Donald Trump’s dramatic gains with Latino voters, particularly among Latino men, have emerged as a huge talking point since his election win earlier this month.
But the surge in Latino support for Trump didn’t manifest equally across the electoral map.
Case in point: Latinos in Georgia appeared to have backed the Democratic ticket to roughly the same extent they did four years ago. Experts attribute that to the specific demographical makeup of the state’s Hispanic population — ninth largest in the U.S., and largely made up of people who arrived to the country relatively recently, making them more wary of anti-immigrant rhetoric than Latinos whose families have been in the U.S. for generations.
At the national level, it is difficult to overstate how resounding Trump’s improvement was with Latinos. According to NBC News exit polls — albeit not a foolproof scan of electoral results — Trump picked up a 13-point increase in support from 2020. Finishing with 45% of the national Latino vote, he achieved a record-high for a Republican presidential nominee.
Georgia results were less eye-popping.
Kamala Harris’ share of the state’s Latino electorate in 2024 (56%), was just one percentage point smaller than Joe Biden’s in 2020, according to NBC. The limited scope of that shift isn’t just a consequence of the fact Harris lost by overall smaller margins in swing states such as Georgia, where her campaign was much more active. Across this cycle’s seven battleground states, Harris’ -1% differential relative to Biden among Latinos in Georgia was bested only by her performance in Wisconsin (+1%).
In all of Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina, Latino support for the Democratic nominee slipped by 8% compared to 2020. Latino losses were even heavier in Pennsylvania (21%) and Michigan (24%).
“The numbers just weren’t there to say that Georgia Latinos were overwhelmingly responsible for what happened” in Georgia, said Jerry Gonzalez, CEO of GALEO, an Atlanta-based nonprofit focused on civic engagement among Latinos.
Vote tallies in some of the Georgia counties with the largest number of Latino residents and voters also dispel notions of a broad political realignment. In Gwinnett, for example, Harris won with 57.7% of the vote, down only slightly from the Biden vote share in 2020, 58.3%.
At a more granular level, Trump support grew by six points across metro Atlanta precincts where more than 20% of registered voters are Hispanic, according to Equis, a research firm focused on Latino voters. That is still a more modest shift than other localities with significant Hispanic populations countrywide.
According to Gonzalez, pre-election polling of Georgia Latinos consistently found that voters’ top concern centered around inflation and cost-of-living issues. But “there was also overwhelming support in Georgia for protecting immigrants,” Gonzalez said.
Legacy of immigration enforcement in Georgia
Latino communities — and by extension, Latino voters — are not a monolith.
In Georgia, among the Hispanic population’s defining characteristics is its relative youth. Latinos across metro Atlanta have a median age of 27, ten years younger than the median age for the region’s overall population, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission. Sixty-one percent of voters ages 18 through 29 backed Harris in Georgia, a higher vote share than she received from young voters across all other battleground states, except Arizona.
More importantly, the Latino community in Georgia has arrived in the U.S. relatively recently. According to census data, over 40% of Georgia Latinos in 2022 were born abroad. Although achieving citizenship status is a requirement to participate in elections, Latino voters in the state maintain a strong connection to the immigrant experience, and even to the undocumented immigrant experience.
“Many citizens know undocumented immigrants. They’re part of our families, they’re part of our church groups, they’re our children’s friends,” Gonzalez said. “The degree of separation between somebody who is a citizen like myself and somebody who is undocumented is really tight, and I think that makes it uniquely different here in Georgia.”
According to the Atlanta-based Latino Community Fund, about one in three Georgia Latinos have undocumented family members. It’s a community that has grown accustomed to living in the margins.
Unlike other states, Georgia does not extend its undocumented population benefits, such as state driver’s licenses. State law has long banned cities and counties from adopting a “sanctuary policy” that would limit local law enforcement’s cooperation with immigration agents. In fact, during the first Trump term, close partnerships between metro area sheriffs and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement resulted in Atlanta becoming a leader in deportations. Members of the Latino community not only lost loved ones to deportations, advocates say, but they also took an economic hit by losing customers and employees.
First-hand experience with immigration crackdowns at the state level may have made Trump’s pledge to bring about mass deportations more salient among Georgia Latinos than with their counterparts in other parts of the country, experts say. Earlier this year, the state’s Republican-led government passed a law that calls for closer collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration officials.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Latino voters in Georgia being less keen to back Trump “has to do with how the state has been treating this community, and all of the anti-immigrant policies that have been generated here,” said Adelina Nicholls, co-founder of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights.
In the lead-up to the election, alliance staff knocked on thousands of doors in Latino communities to encourage residents to vote. Canvassers did not advocate for one candidate over another, Nicholls said, but generally encouraged voters to “protect our community.”
According to Gigi Pedraza, executive director of the Latino Community Fund, intense immigration enforcement in Georgia has left painful memories.
“I still remember very vividly having to drive a mom to a mental health hospital because her daughter had cut herself because she was so incredibly sad that their dad had been deported,” she said. “I remember receiving calls from principals from high schools that had a significant percentage of Latino kids. They were American citizens, but they were refusing to go to school because they did not want to leave their parents alone. They were so afraid that they would come back and find them deported, never see them again.
“It wasn’t that long ago. So, I think that for a lot of people, that’s still very fresh. They don’t want to go back to that.”
State Sen. Jason Anavitarte was the first Latino Republican elected to the Georgia Senate. He agrees that Georgia Latinos’ more muted shift rightward is likely tied to the more limited time they’ve spent in the country, noting that the community only arrived in significant numbers in the lead up to the 1996 Olympics, when there was a need for construction workers. But he’s encouraged by signs that Latino voters in Georgia are “still moving in that direction.”
In his view, the 2024 election “sets us up for where we’re going to see continued growth with the Hispanic electorate going forward, and eventually catch up and see what we’re seeing happening in Miami and other places.”
The border issue
Hispanic community advocates in Georgia say that Latino voters in the state tend to care both about protecting immigrants who live in the country and increasing border enforcement.
“For a majority of Latinos, the issue of border crossing is a concern and it has to be recognized,” Pedraza said.
Worries over unauthorized immigration played an important role in helping Trump flip majority-Hispanic communities along the Texas-Mexico border, a once Democratic stronghold that was directly impacted by record numbers of border crossings in recent years. Trump’s campaign also made significant gains in heavily Latino districts in New Jersey and New York. Republican messaging disparaging the current administration’s handling of the border resonated in the region, in part, because the post-pandemic migrant influx brought over 200,000 newcomers to New York City since the spring of 2022.
As a Republican-run state, Georgia was not targeted by the Texas state government’s politically motivated campaign to bus migrants to Democratic-led cities. That may have allowed border enforcement to prove a less pressing concern for Latinos in Georgia than elsewhere, according to Pedraza.
“We just didn’t see the huge numbers, the influx [of migrants] that other states have seen, and the corresponding impact that has on the social and fiscal budgets,” Pedraza said.
For Hispanic leaders working to expand Georgia Latinos’ political power, the most important election result isn’t how community members voted, but whether they voted at all. There were signs of progress in 2024.
In this year’s election, Latinos cast nearly 180,000 ballots, with 46.8% of registered Hispanic voters turning out, according to state data. As a share of the citizen voting-age population, Hispanic turnout went up relative to 2020, which was in turn also an improvement relative to 2016.
That trend, alongside a growing understanding that Latino voters don’t have fixed party loyalties, could motivate candidates from both parties to more actively court the Hispanic vote moving forward. The lesson of 2024, advocates say, is to not take Latino voters for granted.
“I think it is important for both parties to pay attention to the growing Latino electorate in Georgia, and neither party has done enough,” Gonzalez said. Added Pedraza: The 2024 election results “confirmed that every vote needs to be earned … we are persuadable voters.”
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