Politics

Latino voters powered Trump’s comeback. Now they’re turning on his economy.

Published

5 months ago

January 14, 2026

In 2024, economic anxiety and immigration concerns drove Latino voters to President Donald Trump. Those same issues are beginning to push them away.

Across the country, the cost-of-living woes and immigration enforcement overshadowing Trump’s first year back in office are souring Hispanic businesspeople, a key constituency that helped propel him to the White House. In a recent survey of Hispanic business owners conducted by the U.S. Hispanic Business Council and shared exclusively with Blue Light News, 42 percent said their economic situation is getting worse, while only 24 said it was getting better. Seventy percent of respondents ranked the cost of living as a top-three issue facing the country, more than double the number that selected any other issue.

That’s a particularly striking number from this group: nearly two-thirds of respondents in the organization’s final survey before the 2024 election said they trusted Trump more than then-Vice President Kamala Harris to handle the economy.

“The broader Hispanic community certainly feels let down,” said Javier Palomarez, the organization’s president and CEO. “It would be different if immigration and the economy had not been principal talking points for [Trump]. On both fronts, we didn’t get what we thought we were going to get.”

The combination of ongoing economic uncertainty and stubbornly high prices driven by Trump’s tariffs — coupled with the economic impact of the Trump administration’s ongoing raids in immigrant-heavy communities — makes the situation increasingly dire for some Hispanic business owners.

Trump and his allies argue that they’re just cleaning up the mess left by the previous president.

“Republicans are putting in the work to fix the Bidenflation mess we inherited. From lowering inflation to creating a housing plan, President Trump is fighting for the working families Democrats left behind,” said Republican National Committee spokeswoman Delanie Bomar.

Monica Villalobos, president and CEO of the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, told Blue Light News about a South Phoenix restaurant hit hard by tariffs and labor shortages. Then, a series of ICE raids in the parking lot in front of the restaurant caused customers and workers to stop showing up and forced the owners to shut it down for several days. She predicted this kind of situation will blow back on Republicans in the next election.

“We certainly do sense that our members — our clients in Arizona and across the country — feel a sense of betrayal by this administration, given its excessive overreach,” Villalobos said. “Now that we’ve had a taste of [the Trump administration], I think you’re going to see a big shift [in the vote].”

In 2024, Trump won 48 percent of self-described Hispanic or Latino voters, the highest mark for a Republican presidential candidate in at least a half-century, driven largely by economic anxiety. But polling shows Trump’s approval among Latino voters cratering as their satisfaction with the economy and immigration enforcement plummet.

In a November Blue Light News Poll, a plurality — 48 percent — of Hispanic respondents said the cost of living in the U.S. is “the worst I can ever remember it being,” and a majority (67 percent) said responsibility lies with the president to fix it.

According to a November Pew Research poll, about two-thirds (68 percent) of U.S. Hispanics say their situation today is worse than it was a year ago, and just nine percent say it is better; 65 percent of Latinos disagree with this administration’s approach to immigration, and a majority (52 percent) said they worried they, a family member or a close friend could be deported, a ten-point increase since March.

Trump’s net favorability rating among Hispanics is now at 28 percent, per a recent The Economist/YouGov poll, 13 points lower than it was in February of last year.

“Small business owners are becoming a swing constituency, when you think about the midterms coming up,” said Tayde Aburto, president and CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of E-Commerce. “And not because their values have changed—it’s just because their costs did.”

Latino voters have swung hard back toward Democrats in recent elections as well. In Passaic County, New Jersey, Latinos voted narrowly for Trump in 2024 but in November backed Democratic Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill by double digits. And in Miami, where over 70 percent of residents are Hispanic, a Democratic mayor was elected last month for the first time in 28 years last month.

Those elections are a referendum on Trump’s economy, said Christian Ulvert, a Democratic strategist and adviser to newly-elected Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins’ campaign.

“[Trump’s] agenda literally does little to nothing to help Hispanic families,” Ulvert said. “Worse, it preys on Hispanic families. And what we heard on the campaign trail most pointedly is the old adage: is my life better today than it was yesterday under new leaders? And resoundingly, not only verbally, but through the ballot box throughout the year, Hispanic families are saying, ‘no, my life is actually worse.’”

Joe Vichot, the Republican Party chair in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, said he knows many Hispanic Republicans in Allentown who are supportive of curbing illegal immigration and fighting crime. “But there’s also stories of people who have been here for 10 years or more with their family, but they’ve never been legal, that are now caught up into the [deportation] system,” he said.

“There should be a way to find some type of common ground where that won’t happen.”

The White House has tried to ease the ailing economic sentiment by sending Trump and Vice President JD Vance on the road, delivering a series of stump speeches on affordability in working-class areas, including Vance’s Dec. 16 stop in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, which includes the Hispanic-majority city of Allentown. They insist the economy deserves an “A+++” grade, and are now buoyed by a December consumer price index report released Tuesday that showed inflation rising at a slower pace than expected.

“Joe Biden gave us a colossal catastrophe, but my administration has rapidly and very decisively ended that,” Trump said during a speech in Detroit Tuesday. “We have quickly achieved the exact opposite of stagflation — almost no inflation and super high growth.”

But cooling inflation rates just mean prices aren’t rising as fast as they had been — prices still remain much higher on many goods than they had been in recent years. And improving macroeconomic trends are not yet being felt by consumers, said Massey Villarreal, a business executive in Houston.

“I’m like most Americans. I hear the inflation number and I don’t translate it to my going to the grocery store, when I look at the cost of hamburger meat,” said Villarreal, a former chair of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly.

Palomarez, the U.S. Hispanic Business Council president, compared it to the Biden administration’s insistence that the post-Covid economy was healthy, even as consumer sentiment plunged. “While we were talking about GDP and unemployment and jobs growth rates, people were worried about the rent and the price of gas and the price of eggs. And we’ve got kind of the same thing here,” he said.

In Chicago, where some of the most-publicized immigration enforcement occurred last year, Hispanic-run businesses have been hit hard. Sam Sanchez, CEO of Third Coast Hospitality, said 2025 was the hardest period for business of his four decades in restauranteering, aside from the COVID pandemic.

“It sends a really negative message to the 48 percent of Hispanic voters that voted for President Trump,” Sanchez said. “Everything’s just starting to fall apart.”

Politics

Uzbekistan can’t win the World Cup. But it’s already won Washington’s attention.

Published

17 minutes ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Uzbekistan’s team will head home after its final group-stage match today, against the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the country has worked to use its début World Cup performance — the first ever by a Central Asian nation — to help Washington policymakers put a face to a geographical name once recognizable.

Before the team’s match against Portugal this week, a group of ambassadors, policymakers and government officials met in Houston to discuss the United States’ burgeoning reliance on the “Central Five” nations — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — for critical minerals. The only one of those so-called C5 countries to qualify for the World Cup is Uzbekistan.

“This emergence of Uzbekistan on the soccer scene as a world-class team playing in the World Cup is sort of a microcosm for what’s happening for the entire C5 region,” Assistant Secretary of Commerce David Fogel said at the panel, which was hosted by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition and the State Department. “The C5 region is front and center in everyone’s mind.”

Trump is scaling up America’s footprint in Central Asia in hopes of reducing American reliance on Chinese supply chains, as Beijing grows increasingly dominant in the critical minerals sphere. In November, he hosted Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev at the White House to discuss the nations’ growing economic ties — and Mirziyoyev walked away agreeing to a $400 million investment in American companies’ critical minerals and rare earths supply chains.

That commitment is “good not just for our economy, but also for our national security,” said Richard Parker, the leadership coalition’s senior policy adviser, “when you consider that China really has the market on the processing of critical minerals globally.”

Mirziyoyev has praised his country’s soccer team as representatives of a “New Uzbekistan,” finally emerging from its Soviet era as a geopolitical force on its own terms, but after defeats in its first two matches, it can’t progress further in the World Cup.

Politics

Why soccer is life

Published

47 minutes ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Soccer is so much more than just a sport — especially in the UK.

That was the central message from playwright James Graham — creator of the hit play and TV drama Dear England about the psychology of the England men’s football team — when he joined Blue Light News’s Westminster Insider podcast to discuss the powerful relationship between politics and the national game.

For Graham, soccer’s importance runs far deeper than results on the pitch. He recalled the hours after Gareth Southgate missed his penalty in the semifinal against Germany at Euro ‘96: “I remember … not being able to explain in the car home with my parents why I was crying, but the tears were falling out of me.”

“Sport is never just about sport,” he said. “It is about storytelling and national storytelling.”

As the self-styled home of soccer, England has long tied its sense of national confidence to performances in major tournaments. Graham argued that the euphoria, despite eventual defeat to Germany, around Euro ‘96 helped give voters the confidence “to choose a different path” and back a more youthful, confident-seeming leader the following year in Labour’s Tony Blair.

At a time of declining social cohesion, hollowed-out high streets and growing political division, he sees soccer as one of the few institutions still capable of bringing communities together in person, week after week.

And Graham believes politicians could learn from soccer leaders such as Southgate — the man who led England to the World Cup semifinal in 2018 and back-to-back European Championship finals in 2021 and 2024 — who communicated with fans “as adults” in a way that was “very human” and “very emotionally intelligent.”

At its best, Graham argues the beautiful game offers a language of identity, emotion and togetherness that politics often struggles to speak.

Politics and soccer: How to play the game. Listen to the full interview with James Graham on Westminster Insider next Friday, July 3.

Politics

How Josh Shapiro became a World Cup super fan

Published

1 hour ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

PHILADELPHIA — Josh Shapiro’s black SUV deposited him at a bougie cafe earlier this week, and the governor beelined to a backroom full of handpicked World Cup social media influencers and began working the room.

For roughly an hour, the Pennsylvania governor and potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate worked to build relationships with people who could cast this host city — and, one day, his potential candidacy? — in a positive light. He regaled them with personal anecdotes, waxing eloquent about how the former NBA star turned TV analyst Charles Barkley had said nice things about him, how he once got Jerry Seinfeld to laugh at one of his jokes and how Philadelphia would play host to UFC 330. (“I am not putting a claw on the governor’s residence lawn,” Shapiro joked. “We’re going to do it in a proper venue.”)

But what the governor, wearing a navy U.S. Men’s National Team polo and FIFA-themed Adidas Stan Smiths, really wanted to talk about was the World Cup.

“I don’t know that we’re gonna make a run all the way to the end here, but there’s something really exciting — I mean people who don’t know anything about soccer are tuning in and watching and getting pumped up,” Shapiro told them. “I think sports is an amazing thing, and it has the effect of changing the psychology of the entire city.”

Shapiro, more a Sixers than a Philadelphia Union guy, is among those recent converts to the world’s game. As of this week, he’s been to three matches at Lincoln Financial Field — more than any other potential 2028 presidential candidate. Save New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has blitzed soccer media to chat about arcane ball knowledge such as being “personally affected when Championship Manager became Football Manager,” perhaps no other Democratic politician has so fully embraced the tournament. (Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas may also have a claim.)

“I’m especially proud to see people from all across the world coming here to Philadelphia and being greeted not just by a governor who’s happy they’re here, but by Philadelphians and Pennsylvanians who are thrilled to see them here,” Shapiro told me in an interview. I think we are better than [President] Donald Trump’s cruel rhetoric. We are better than his cruel policies, and I think we’re seeing that on display here during the World Cup in Philly.”

Shapiro’s approach to the tournament could pay political dividends for him. “The U.S. team is kicking ass. And Trump is ignoring it,” said Matt Bennett of the center-left think tank Third Way. “Democrats should own it all — go to games, watch them in bars with fans, brag about our team, hang out with the Scots. Show the country that we’re normal, patriotic and fun-loving.”

After breakfast with the influencers, Shapiro made his way to the official FIFA Fan Festival at Fairmount Park’s Lemon Hill, and fist-bumped lines of volunteers. He darted over to a fan zone area where he assembled a collectible Bank of America Fan Band, selecting charms that would spell out “250” for the Semiquincentennial.

In nearly every interaction, he conducted an informal poll on who revelers thought was the tournament’s greatest player, namechecking Argentinian and French maestros.

“[Lionel] Messi or [Kylian] Mbappé?” he’d ask. It is, one of his staffers told me, a tic he has, a way to put people on the spot and also gather intel.

Next, he went over to a makeshift arcade featuring a video game called Soccer Jawn — a homage to the old Atari Pong — posing for selfies along the way. He took the controls of the game and rotated through several new acquaintances and opponents: a staffer, then a kid visiting from Virginia. His father, who said he was a fan of Shapiro, watched.

“Who do you think is better: Mbappé or Messi?” Shapiro quizzed again.

Mbappé, the kid replied.

Shapiro fist-bumped the kid and moved on to grip more hands and poll more people, stopping for selfies along the way.

“I think the world needs some more togetherness, needs some more cheer, and this is a great opportunity,” Shapiro told reporters in a gaggle.

A reporter asked whether he disagreed with former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who rejected FIFA and Chicago serving as a World Cup host.

“I’m not going to comment on Rahm, because I didn’t hear him say it, but I’ll just say we’re looking at $770 million in economic impact here, and remember it’s across the state with Reading, with Pittsburgh and Scranton, of course, here Philly, which is the center of the soccer universe,” Shapiro said. “I think you’re seeing with the record-setting crowds we’ve had here at fan fest, it’s not just people here, it’s people in our hotels, our restaurants, our bars.”

Later, Shapiro headed in the direction of the Linc, or Philadelphia Stadium in FIFA parlance, where he would take in the first half of Iraq vs. France, seeing Mbappé himself score a brace, including a back post screamer in the 13th minute. First, though, he sat for another interview on the World Cup, this time with NPR Sports in America.

Back at the FIFA Fan Festival, Shapiro spoke with me about his endorsed slate of congressional candidates, his recent meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Philadelphia’s ties to the men’s team.

The Commonwealth is home to three U.S. players: Matt Freese from Wayne, Christian Pulisic from Hershey and Auston Trusty from Media, I pointed out to Shapiro.

“Freese first off has just been lights out at goalie,” Shapiro said. “Hopefully, Pulisic is going to be healthy for Thursday night. [He was.] I got a soft place in my heart for Trusty.”

Shapiro explained that Trusty’s mom was partners in a law firm with the mother of his own son’s girlfriend. The group went out to dinner last week, though Shapiro didn’t join. The governor did make a video for Trusty and sent it to him. “Just letting them know how proud we are of him,” Shapiro said.

Trusty, Shapiro said, is “someone who can surprise us going forward.”

A press wrangler told me I had one more question.

“Messi or Mbappé?” I asked Shapiro.

“Mbappé today may be a slightly better player,” Shapiro said. “Messi has that thing that Michael Jordan had, which is just playing it at a different level, where it’s not just that he’s the best player on the pitch; he’s just in a different universe. He just does things that others simply can’t do. So, I mean, the three goals he had in that first game, actually, the first one, was extraordinary. I think Messi overall. Mbappé is pretty damn good right now.”