MERCED – At first, Marlyn Huesgew Mendoza registered as a Democrat. In 2020, she re-registered as a Republican and voted for Donald Trump for president, as she did this election.

The reason is simple: It was in 2018 — when he was in office — that her family was finally able to buy a house in Merced. The same year, the Trump administration approved her Guatemalan mother’s citizenship application — one that had been rejected under President Barack Obama, she said. The approval letter had Trump’s signature on it.

“She’s like: ‘Look who adopted me,’” said Huesgew Mendoza, a 25-year-old graduate from University of California Merced and an administrative assistant at the Merced County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

“Once he came in and it was just so easy for us, I was like, ‘Huh, he might not be as scary as people may think.’”

Most — if not all — of California’s 12 Latino-majority counties gave a larger share of their vote to Trump compared to 2020, and counties with a higher share of Latino population swung further toward Trump, according to a CalMatters analysis of state voting data. Trump also expanded his vote share in most other counties in California.

But does that signal a rightward shift among Latinos and a departure from the Democratic Party in California?

The answer is complicated.

Absent conclusive demographic data on votes cast in this election, pollsters disagree over how much their surveys show Latinos shifting toward Trump. The AP VoteCast, which surveyed more than 120,000 voters nationwide in English and Spanish, shows 55% of Latino respondents supported Vice President Kamala Harris, while 43% backed Trump. In 2020, Joe Biden won 63% of the vote among Latino respondents versus Trump’s 35%.

But almost all polls reached the same conclusion: Latino support has grown for Trump.

A mix of factors contributed to the apparent shift: Inflation blamed on an unpopular administration, concern over border security, resistance to Democrats’ messaging on cultural issues and Harris’ lack of appeal, according to pollsters, experts, political consultants and a dozen Latinos in the Central Valley who spoke to CalMatters.

Marlyn Huesgew Mendoza, an administrative assistant at the Merced County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, sits at a bench in front of her downtown Merced office on Nov. 7, 2024. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local

How much other Republicans gained from the growing support for Trump remains to be seen. Nationwide, Democrats won four of the five battleground U.S. Senate seats and declared victory on abortion rights ballot measures in Arizona, Missouri and Nevada.

In California, with 88% of the estimated vote counted, Trump has received slightly fewer votes than Republican U.S. Senate candidate Steve Garvey. And in some counties within the state’s toss-up congressional districts, Democratic candidates appear to be outperforming Harris. In Merced County, which falls entirely into the 13th Congressional District, Democrat Adam Gray has received 5 percentage points more of the vote than Harris, with nearly 80% of the votes counted.

For Gray, who is narrowly trailing Republican Rep. John Duarte, this election does not reflect voters flocking toward Republicans.

“What you want to call a rightward shift, I would call a rejection of more of the same. Voters are saying … ‘We want you guys to change,’” he told CalMatters. “I think people want to see us get back to the basics, and if I’m elected to Congress, I’m going to do just that.”

But Mike Madrid, a longtime GOP consultant with an expertise in Latino politics, called this election a “five-alarm fire” for Democrats, who he said have gradually lost support among Latino voters since 2012. He pointed to a pair of Pew Research Center surveys, which suggested Latino support for the Democratic presidential candidate dropped from 71% for Obama in 2012 to 59% for Biden in 2020.

In California, a majority of Latinos have firmly supported Democrats after former GOP Gov. Pete Wilson championed Proposition 187, which was approved by voters in 1994 to deny benefits to undocumented immigrants but was blocked by the courts. But that support could erode as cost of living increases, alienating working-class residents, many of whom are Latinos, Madrid said.

“I think this is a pivotal moment. I think it’s as significant as the Prop. 187 moment in 1994, except it was a wake-up call for Republicans,” Madrid said.

But some experts warned it may be too early to tell if the past three presidential elections are a referendum on the Democratic Party, given that Democrats have won toss-up statewide races in battleground states and have won every statewide race in California since 2006.

This election is an outlier, with Biden withdrawing from the race and passing the torch to Harris so late in the campaign, said Roberto Suro, a professor of journalism and public policy at the University of Southern California.

“You’ve got to put an asterisk on this election, or actually, multiple asterisks. Trump as a candidate is a giant asterisk,” Suro said. “Trying to say we are seeing any kind of permanent realignment is a mistake.”

‘The bottom line is money’

Huesgew Mendoza isn’t alone in believing that her life changed for the better after Trump took office in 2017.

Sandra Izaguirre, a 34-year-old in-home caretaker from Lancaster in Los Angeles County, said she supported Obama in 2008, but not in 2012. Then a first-time mother working at a fast food restaurant, Izaguirre needed health care. Obamacare required bigger businesses to provide full-time employees health benefits or pay a fee, so Izaguirre said her employer just cut her hours to disqualify her.

“I wasn’t improving. If anything, I was hurting more,” she said. “I just wanted a change already.”

That drove her to vote for Trump in 2016. A year later, Izaguirre said, she was able to buy her first home.

But because she couldn’t work as an in-home caregiver during the COVID-19 pandemic, she said she almost defaulted on her house but was saved by a federal mortgage relief program approved on Trump’s watch. The economic downturn, mixed with the state’s failure to stop unemployment benefits fraud, was “a recipe for disaster,” she said.

Even economic concerns, however, weren’t enough to drive Izaguirre to the polls this November. But that’s not because she didn’t support Trump: She said her vote for him in deep-blue California would not have made a difference anyway.

Political signs along Highway 152 leading into Los Banos on Nov. 9, 2024. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local

First: A family walks through downtown Delano on Nov. 8, 2024. Last: A mural painted on a power box in downtown Merced on Nov. 7, 2024. Photos by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local

But the economy is top of mind among Latino voters, as well as among voters overall, as polls have consistently shown throughout the 2024 campaign. Latino and Black Americans are the most likely to feel the pinch of high inflation compared to the overall population, according to a 2022 analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Latinos in California make up 40% of the state’s population but more than half of poor Californians, according to an analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California last year. The poverty rate among Latinos rose to 16.9% in fall 2023 compared to 13.5% in fall 2021, the analysis shows.

It’s a pain felt by Annissa Fragoso, a Merced insurance agent who voted for Harris this year. As a business owner, she said, she’s “struggling a lot with the insurance industry” and growing frustrated with state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, a Democrat.

“The Latinos in the past were registered and supportive of the Democratic Party, but it has not been very supportive of us,” she said.

Fragoso, who lost in the March primary for the Merced County Board of Supervisors, said she spoke to a lot of Latino voters who saw Trump as an agent of change on the economy.

“The bottom line is money,” she said.

Annissa Fragoso, an insurance agent, works at her desk in downtown Merced on Nov. 7, 2024. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local

Adrian Jurado, a painter in Los Banos who said he never registered to vote since he believed he couldn’t make a difference, said that ever since the pandemic, there were fewer painting jobs because people weren’t willing to spend anymore. But when Trump was in office, he said, the economy seemed better.

“I’ve never had it like this,” he said. “It used to be that you could put a little bit away. I wasn’t able to put nothing away.”

While consumer prices have climbed by 20% over the past four years, average wage gains actually outpaced inflation, according to an analysis by the NBC News. But that does not match people’s perception, as expenses keep rising, the analysis says. Many voters frustrated with the economy embraced Trump, even as economists warn that Trump’s proposed tariffs could hike prices even further nationwide as well as in California.

But voters may be punishing incumbents rather than voting for Republicans, said Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas, research director at the Latino Policy & Politics Institute of UCLA.

“You get reminded of those high prices every single day because you are buying something every single day,” he said. “High inflation was a global phenomenon. It was not unique to the United States. But who happened to be in power when it happened? It was Biden and Harris.”

People walk through downtown Delano on Nov. 8, 2024. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local

Julián Castro, CEO of the Latino Community Foundation, said Trump’s win resembles the victories of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000: All three campaigned against a Democratic administration that “faced headwinds,” he said.

“In 1980, the economy was similar to 2024, at least in people’s minds,” Castro said. “In 2000, after eight years of Democratic governance, there was a pent-up demand for a change.”

But even though they are frustrated at the economy under the Biden administration, most Latinos who spoke to CalMatters said it doesn’t mean they will continue to vote Republican.

“I’ll just see how it goes in the (next) four years,” Izaguirre said.

‘That’s not me’

Trump has promised to conduct the largest deportation in American history, targeting immigrants in the country illegally, with or without criminal records.

But Izaguirre, as well as other Latino Trump supporters who spoke to CalMatters, said they do not want undocumented immigrants who have been working in the country for years to be deported. The majority of them supported providing legal status for those immigrants — a policy Democrats have championed.

Trump’s victory has terrified some migrants at the border and undocumented immigrants in California.

“I feel worried because I don’t know what the future will be for us people who don’t have documents, and we work here,” an undocumented immigrant in Delano told CalMatters in Spanish. CalMatters is not naming him due to his concern for his safety.

But others said Trump’s mass deportation plan would not touch them.

“He said he was going to deport people who have a bad record. That’s not me. I don’t have a bad record,” said a farmworker in Stanislaus County who spoke to CalMatters on the condition of anonymity and who said she came to the country by paying off a “coyote” — a term for smugglers — 20 years ago.

Huesgew Mendoza likened Trump’s mass deportation to yelling fire in the theater. “It just sounds too scary, too major,” she said.

And Aaron Barajas, 46, who voted for Trump this year in his first presidential election, slammed policies that would “rip people apart from their family,” arguing those who are already established in the United States should be allowed to obtain legal documents. But he distinguished between those who are already living here and those who wish to come in, arguing Trump merely wants to “bring people into our country, but do it the right way.”

First: Aaron Barajas, an insurance agent, sits at a bench in front of his downtown Merced office on Nov. 7, 2024. Last: Political signs along Highway 152 leading into Los Banos on Nov. 9, 2024. Photos by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local

It appears Trump’s rhetoric on immigration has not deterred Latinos from voting for him, unlike the assumption Democrats have made following the passage of Prop. 187, Suro said.

“The hypothesis was that, when confronted with threats to the immigrant population and xenophobic rhetoric and harsh exclusionary measures toward immigrants … you would alienate Latinos,” he said. “Trump has very vividly disproven that.”

That’s in part because of “scapegoating” by Trump and his allies, who targeted migrants “physically at the border” for mass deportation, Castro said. “They cleaved the recent arrivals from people who have been here for a long time, and that’s why I think you hear people express confidence that he doesn’t mean them.”

Another factor could be the rapidly changing demographics among Latinos in California, as more young, U.S.-born Latinos become eligible to vote, experts say.

“Overall, fewer Latinos are as close as they used to be to the immigrant experience,” said Mindy Romero, founder and director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy. “How close you are to the immigrant experience can directly affect how you view policy on internal (immigration efforts) versus border (immigration).”

The anti-immigrant sentiment could even be appealing to some Latino voters who are “fueled by a deep desire to assimilate or to be seen as belonging to a larger American culture and to differentiate themselves from those who are seen as outsiders,” said Dominguez-Villegas at UCLA.

A referendum on Democrats?

While it’s too early to draw firm conclusions from the election, the takeaway for Democrats is that they must be better at reaching Latino voters, something both major parties have done poorly in California, political consultants say.

California Democrats are “clearly in danger of losing Latino support long term” due to “bad branding” that lasted for more than a decade, Madrid said.

But, he added, “there’s very little evidence that suggests Latinos are becoming more conservative. There’s a lot suggesting they are becoming more populist.”

Michael Gomez Daly, a senior strategist with the progressive California Donor Table, said he’s unsure how best to counter the backlash Democrats faced from voters hurt by inflation, stressing that voters may remember Trump with “rose-colored glasses.”

However, he said, Trump proved “inspiring” among Latino voters even with his “problematic” rhetoric. Living in the toss-up 41st Congressional District where GOP Rep. Ken Calvert narrowly defeated Democrat Will Rollins, Gomez Daly said he saw conservative YouTube ads targeting young men all the time.

“I think Democrats need to recognize the economic situation that much of inland California is facing and speak to those problems and give hope to people,” he said. “I think that was lacking.”

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CalMatters’ data reporter Jeremia Kimelman contributed to this story.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.