While Latinos[1] still overwhelmingly vote and identify as Democrats, growing shares of Latinos are shifting politically rightward (Fraga, Velez, and West 2024; Wakefield, Fraga, and Fisk 2025). Since 2016, analysts have sought to understand Latino political behavior trends and their willingness to support the Republican Party, especially with Donald Trump as its leader (Alamillo 2019; Cadena 2023; Fraga et al. 2024). Such studies, while necessary for unraveling the supposed puzzle of the “new” Latino Right, often overlook right-leaning Latinos who reject Trump and the Republican Party.
This research gap is unfortunate. Right-leaning Latinos who reject Trump are worth studying because they ambivalently navigate conflicting racial, ethnic, and immigration politics and articulate a contingent pathway for the “new” Latino right. To address this elision, I draw upon original, in-depth interviews with Latino Republicans and Independents and explain their choices to vote for Trump. In an earlier 2023 article (Cadena 2023), I briefly discussed Republican respondent Alvin’s rejection of Trump. In this article, I build on that earlier discussion by introducing other Republican respondents and analyzing their varying perspectives on why they rejected Trump at the ballot box.
In line with scholarship that shows that Latino Trump voters are more likely to dismiss racism as a significant social structure (Alamillo 2019), I find that some right-leaning Latinos who reject Trump articulate their vote choices in relation to how they understand xenophobia, prejudice, and racism. Specifically, respondents in my study do cultural work to (1) distinguish their Republican identities from white supremacy and Trump’s racism and (2) emphasize how Trump mobilized American white supremacy. As such, they note the ambivalent choices some Latinos face in the U.S.’s two-party system. Namely, while they align themselves more with the Republican Party’s social and economic conservative politics, they struggle to reconcile their self-understandings with the party’s racial, ethnic, and immigration politics. These findings challenge common, unnuanced perspectives on right-leaning Latino politics.
ETHNORACIAL AND POLITICAL DISCURSIVE FIELDS
Latinos’ different strategic articulations of their social and political identities exist within a broader ethnoracial and political discursive field shaped by party elites, media, movements, and everyday people. Discursive fields are the “dynamic terrain in which meaning contests occur” between electoral political stakeholders (Steinberg 1999:748). Specifically, race, ethnicity, and immigration are foundational cleavages around which U.S. political parties organize their discursive strategies and mobilization efforts (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015; López 2015). As a result, electoral political competition generates a “field of [ethno]racial positions” that “shapes the opportunities, constraints, and possibilities” of everyday people’s political behavior (Kim 1999:106–7).
Ethnoracial and immigration discourses are particularly salient in shaping Latino political behavior and electoral mobilization. First, since the 1990s, Republican politicians have more readily used appeals that negatively characterize undocumented Latin American (mainly Mexican) immigrants (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015; O’Brian 2024). Second, anti-immigration appeals have the effect of conflating these symbolic, social, and legal categories, homogenizing U.S. Latinos as a racialized, undifferentiated group (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015:17; Chavez 2013; Pérez 2015).
As such, Republican and Democratic elites have increasingly polarized around immigration politics and their relations with Latino voters (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015; O’Brian 2024). Within this context, most Latinos have identified with the Democratic Party coalition (Cisneros 2016; Fraga et al. 2024; Wakefield et al. 2024). Scholars also contend that the minority of Latino voters who identify as Republicans adopt colorblind ideological orientations, deny the salience of racism, or otherwise see themselves as distinct from undocumented immigrants (Alamillo 2019; Basler 2008; Cadena 2023).
While sometimes conflated, individuals’ vote choices, even if consistently for candidates of a single political party, are distinct from individuals’ partisanship (i.e., the social-psychological identification with a political party) (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2008). These are further distinct from “political ideology” (i.e., conservative vs. liberal or left vs. right), which aims to capture two different and opposing ideological projects in U.S. politics that are often conflated with the two major parties (Hajnal and Lee, 2011). When I refer to “Republicans” in this study, I use it as a shorthand for those respondents who directly identified as “Republicans” or articulated a set of ideological positions, identifications, and voting behaviors that were more consistently aligned with one party.
In this essay, I examine how Latino Republicans who reject Trump interpretively navigate their unique positions in an ethnoracially polarized, two-party system. I advance my concept of “assimilated consciousness” whereby Latinos “politicize ethnoracial identity by disaggregating Latinx groupness and positioning themselves in opposition to other racialized people” (Cadena 2023:296). I do so by discussing respondents who are notable exceptions to the concept of “assimilated consciousness” and explaining how they use ideologies, symbolic boundaries, and positioning strategies to articulate how they can be Republican yet not vote for Trump.
METHODS AND DATA
This post draws on interviews I conducted between 2020 and 2023 with 22 Latino Republicans and 8 Independents, and is part of a larger interview project involving 66 Latino partisans.[2] The subsample is not “representative” but aimed at answering my research questions (Small 2009). Most respondents are overwhelmingly of Mexican origin, cisgender men, and Christians (either Protestant or Catholic). Of the Christian respondents, seven indicated they were “non-practicing.” Half of the respondents hold a post-secondary degree, and half are second-generation immigrants (i.e., the respondent had at least one parent born outside the US). Moreover, respondents’ ages ranged from 19 to 60, with an average age of 35 for the subsample.
WHY DO SOME LATINO REPUBLICANS REJECT TRUMP?
Of the sample of 30 Latino Republicans and Independents, I found that nine either did not vote for Trump or voted for Trump in 2016 but did not vote for Trump in 2020. These respondents included four Republicans and five Independents. All respondents who voted for Trump in both elections identified as Republicans.
| Table 1: Overview of Sample Vote Count (N=30) | ||||
| Voted for Trump | Non-Trump Voter* | Regretful Democratic Voter | Voted for Trump to Rejecting Trump | Did Not Vote** |
| 14 | 7 | 3 | 2 | 4 |
| *Includes 5 Democratic voters and 2 third-party voters
**Includes 3 people who were ineligible to vote but supported Trump and 1 person who chose not to vote because he did not support either major party option in 2016 or 2020 |
||||
Before discussing Latino Republicans who did not vote for Trump, it is useful to look at one who did.
Jay, who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but had opposed Trump during the primary elections.[3] Jay is a long-time Republican and party operative. In our interview, he told me:
I’m not his biggest fan. It’s important that you understand it at the outset. I’m Republican because I believe in certain principles that I hope that the country aspires to. I’m not a big fan of what I call the cult of personality. I’m not a Republican because of Trump or I’m not a Democrat because of Trump. He’s just one person. He may not capture a Republican ideal.
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- Jay (Republican, 45, Mexican, 2nd Gen, Illinois, emphasis mine)
Jay strongly believes in Republican “conservative” ideological principles like personal responsibility, balanced government budgets, racial colorblindness, and respect for religious traditionalism. At the same time, he sees Trump’s rise as contrary to those principles. To reconcile the tension between his Republican identity and his distaste for Trump, however, he emphasizes Trump as “just one person” within the party. Of course, this contrasts with the reality that Trump continues to lead the party and won the 2024 election despite two impeachment trials, four criminal trials, a sexual assault civil lawsuit, and a criminal conviction in New York State.
The Republicans who chose not to vote for Trump similarly saw him straying from their principles and conservative preferences. At the same time, they were less inclined to disentangle Trump from the Republican Party and from what they saw as the rising prejudices that emanated from the Trump campaign (Canizales and Vallejo 2021; Flores‐González and Salgado 2022). For example, when I asked David how he thought other Latinos perceived his partisanship, he told me:
I’ve been vocal about the fact that I still lean a little bit Republican, or… I agree with a lot of their policies. However, I was totally against President Trump and his ideals… Not so much policies… but just his values or the way he treated maybe immigrants or people of color.
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- David (Republican, 37, Mexican, 1.5 Gen, Michigan, emphasis mine)
Like Jay, David sees himself politically more aligned with the Republican Party. Unlike Jay, , he refused to vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020. Instead, David, who sees himself as an immigrant of color, draws a boundary between himself and Trump to articulate his Republican identity. In doing so, he makes an implicit distinction between himself and Jay: David recognizes the contradictions between Trump and Republican “principles” and “policies” but contends that Trump’s xenophobic and racist rhetoric represented a threat to people like him.
Maduro, a Colombian professor who strongly believes in “conservative” (i.e., neoliberal) economic policies, articulated his rejection of Trump in starker terms. He did not vote for Trump in either 2016 or 2020. Beyond simply targeting immigrants of color (like him and David), Maduro contends that Trump represents a movement toward a racist and fascist ethnoreligious state:
Desde la campaña electoral que llevó a Donald Trump a la presidencia. … el giro populista hacia una derecha muy radical… que a veces veo que es fascista. Que es esencialmente la ideología del Estado Nación llevada al extremo. Un Estado Nación identificado con una herencia, pues lo que se conoce como WASPs [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants]. Asume unas interpretaciones muy de derecha y muy particulares de lo que significa ser cristiano, que son unas interpretaciones supremamente excluyentes.[4]
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- Maduro (Republican, 65, Colombian, 1st Gen, Florida, emphasis mine)
In other words, according to Maduro, Trump’s movement has reconstructed a “WASP[y]” American national identity. Thus, beyond simply being “populist,” Maduro worries that Trump represents a “fascist” movement that, in many ways, resembles how the Ku Klux Klan articulated American identity in the 1920s (see McVeigh and Estep 2019). Such parallels are not surprising as the 1920s KKK similarly “revived” itself in contention to ongoing debates over race, ethnicity, and immigration (McVeigh and Estep 2019). Consequently, unlike Jay, who critiques Trump’s “cult of personality” as unlikable, Maduro interprets Trump’s leadership in starker, more dangerous terms.
Yanelly agrees with David that Trump advocated for policies she liked and agrees with both David and Maduro that Trump’s rhetoric made it difficult to support him. Namely, she contends that his rhetoric made it okay for people to “discriminate” or express their “prejudice” in public. Unlike David and Maduro, Yanelly sstrongly disapproved of Trump’s consistent engagement with the public through social media and speeches: :
I will admit that I did vote for [Trump in 2016]. I think he would’ve done a great job if he would’ve stayed off social media. No, I take that back…. The things he did were actually good, in my opinion, he just needed to keep his mouth shut, and stay off the social media. [laughter] He incited… the people that have biases and prejudice… to come forward with it. It’s okay to discriminate, it’s okay to hate people. And that’s not what we needed for sure. But some of the decisions that he made were actually really good…. It just took away from some of the actions.
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- Yanelly (Republican, 60, Mexican, 2nd Gen, California, emphasis mine)
Like other Republican respondents in my prior study (Cadena 2023), Yanelly interprets Trump’s rhetoric as unpolished and unprofessional. Unlike those respondents, however, she also considers his rhetoric dangerous and not just a function of “media” bias or “Democratic” branding of Trump as racist. Understood this way, Yanelly straddles the line between Republican Latinos who minimize Trump’s racism and mobilization of White nationalist grievances, and Maduro, David, and another participant in this study, Alvin, who undoubtedly see Trump as part of a broader ethnoracist project. In other words, Yanelly suggests that although Trump said terrible things and mobilized prejudicial behavior, he could have avoided tarnishing his reputation if he had stayed away from the public eye.
By emphasizing what they saw as the rise in white supremacist prejudices, discrimination, and nationalist mobilizations, Yanelly, David, and Maduro reconciled their conservative principles with their decisions to vote against Donald Trump. Yanelly voted against Trump in 2020 after voting for him in 2016, while David and Maduro never voted for Trump. As such, they drew on ideologies rooted in race consciousness (Itzigsohn and Brown 2015; Jung 2015) and drew boundaries between how they saw themselves and how Trump led the Republican Party.
Such reconciling work does come with costs. First, some Latinos can likely struggle to maintain their social-psychological identification with the Republican Party as they are faced with the perceived tensions between their Republican and ethnoracial identities. For example, in our interview, Maduro laments Trump’s control of the Republican Party and resigns himself by saying that his identification with the Republican Party “se ha erosionado tremendamente…”[5] Similarly, some Latinos might evade identifying too closely with Trump while maintaining their Republican identification. For example, although David is “vocal” about his Republican partisanship, he often emphasizes his opposition to Trump, particularly when talking to other Latinos: “Because I identify maybe or I lean towards Republican, but I say [that] I’m anti-Trump. So they kind of get that…” In other words, David works to manage his public position as a Republican and Latino by stressing his distance from Trump. As I discuss elsewhere (Cadena 2025), non-Republican Latinos criticize their Republican peers and family members for “betraying” their families and Latinos generally by supporting Trump’s racist and xenophobic political project.
Why did these respondents differ from Jay? Jay’s work as a political operative is a relevant consideration: Jay could be more psychologically, instrumentally, or ideologically committed to the Republican Party as an institution for furthering his political preferences. It is also possible that Maduro, David, and Yanelly have different experiences than Jay with the kind of discrimination and prejudice that they claim Trump increased. Notably, Maduro and David, as first-generation immigrants, each described experiences of being discriminated against for their language abilities, skin tones, or otherwise felt out of place among their white American community members. Although Yanelly did not report such experiences personally, she noted the deep divide between Mexican and white Americans in her California community growing up.
Such experiences of discrimination and exclusion are politically meaningful as they can help develop what sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois called “second sight” (Itzigsohn and Brown 2015; Jung 2015) which refers to how ethnoracially marginalized Americans can see through ideologies and social relations that naturalize ethnoracial inequalities. Second sight can inform how Latino Republicans articulate the conflicting relationship between Trump’s racist rhetoric and their sense of ethnoracial marginalization that leads them to vote against Trump. Thus, rather than exhibiting an assimilated consciousness (Cadena 2023), respondents reject the opportunity to position themselves against other ethnoracially marginalized people and instead articulate Trump’s political project as a threat to ethnoracial equality.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
While much has been made of rising Latino support for Trump since 2016 (Fraga et al. 2024), my brief analysis of Latino Republicans who rejected Donald Trump highlights the fact that even among Latino Republicans, some oppose the Party’s white nationalist overtures. This finding is the inverse of Alamillo’s (2019) quantitative study, showing that Latino Trump voters were those most likely to deny the salience of racism in the U.S.
My respondents’ insights are not necessarily surprising: In the 1980s, Latino Republicans similarly challenged rising white neoconservatism and growing anti-immigrant discourse (Francis-Fallon 2019). That said, what may be new today is a growing “post-racial” reactionary conservatism that includes “meritocratic, patriotic, and American” people of all ethnoracial groups (Brooks 2024). Such ideological shifts may blur the once seemingly clear divisions between white and traditionally non-white politics and explain why many Latinos continue to feel included within the Republican project. In the end, as I argue elsewhere (Cadena 2025 ), we must continue to engage more deeply with the ambivalent cultural dimensions of U.S. politics and learn from everyday Latinos to better understand how they navigate contested racial, ethnic, and immigration party politics.
Engaging ambivalence and culture should lead us to ask and answer new questions about Latino politics. For example, we can ask: How do Latinos on the “right” come to their ethnoracial and political identities and ideologies differently than their left-leaning peers? Or why do some Latinos divergently interpret political, ethnoracial, and immigration political rhetoric in the first place, and how does political-ideological or partisan socialization shape those processes? And how do Latinos interpret, feel about, and navigate relationships with their right-leaning Latino family members, friends, and peers?
Answering these questions will mean moving beyond the “neo-positivist” approach to studying “Latino politics” that centers quantitative studies of voter behavior and attitudes (Gonzales 2018). Instead, we should employ diverse methods and theoretical frameworks to expand our understanding and definition of Latino politics. A comprehensive study of Latino politics will mean incorporating history, culture, and social structure to understand political projects, political behavior, and contestations over state, economic, and cultural power. Finally, it will also mean moving beyond the academy to develop new political projects that deal squarely with socioeconomic inequality, ethnoracial discrimination, and the scapegoating of migrants. To develop such projects, we must courageously and with conviction engage Latinos (and others) from where they are, understand the (Latino) right’s contradictions, and invite them to a new coalitional politics.
Endnotes
[1] Although there is considerable debate over what labels to use to identify Latin American immigrants and their descendants, I use “Latino” to welcome readers who may reject this essay outright for using such labels as “Latinx,” “Latine,” and “Latin@.” That said, I agree that these labels are significant for disrupting the gendered hierarchies within the Spanish language. In general, I refer to respondents by their self-identified gender and national origin identities.
[2] I conducted almost all interviews over the phone to encourage people to speak freely and accommodate respondents’ schedules. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. To recruit for this study, I drew on personal networks, participant referrals, and advertisements on social media and through local businesses, venues, and community and political organizations in the Chicago, Northern Indiana, and New York areas.
[3] I discuss Jay’s political perspectives along with other similarly aligned Trump voters more in my 2023 article.
[4] Translation: “Since the campaign that brought Donald Trump to the presidency… the populist turn has become increasingly radical… which at times comes off as fascist. What is essentially the ideology of the nation-state brought to the extreme. The nation-state identified with the heritage that is often known as WASPs [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants]” (Maduro).
[5] Translation: “[Identifying as Republican] has eroded tremendously…” (Maduro).
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Featured Photo Credit:“Latinos para Trump” signs being held by participants at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Picture provided by Voice of America and accessed via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Latinos_for_Trump_2016_RNC.jpg
