05/22/2026
Many California Latinos feel betrayed by the president’s campaign promises to promptly lower costs and keep the U.S. out of foreign military entanglements — both of which ring hollow as gasoline and grocery prices surge due primarily to Trump’s unpopular war in Iran.
Public opinion polls and off-year elections have pointed to Latinos reversing their historic 2024 rightward shift toward Trump. And according to a new CalMatters review of 2025 election data, that trend also applies to last year’s special election on redistricting — which Democrats successfully framed as a referendum on Trump.
The analysis of voting results from 57 of California’s 58 counties found that Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts in Democrats’ favor, vastly outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign in precincts where the majority of voters are nonwhite.
The trend was most striking in precincts where the majority of ballots were cast by Latino voters. “Yes” on Prop. 50 gained about 30 percentage points compared to Harris’s performance against Trump a year earlier, according to CalMatters’ analysis.
CalMatters’ findings provide some of the clearest quantitative evidence yet that the Latino rightward shift toward Trump in 2024 was more a blip than a permanent realignment, a nationwide trend that has so far been captured by state and national polling, focus groups and anecdotal evidence.
Voting “Yes” on Prop. 50 was a way for Latinos to channel their pent-up frustration with the Trump administration, said Ben Tulchin, a San Francisco-based Democratic pollster who has conducted several surveys and focus groups with Latino swing voters
“These Latinos, even the ones who voted for Trump in 2024, were pi**ed off at him,” Tulchin said. “They feel deceived by Trump and his promises.”
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