LAS VEGAS — President Donald Trump, two years ago, won over Latino and working class voters frustrated with Democrats’ economic stewardship with promises of a brighter future.
Now, many of those voters are frustrated with him, too — and threatening to stay home in 2028.
Nowhere is that more apparent than Nevada, the battleground state where Latino and working class voters are largely the same people — the hospitality workers, dishwashers and bellmen who keep Las Vegas humming and who were among the most coveted demographics of the 2024 election.
“They’re the new soccer mom. We are literally the new persuadable voter,” said Democratic strategist and former union organizer Chuck Rocha, who served as an adviser to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 and 2016 presidential campaigns and ran the campaign’s efforts to turn out Latinos. “But I’m not sure if either party yet treats us that way.”
Strategists from both parties are facing an uncomfortable reality: These voters, who have in recent cycles swung between Democrats and Republicans, may not come back at all. The 2024 shifts to Trump, they say, were less about enthusiasm for Republicans than dissatisfaction with Democrats. Turnout among young Latino voters fell off sharply between 2020 and 2024, according to Tufts’ Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement; even as those Latinos who did show up swung to Trump.
“It’s not a realignment,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who specializes in Latino voter outreach. “It’s a dealignment — moving away from both parties.”
The conventional framing of these shifts — Latino voters going Republican, or swinging back to Democrats — fundamentally misreads what is happening, Madrid said. These voters aren’t changing their minds about which party they prefer but rather losing faith in the political system altogether, disillusioned by promises from both sides of the aisle to make things like housing and health care more affordable.
“They’re being reminded why neither of these parties get it,” Madrid said. “These voters know they’re not anchored to either of them. They’re clearly disappointed in Trump, but they were clearly disappointed in Biden and Harris, and neither partisan side is capable of understanding that.”
In 2024, Trump won 46 percent of Latino voters nationally — up from the 28 percent in 2016 and 32 percent in 2020, and a record for a Republican presidential nominee.
But after two years during which many of those voters have failed to see the promised prosperity, Democrats and Republicans are scrambling to mend fences with them, aware that the White House’s next occupant could hinge on whether they turn out to vote.
Already, more than a half dozen Democratic presidential hopefuls have made pilgrimages to the Culinary Union in Las Vegas to court its heavily immigrant, predominantly Latino working class members. To convince this group that it’s worth voting at all, union leaders say Democrats need to speak in ways and take positions that have made many in the party recoil in recent cycles.
For instance, Ted Pappageorge, the Culinary Union’s secretary-treasurer, at an interview at the union’s headquarters, frequently used the words “common sense,” borrowing a term favored by Trump and Republicans in the 2024 election.
On immigration, he says Democrats need to borrow Republicans’ message of secure borders and deporting criminals, the kind of language polling shows appeals to the majority of Americans. That may, however, prove a tall order in a Democratic primary where many candidates will want to tack to the left to win the progressives likely to show up for primaries and caucuses.
“At the end of the day, the American people elected Trump twice because the truth is, Democrats were tone deaf and they weren’t listening to working class voters,” Pappageorge said during a press conference ahead of the president’s recent trip to the state. “In Nevada, in order to win, you’ve got to pay attention to working class folks and you’ve got to have common sense.”
He added that Democrats need to stop talking about the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office and “whining about Congress and all these politicians.”
The stakes for Republicans might be even higher as strategists from both parties agree that low turnout among Latino voters likely hurts the GOP more than Democrats. Republican gains among Latinos largely came from younger, male and less educated voters — the kind of lower-propensity voters that are hardest to get to the polls. That may be even harder without Trump on the ticket.
Republicans are counting on the populist tack their party has taken under Trump, highlighted by the president’s recent visit to Nevada to highlight his “no tax on tips” and other tax policies designed to benefit working class Americans. They’re hoping that Vice President JD Vance — currently a favorite to succeed Trump — will build on that populist agenda, buttressed by his working-class upbringing.
Michael McDonald, the chair of the Nevada Republican Party and a former Culinary Union lobbyist, makes the case for Vance in almost entirely biographical terms — a poor, working class kid who pulled himself up through the military and college.
“That’s the great American story,” he said, adding that Democrats “did lose their way” with the working class. “They forgot. They left us. We didn’t leave them.”
Incumbency could prove the biggest impediment. Latino voters shifted toward Trump in 2024 largely because of economic frustration with the Biden administration — and now, just over a year into Trump’s second term, only 14 percent of Latino voters say their lives have improved, while 39 percent say things have gotten worse, according to a UnidosUS poll in November.
Carlos Perez, a 30-year-old housekeeper at a hotel just off the Las Vegas Strip, typifies the voter both parties are chasing. Brought to the United States from Mexico as a child and working toward citizenship, Perez hopes to cast his first vote in 2028, if someone earns it. He’s not particularly interested in ideology or party affiliation — just in whoever is in power making his life a little easier.
He’s been able to buy far less with his $200 grocery budget than he used to, gas prices pinch him every week, and the immigration enforcement he’s watched unfold around him looks nothing like what Trump promised.
“He was saying he was just going after the bad of the bad — obviously, that’s great,” Perez said of Trump. “But so far, from what I’ve seen, it’s not going that direction.”
He would have voted for Trump in his first term, he said, if he could have, though he soured on the president with time. In 2024, he didn’t like either candidate: “I didn’t feel like they were that great of options.”
The problem Democrats have run into in trying to reach people like Perez, Rocha argues, isn’t the message so much as the messenger and the machinery behind it: too many working class campaigns run by people who have never lived a working class life, delivering talking points that sound nothing like the way working class people talk.
“Democrats want to bring a 10-point policy book to a fist fight,” Rocha said, adding that their message should instead be: “Oh my God, your shit is really expensive.”
The voters Democrats lost to Trump, Rocha said, didn’t leave because they fell in love with the Republican Party — they left because they felt abandoned, and Trump spoke their language.
“They hang out with their boys at the construction site,” he said of the young Latino men who swung toward Trump in 2024. “They hear that Donald Trump is going to do something about cost on day one, and that Democrats are a bunch of wussies.”
Nevada’s Democratic attorney general Aaron Ford, who is running for governor, is trying to make a version of that pitch. He has spent months on what he calls a “working class first” tour of the state’s 17 counties — and says he heard the same thing everywhere he went.
“Folks just want to have a good job that’s going to help them buy a house in a safe neighborhood where the schools are preparing their kids for careers or for college, where a health care system is available to them and is affordable, and through all of that, to be treated with humanity, dignity and respect,” Ford said in an interview at a Dunkin Donuts in Las Vegas. “It’s one thing to say the economy is doing good because the Dow Jones is at whatever — skyrockets — but if you’re not feeling it in your pocket, right? Which is the case right now.”
