Latino voters in Pennsylvania may have pushed Donald Trump to victory

READING, Pa. — The rationale behind Genison Ramirez' vote in the presidential election Tuesday was part business and part personal.

The operator of a small auto business and the father of a 2-year-old, Ramirez knew well the basic two-part equation of a family budget: revenue and expenditures. And — recapping his support for Donald Trump — he told how fewer people have had money to spend at his business recently, while at the same time he recalled spending $300 on a single grocery shopping trip.

Because he is Latino — and, particularly, a man in that demographic — the rationale behind his vote in President-elect Donald Trump's victory on Tuesday has become important to those parsing election results. The Republican former president beat the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, by a wider margin than pollsters had projected. The win was fueled in part by support for Trump in many segments of the voting population that exceeded pollsters' predictions, including Latinos.

Trump "looks to put more emphasis on getting the economy back in shape," said Ramirez, who lives and runs the business in Reading.

Such budget-minded reasoning appears to be one of the key reasons Trump made gains in the Latino vote in Pennsylvania this year, compared to four years ago.

The Berks County city of Reading has 95,000 residents. They include the highest percentage of Latino residents — about 67% — of any city in Pennsylvania. Both candidates made stops there in the days just before the election. Harris visited at a Puerto Rican restaurant, and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida spoke in Spanish during a Trump rally.

In the county as a whole, Trump got 115,676 votes on Tuesday to 89,764 for Harris. That improved upon Trump's 2016 victory margin, when he got 96,626 in Berks County to 78,437 for Hillary Clinton.

There are no statistics on exactly how the Latino population or any other specific segment of the population voted in the presidential race.

But Chris Borick, a pollster and political science professor at Muhlenberg College, said his assessment of exit poll data indicated Trump did slightly better among "almost all" segments of the electorate this year than he did in 2020. Without quantifying it, Borick said Trump's gain among Latino voters may have been bigger than the other gains.

And Jim Lee, a pollster at Susquehanna Polling & Research, pointed to national exit poll statistics from CNN that showed Latino men favored Joe Biden over Trump by 23 percentage points in 2020 — but in 2024, that same demographic went for the former president over Harris by 12 percentage points.

"That's a big jump," said Lee.

Ramirez said he remembered how things were financially during Trump's first presidency, and it was better than things have been the last few years while Harris has been vice president. Consumers are skimping on car repairs, car purchases and car down payments.

"Not many Hispanic people are walking around with $5,000 or $6,000 in their pockets looking for a car," he said.

Among Latinas, Biden held a 39 percentage point margin in 2020, while Harris' margin this year was only 22 percentage points.

A feeling of betrayal was evident in the tone of Alfa Quintana as she explained why she — a registered Democrat and Latina mother of four in Reading — voted for Trump.

"After what Joe Biden did to us, opening the frontier like that, it was like a stab in the back," Quintana said, referring to the Biden-Harris administration's policies on the U.S. southern border. "When you see those people crossing and getting access to all the benefits that we, the working class, don't have access to."

Twenty-two-year-old Jesslania Massari, who was born in Reading to Puerto Rican parents and grew up in the city, said she voted for Harris because the vice president was "more for the younger generation."

Massari lives with her parents and works in health care. She has looked at apartments, and she liked Harris' proposals on housing.

"Right now, rent is through the roof," she said, noting that in the Reading area a small one-bedroom requires rent of $1,200 a month, a security deposit, and usually the meeting of an income requirement of three times the rent level.

Trump, Massari said, did nothing for Puerto Ricans when he was in office. "He treated us badly," she said.

Party and pollster research on the Latino vote appears likely to continue, if not become even more intense. Census Bureau statistics show that between 2022 and 2023, the Hispanic population accounted for about 71% of overall population growth in the U.S.

In Pennsylvania, nearly 9% of the roughly 13 million residents in 2023 were Latino or Hispanic. In Pittsburgh, only 3.6 % of the 303,000 residents in 2023 were Latino or Hispanic.

But a number of cities in the eastern part of the state besides Reading had far higher percentages: Hazleton, 62.2%; Allentown, 54.3%; and Lancaster, 39.4%.

Victor Martinez, an owner of four Spanish-language radio stations that serve Reading and other markets, pointed out Harris won the overall Latino vote regardless of how big the swing among men was. Exit polls from NBC News showed Harris got 53% to 45% for Trump.

Martinez said his experience with listeners told him that some Latino men would not vote for a woman. Others, he said, believed strongly that Trump would be better for the economy.

Trump appeared with WWE legend The Undertaker; had another WWE favorite, Hulk Hogan, speak at his Madison Square Garden rally; and got a massive ovation at a UFC event.

"He is a man's man, and that has a lot of appeal to Latino men who like wrestling, who like boxing," Martinez said.

He said Harris' messaging on fixing the economy, while logical, was more complex than messaging delivered by Trump. "He is able to simplify it. You talk to his followers and his fans, and they will tell you the same thing," Martinez said.

Democratic state Sen. Judy Schwank has represented Reading and its massive Latino population in Harrisburg for more than 13 years. Trump's showing among that population "absolutely" surprised Democrats, she said.

Schwank underscored the fact that the Latino population is not "monolithic" but encompasses people with family backgrounds in many places outside the U.S. She recalled seeing enthusiasm for Trump among Latino poll workers.

"They felt better about the trajectories of their own lives under Trump," she said. "So that's who they voted for."

Mariano Valentin, of Reading, was not one of them. A Puerto Rican retiree who worked in security, Valentin said he voted for Harris because he believed she would protect the rights of women on abortion and because she was more believable.

Trump, he said, speaks with a "forked tongue" and "says one thing and means another."

Omar Ramirez, who lives just outside Reading but runs a transit center in the city, was born in Colombia and is a conservative Christian. He voted for Trump, he said, in part because the former president "was more, morally, for the core values of who my community is."

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