Why don’t more Latinos reject Trump?

That pretty much sums up what the Spanish electorate thinks about Trump in general. And yet there has been a shift to the right toward Trump among Latino voters — happening in traditionally Democratic strongholds like California and in swing states like Pennsylvania.

Perhaps no other trend across the Hispanic electorate is antagonizing anti-Trump white Americans more than this: Why don’t more Latinos reject Trump, given the former president’s harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric?

Unless something seismic happens, yes It is likely that a majority of Latinos nationwide will support Vice President Kamala Harris in November, said Clarissa Martinez De Castro, vice president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS. The question will be about Harris’ margin of victory over Trump.

A new poll of 2,000 Latino voters in six battleground states released Monday by Voto Latino, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering and mobilizing Latinos across the country through civic engagement, shows Harris by that margin among Latino voters in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North America. Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. According to the poll, support for Harris rose from 60 percent in August to 64 percent this month. Meanwhile, support for Trump fell from 29 percent in the August poll to 31 percent in the October survey.

But Harris still underperforms among Latinos overall. While Harris leads with 56 percent of Latino voters to Trump’s 37 percent in a national New York Times poll, that’s down from Biden’s 63 percent of Latino votes in 2020 and 66 percent of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Martinez De Castro said there is nothing to explain why Republicans have seen their support grow among Latinos. Instead, there are multi-layered, complex reasons to explain this.

“There are a lot of people who say, ‘oh, you know, that’s because Latinos are self-haters because they turn against themselves’” by supporting Trump, Martinez De Castro said. “Well, that’s not so clear. In some ways, both the impact and perception of economic issues are most significant” for Latino voters.

Mike Madrid, a Latino GOP political consultant and co-founder of The Lincoln Project and author of “The Latino Century,” agrees. “The Democrats are losing their grip on the working class in general, and Latinos are the fastest growing segment of the working class,” he told me. “We are much less racial and ethnic voters than most people think. We are economic and wallet voters.”

It turns out that for Latinos it is the economy, stupid. “It easily dominates the top priorities of Latino voters,” Martinez De Castro said. Democrats have lost Latino and black voters, she said, largely because Democrats failed to connect with them on the economy. For Madrid, that has been a tactical error by Democrats, because “there have been no polls anywhere in decades showing that Latinos are anything but prioritizing economic issues,” he told me.

For Sonja Diaz, co-founder of Latina Futures 2050 Lab, a policy and research center centering Hispanic women, it’s about a broader failure on the part of Democrats. “Since 2020, Democrats have seemingly retreated from Texas in the same way they did Florida, which used to be a battleground,” Diaz told me. “The reluctance to support on-the-ground mobilization efforts, including voter registration, voter education and messaging, is a huge void. Instead of trying to contest these disparate places, they turned it over to a Republican Party that mobilized Latino voters with their message.” That includes Trump’s message of resentment and resentment, which he is spreading among black and Latino voters.

Ultimately, for Diaz and Martinez De Castro, to the extent that the general public and political pundit class are targeting right-leaning Latino voters, there hasn’t been enough “analysis and repetition of the fact that a majority of white voters support Donald Trump,” Diaz said. According to a seven-state Washington Post poll released Monday, 55 percent of white voters said they would vote for Trump, versus Harris’ 39 percent.

“You have these racial tropes of, ‘how can you vote against your interest?’ without the self-awareness to look at that with the majority population,” as Diaz put it.

In other words, Latinos are multifaceted people who possess their own sense of political self-interest and are also somewhat inclined, like so many other voters, to forgive Trump for his many shortcomings.

Marcela García is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @marcela_elisa and on Instagram @marcela_elisa.