Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it covers voter demographics.
Pew Research is the gold standard of Latino public opinion research in this country. When Pew releases a new National Survey of Latinos, people in my line of work stop what they’re doing and read it. Their new report, “U.S. Hispanics Are Divided on Whether Their Identity Helps or Hurts Them in America,” is one of those studies. It confirms something I have argued for years, most fully in my book The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy. Latinos are changing identity politics in this country. But they are not changing it in the direction either party wants to believe.
The topline numbers in the Pew study tell the story. Sixty-one percent of Hispanic adults say being Hispanic is an extremely or very important part of how they think about themselves. That is a real number. Identity still matters to most Latinos. But ask whether that identity helps or hurts their chances of getting ahead in America, and the answer splits three ways: 26 percent say it helps, 33 percent say it hurts, 40 percent say it makes no difference at all. There is no consensus here. There is no single Latino experience for either party to build a coalition around, whether that coalition is built on grievance or on advantage.
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Generation tells the same story from a different angle. Seventy-one percent of Hispanic immigrants say their identity is extremely or very important to them. That falls to 57 percent among the second generation and 51 percent among the third generation or higher. Ask if they consider themselves “a typical American,” and the numbers move in the opposite direction: 27 percent of immigrants say yes, 60 percent of the second generation, 72 percent of the third generation and beyond. Distance from the immigrant experience is doing more to shape Latino identity than party registration is.
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Equis surveyed 2,000 registered Latino voters in May 2026 and asked them, without prompting, what they consider the most important issue facing the country. The answer is not immigration. It is not close. Economy and jobs came in first at 29 percent. Cost of living followed at 24 percent. National security came in third at 14 percent, and concerns about the erosion of democracy and government overreach came in fourth at 13 percent. Immigration enforcement and ICE registered at just 6 percent. Border security, counted separately, came in at 7 percent. Even added together, the two immigration categories trail the top issues badly.