Struggling Latino voters have spoken. After giving Bernie Sanders substantial support in 2020, they opted for Donald Trump in 2024 in alarming numbers. How could voters who recently favored an anti-corporate and pro-worker program swing so dramatically in favor of a hate-mongering friend of billionaire elites?

Although large constituencies of Latinos sat these elections out, millions more, shredded by Clintonite social, labor market, and trade policies, took the fateful decision to back Trump’s authoritarian populism to maintain minimal well-being. With their preferred choice eliminated, they have joined the working-class revolt against the Democrats’ empty progressivism that offers cultural recognition at the expense of socioeconomic protections.

Insulated from the realities most Latinos face and clinging to crumbling orthodoxies that disregard the material conditions shaping workers’ economic strategies and political behaviors, most progressive commentators and critical scholars have proven incapable of making sense of Latinos’ inclusion in the expanding working-class embrace of the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) coalition. Their fixation on Latinos’ cultural identities mimics the Democrat Party’s elite-driven denial of the centrality of economic grievances and helps reproduce its troubling electoral consequences.