Trump’s approval among Latino voters has collapsed since he took office, according to CNN polling: just 20 percent of Latinos approved of his job performance as of last fall, down from 41 percent in February, a 21 point drop that outpaced the decline among both Black and white Americans over the same stretch. Follow up polling through 2026 shows the slide has continued rather than stabilized.
Trump won a record 48 percent of the Latino vote in 2024, up from 32 percent four years earlier, a result Republicans treated as a genuine, lasting realignment. CNN’s polling found that reversing hard: Latino registered voters said they would back a Democrat over a Republican for Congress by 64 percent to 19 percent, a wider gap than among voters overall.
CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten broke down the numbers on air, describing the shift as Latino voters turning against Trump “in massive, massive numbers.”
What Actually Changed Their Minds?
Cost of living, not immigration, is the issue Latino voters themselves cite most often as driving their views of Trump, according to polling from Pew Research and UnidosUS conducted through the spring of 2026. Immigration enforcement ranks second. A May 2026 UnidosUS poll found two thirds of Latino voters disapprove of his job performance, and that one in four Latino voters who backed Trump in 2024 now say they would not vote for him again, up from just 9 percent who said the same in April 2025.
None of this means Trump’s support among Latino voters has vanished entirely, a real, if shrinking, share still approves of his performance and would back him again. But the scale of the reversal is genuinely unusual: a demographic Republicans were actively courting as a durable part of their coalition after 2024 has instead become one of the sharpest sources of erosion in his second term approval numbers, and the polling shows that shift accelerating through 2026, not leveling off.
