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Two years ago, Chiefer Danks of Rosedale, who works in agriculture, believed the former president would stabilize the economy and make life more affordable again as it was under his first administration. But more than a year into the second Trump administration, Danks isn’t pleased with how things have changed.
Like Danks, 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.
They’re also frightened and outraged that Trump’s second administration has targeted Latino residents — both those here illegally and legally, even U.S. citizens — with violent immigration raids and deportations, separating families in the process.
“I thought he was going to make America great again,” said Danks, 31, as he stood waiting for his wife in El Mercado Latino, a hub for Latino-owned family businesses in the heavily Hispanic neighborhood of East Bakersfield. “He didn’t follow through on his words.”
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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.
The trend was most striking in precincts where the majority of ballots were cast by Latino voters. “Yes” on Prop. 50 “”””””””””
As a multi generation Californian, WASP, who’s family has married into generations of Mexicans (yep I said it), the supposed outrage this article talks about it propaganda.
I have good friends in the 1st generation and green card workers. When I give them my side that includes the irrational minimum wage that has cost them jobs, the one sided gasoline taxes that makes us pay $2 a gallon more, the irrational killing of oil production and then buying oil from countries that hate us – to meet the demand of the economy, where is the supposed sky is falling environment when compared to historic data proving “nothing new here” and more a 100% anger at the Dem’s, and Socialists.
When you educate the middle class workers that seldom watch the news and when asked questions about what is happening county wide they cannot tell you. Between work, and family they don’t have the time. Understand the middle class Hispanics are not dumb, but have been lied to by the other side.
E.g. Insurance companies need to have more regulation because they are hammering the poor and working class. When you watch evening news it has been heavily edited to ignore 40 years of Sacramento and the “wild child forest management” that has resulted in deadly fires like the Paradise that killed people……… You know kill streets capacity, don’t create fire breaks, and more. So blame someone else except those responsible
So hey there Cuz, why are you blaming your Gringo relatives and the Prez.?????
The article quote ””’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,””’ is in fact drive by media bias that doesn’t tell the truth or eliminates the truth. Verdad?