There’s an open question hanging over both parties when it comes to Latino voters right now: How should they talk about the second Trump administration’s ongoing campaign of mass deportations?

Setting aside the moral and humanitarian issues, this is an important, and curious, political debate. On the Democratic side, that’s over how to frame Trump’s operations: as overreach and excessive — of going beyond what he promised to his recent converts and targeting longtime, law-abiding residents and sweeping up citizens through racial profiling — or to focus on other issues, like the economy.

On the Republican side, it’s over whether to continue down the current path or pull back from excessive shows of force, the elimination of special migrant protections, and an all-encompassing approach.

For now, there isn’t consensus over any of this or even whether immigration is even an important or decisive issue for these voters. But both sides will still be spending the next few months looking at public opinion, primary voting, protests or popular backlash, and the campaign trail to get a sense of what approach might work.

What’s clear for now is that Trump 2024 coalition is in real peril — largely because of defecting Latino voters.

That’s why I decided to take a look at what the data and research we have at this moment suggests and try to lay out the nuances of how Republican-voting Latinos are feeling right now. Those perspectives and opinions matter. They may determine the durability of both the GOP’s 2024 edge and Democrats’ gradual erosion of support while also saying something larger about how these voters view themselves in the American political system.

There are emerging divisions between Republican-supporting Latinos and the rest of the GOP tent

Entering 2025, the new line of conventional wisdom about why Republican Latinos were swelling the ranks was two-fold: They were angry at the Biden-era Democratic Party’s management of the economy, and they were growing more tolerant of harsher immigration policy.

Polls, focus groups, and individual interviews with these voters all seemed to point in the same direction: a rightward shift among primarily working-class Latino voters, driven by a combination of economic anxiety and discontent with aspects of social liberalism that clashed........

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