The Hispanic Shift in 2024
The 2024 presidential election saw Hispanic voters make a dramatic shift to the right. The result was catastrophic for the Democrats.
Let's take a look at every county in the nation where a majority of the population is Hispanic. If we compare Hispanicity and rightward shift, we observe a positive correlation. That is, the more Hispanic a county is, the more it shifted rightward since 2016.
Now, let's put all of these data points on a map. In the visualization below, the size of the bubbles represents the size of the shift on the presidential level. Again, all of these counties are more than 50% Hispanic.
Starr County, Texas, sits along the nation's southern border and is almost entirely Hispanic. We can learn a lot about the movement of Hispanic voters just by observing this county. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got nearly 80% of the vote here; in 2024, Donald Trump won it by double digits.
So what did this amount to? Ultimately, there was a tangible shift in the electorate between 2016 and 2024, causing a key demographic of the Democratic coalition to turn to MAGA. The question now is if Hispanic people will continue shifting red or if they'll come home to Democrats.
However, in the 2026 primaries, the Starr County results showed significant reversion away from the GOP, with large swaths of Hispanic voters opting to vote in the Democratic Senate Primary rather than the Republican Senate Primary. The question now is whether that shift will persist nationwide and whether it will continue into the general.
