has been palpable all year, said Beatriz Lopez, executive director of Voto Latino, a national organization that works to register and mobilize Latino voters.
The next challenge, she said, is to not take this electorate for granted, because no party has a hold on Latinos.
"If they want to in 2028, if they want to sustain this momentum, if they want these big wins, invest in us, invest in the Latino vote."
(Reporting by David Hood-Nuño; Editing by Kat Stafford and Daniel Wallis)
