Republicans Lost Non-White Trump Voters. Some Say That Should Be a ‘Wake Up Call.’

Republicans failed this week to maintain the inroads with Black and Hispanic voters that helped deliver Donald Trump the presidency and hand Republicans a majority in the House and Senate.

Democrats’ wins in New Jersey and Virginia should be a “wake up call for the administration” on how they’re reaching Hispanic voters, said Abraham Enriquez, board chair of Bienvenido, a conservative Hispanic advocacy group.

In New Jersey, governor-elect Mikie Sherrill won 77% of non-white voters, and Virginia’s governor-elect Abigail Spanberger won 83%, according to CNN’s initial exit polls. Exit polls are subject to change, although both Sherrill and Spanberger performed well in counties with higher populations of non-white voters.

Among Latino voters, Sherrill won 68% of Latino voters compared to her Trump-endorsed competitor Jack Ciattarelli’s 31%, according to CNN’s exit poll. The state’s three most Latino counties also went for Sherrill. She flipped Passaic and Cumberland counties blue, and won Hudson County by 22 more percentage points than Kamala Harris did in 2024. This is a remarkable reversal of Trump’s popularity among Hispanic voters. Of New Jersey’s 29 townships with a majority Hispanic population, all of them went for Trump in 2024 by an average of 25 percentage points, the New York Times reported.

Republicans are still holding on to the hope Trump’s electoral coalition will return to the polls in full force by 2026. After Tuesday, the party largely said Democrats’ wins in New Jersey and Virginia were not representative of trends nationally.

“I believe a large number of those new voters in these demographics that have not traditionally been with the Republican Party are with us,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Thursday. “I know that the Hispanic and Latino populations across this country understand which party is delivering for them.”

But some in the party are warning that the GOP needs to focus more on the economic hardships many in the country are still facing if the party intends to maintain Trump’s gains among Black and Hispanic voters.

“I don’t think that the Democratic Party specifically has a movement that is ushering Hispanic voters in,” Enriquez said. “I think that these candidates capitalized on the fact that this economy still is very, very tough for Hispanic voters across these states.”

Mike Madrid, a Latino GOP political consultant and staunch Trump critic, said the results were a “clear refutation and rebuke of Donald Trump and the Republicans.” Tariffs hurt Latino households more than any other demographic, he said.

“The chaotic economic situation we find ourselves in is going to hurt lower income workers more, working class voters more, and Latinos are that working class base of the country,” Madrid said.

Messaging aggressive immigration policies has also struck fear among voters, Enriquez added.

The administration has implemented its massive immigration enforcement agenda across the country with force; for months, images of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection raids have dominated the news — and the administration’s social media. Documented immigrants have repeatedly been caught up in the administration’s sweeps.

“When the message went from ‘We’re deporting violent illegal criminals’ to ‘We’re deporting everyone that is illegal,’ those ‘everyone’ might be the elderly lady who sells tortillas sitting across from you on a Sunday morning at church,” Enriquez said.

The economy ranked as the most important issue facing New Jersey and Virginia for Black and Latino voters, per CNN’s exit polling.

Sherrill also claimed Middlesex County, which is about 61% non-white, by 25 percentage points. She won 94% of Black voters in the state, according to those exit polls.

In Virginia, where every county shifted left, Spanberger also overwhelmingly won over Black and Latino voters. CNN’s exit polls show she won 93% of the Black vote and 67% of the Latino vote. She more than doubled Harris’ 2024 margin in Manassas Park, Virginia — a city with a 46% Hispanic population. Spanberger took the city by 42 percentage points, compared to Harris’ 19 points.

Democrats overwhelmingly touted those numbers as a win for the party in connecting with non-white voters.

“The best way to talk to the Latino community is about the economy and jobs,” New Jersey Democratic strategist Dan Bryan told NOTUS. “Mikie Sherrill is a great example. She talked about affordability and cost of living for a year straight.”

Bryan added that Democrats shouldn’t be surprised that Republican gubernatorial candidates lost support in communities of color, because though many non-white voters shifted toward Trump, most did not shift toward Republicans overall. The president is “uniquely popular” among voters of color, but “there has never been any evidence that the inroads he makes translate to anyone else,” Bryan said.

But Henry de Koninck, a New Jersey Democratic strategist, cautioned that the party should not automatically attribute the leftward shift to Latino voters, Arab-American voters and others changing their party allegiance between last year and this year. The 2025 race was unique and drove high Democratic participation, he said, which means Sherrill’s winning margins could have been the result of more than just a red-to-blue flip.

“Those margins that Mikie Sherrill put up in Hudson County — and this is true in other parts of the state — could be attributed simply to increased Democratic turnout, and not necessarily reflective of anything from a persuasion perspective in terms of voters who went for Trump flipping back to Mikie Sherrill,” de Koninck said.

Democrats could easily fall for the same pitfalls around the economy that lost them the presidency again, Madrid cautioned.

“Neither of these parties are listening, and neither of these parties are learning the obvious message, which is you need to primarily, and maybe exclusively, focus on the economic pain amongst working class voters in this country,” Madrid said. “If you don’t, you will lose.”