US election: Did Trump gain Latino vote despite ‘floating garbage’ jibe?
Al Jazeera
Long held up as a Democrat base, the Latino vote reflects a truer picture of a community that refuses political labels.
The US Latino vote leaned more to the Republican side this election than it did in 2020, when President Joe Biden won, one of several drivers that have propelled Donald Trump to triumph over Vice President Kamala Harris this time around.
Analysts and observers say this is an important but unsurprising shift, as the traditional support among Latinos for the Democratic Party has waned in recent years.
A key voting bloc, Latinos make up nearly 20 percent of the United States population, with most born in the country. Some 36.2 million Latinos were projected to vote this year.
A crude, badly-timed joke likening Puerto Rico to a “floating island of garbage” by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at a Trump rally in New York had been expected to batter Trump’s growing support base among Latinos, especially in battleground states such as Pennsylvania – an Electoral College heavyweight which counts some 486,000 residents of Puerto Rican origin (3.7 percent). But did it?
Here’s what we know about how Latinos voted in the 2024 US elections:
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