Between Faith and Fight: What Motivated Latino and Black Christian Men to Back Trump

When pastor Samuel Rodriguez thinks of Donald Trump’s appeal among Hispanic and Latino men, one phrase comes to mind: Fight, fight, fight.

It’s the chant Trump led rallygoers in at Butler, Pennsylvania, after the near miss of an assassin’s bullet.

Rodriguez, the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, has supported Trump in the past three presidential races and prayed at his inauguration. But this year, he saw more Hispanic Christian men take his side. 

“I can’t deny the fact that the bro factor … was there,” said Rodriguez, who pastors New Season church in Sacramento, California. “It has to do with a man who was down, literally down, bleeding in front of the entire world, and he gets up.”

After the assassination attempt, Rodriguez met with a Hispanic pastor who had voted for President Joe Biden in 2020. This time, the pastor told Rodriguez he’d support Trump. According to Rodriguez, the pastor was persuaded by memories of the economy under the Trump administration, plus sheer admiration for the way the Republican candidate handled the shooting. “I’m all in,” he said.

Rodriguez noticed how Trump’s response to the assassination attempt captured the attention of certain men who weren’t particularly politically engaged. They had been focused on stretching their paychecks, providing for their families, and dealing with economic headwinds, and once they started following the campaign, the message resonated.

While white and working-class voters were the strongest voting blocs for Trump, the president-elect also cut into Democrat Kamala Harris’s margins with Hispanic and Black voters, particularly among men and people without college degrees.

Trump improved his share of Hispanic voters and won Hispanic men outright, a first for a Republican candidate, at 55 percent. He got the highest level of support from Hispanic Protestants; 64 percent went for Trump this year, up from 48 percent in 2020, when Biden took the majority, according to CNN.

Though Harris held the vast majority of Black voters, the president-elect still gained more Black voters than any Republican in close to 50 years, CNN reported. He won 21 percent of Black men, about 2 percentage points more than in 2020.

His improvement was concentrated among Black men under the age of 45: Three in ten Black men in that age group went for Trump. Black Protestants supported Trump at the same level as Black voters who are religiously unaffiliated, just around 13 percent.

There was a larger gender gap among Black and Hispanic voters than among white voters: Trump only won 38 percent of Hispanic women and did not even win double digits among Black women (7%).

Economic dissatisfaction was a fundamental concern this election year across demographics. It was a motivating factor among the minority of Black voters who supported Trump, according to Gina Barr, executive director of Black coalitions for the Trump campaign.

Much of her outreach involved the Black church, including roundtable discussions and nationwide conference calls with Black pastors.

“They see their congregants struggling to make ends meet and getting daycare and finding jobs and, if they have small businesses, staying open,” Barr said. “The pastors are on the front lines. They know this. They know their people are suffering.”

Barr is a PK, or pastor’s kid, as well as an ordained minister herself, so she was comfortable giving pastors a pep talk. She told them, “Look, a lot of times we want to get up and we want to speak out over the pulpit, but we have to mobilize.”

She worked closely with Believers for Trump, a campaign initiative focused on battleground states.

Black leaders who came out in support of Trump sometimes faced pushback from their community—many fellow Black voters fear that another Trump administration would do away with diversity and civil rights initiatives, and they take issue with the president-elect’s stereotypical characterizations of minorities, such as his remarks on “Black jobs.”

In response to the criticism, Barr said it ultimately hinders priorities important to Black voters if they only have the chance to influence Democratic politicians. “When you’re only in the room half the time, that means your issues are going to get dealt with half the time,” she said.

Pastor Marlin J. Reid doesn’t shy away from politics, and his social media feeds are full of political commentary. Reid has been a Trump supporter since 2016 and hostedBen Carson, who led the Trump campaign’s faith outreach, at his church this year.

New Wine Glory Ministries in Livonia, Michigan, pulls somewhere between 400 and 500 attendees on a Sunday. Reid saw culture war debates—namely, parental rights and transgender issues, as well as their concerns over the US–Mexico border—driving people in his community to vote Republican.

“I think that most people who switched over their vote were not so much voting for Trump,” Reid said. “They were voting against the issues.”

At campaign rallies, Trump brought up transgender athletes and promised to “keep men out of women’s sports.” His campaign dropped $37 million on ads that put transgender issues front and center, according to The Wall Street Journal. One told voters, “Kamala’s For They/Them. President Trump is for you.”

Trump’s team said the ad was most effective with Black and Latino men, and Harris’s super PAC Future Forward said the advertisement shifted the race nearly 3 percentage points in Trump’s favor among viewers who saw it, The New York Times reported.

AP VoteCast, which surveys the electorate about issues and attitudes, found that half of American voters said “support for transgender rights in government and society” had “gone too far.” Among Trump voters, 85 percent agreed.

Rodriguez said he’s heard similar sentiments. “‘Keep your hands off our children.’ That was it. That may have been the tipping point,” he said.

Family was a factor—a majority of Hispanic voters who are married voted for Trump in 2024, compared to only around a third in 2020, CNN exit polls showed.

Libre Initiative president Daniel Garza heard from working-class voters who felt that the Democratic Party had left them behind.

“In the past, the only consideration [Latinos] got was from the Democrats. … Democrats took advantage of that relationship, and what they did was impose their own agenda, their priorities, the green agenda, abortion, these cultural issues,” said Garza, whose libertarian-leaning organization focuses on the economy, immigration reform, education, and health care.

It felt as if segments of the party “looked down on the rest of us for loving America, loving God, and raising families,” he said. “It was insulting.”

Barr said she heard from some longtime Democratic voters who didn’t feel that the party was listening to their core financial concerns.

“It wasn’t just that we had gains. It was also that Vice President Harris didn’t perform as well. And the reason why she didn’t perform as well is because there was no faith in her to fix the problem,” Barr said. “So people would just rather stay at home than to go out and vote.”

“People’s bottom line was ‘I got kids. I gotta feed them. I gotta take care of this house.’ And then the cost of living gets higher and higher,” Reid said. “Gas is higher. Transportation, energy. Buying eggs and milk. I mean, basic stuff. … And it was crushing the working-class people.”

Reid heard from workers concerned about layoffs in Detroit’s auto industry who appreciated Trump’s pledge that “by the end of my term, the entire world will be talking about the ‘Michigan miracle.’”

At Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Maryland, senior pastor Michele Jackson had congregants on either side of the presidential race. Trump supporters, she said, typically were concerned with “security, safety, jobs, the economy, and family.”

“While they may have some reservations about all that President Trump stood for, they knew he would protect their values, and those were the ones that were most important to them,” said Jackson, daughter of the late bishop Harry Jackson Jr., a prominent conservative pastor and faith advisor to Trump.

Jackson believes that the range of issues minority voters care about are often overlooked or oversimplified.

“The issues of life and protecting our children, not just in the womb but in society, and the issue of law and order and how we’re going to engage in wars,” she said. “There are things that the media assumes African Americans aren’t concerned about.”

While the economy was a significant factor for Hispanic men, faith communities in border states were also following immigration policy.

After the election, a group of Hispanic pastors in Texas were discussing over text how deportations might impact their churches. One said that the only people who should be worried should be criminals or cartel members.

Jesse Rincones, executive director of the Hispanic Baptist Convention of Texas, was more concerned. He pointed to campaign promises by Trump to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history” and pledges by Trump adviser Stephen Miller to seek to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

“The answer means that the families and communities most devastated will definitely be those of our hermanos and hermanas,” Rincones told the others. “Ten misericordia, Señor.” (“Lord, have mercy upon us.”)

Garza also cautioned against Republican overreach in implementing unpopular policies that could cost them in future elections.

Deporting criminals is not controversial, but “you’re talking about dragging family members out of their homes and out of workspaces, people who are industrious and hard working,” he said. “I think you’re going to see a blowback.”

It’s too soon to knowwhether Republicans will be able to earn deeper loyalty among Hispanic and Black men that will last beyond one presidential race.

Some voters, frustrated with the status quo and viewing Trump as a source of change, may not be motivated in future elections when Trump is not at the top of the ticket, Garza said.

“Donald Trump won easily, and some of the [GOP] senators lost. What that tells me is there was a lot of split voting,” Garza said. “An association to Trump or an association to the Republican Party isn’t going to get you a win. You have to do the work in the Latino community. You have to earn their vote.”

“Go to where they’re at. Be a part of the community. Listen to them,” said Garza. “[Politicians] need to make their case: ‘This is why my ideas are going to improve your life and the life of your family.’”

Rodriguez hopes the results are a wake-up call for neither party to be complacent when it comes to earning minority voters’ support.

“I think this fluidity is going to actually be the new norm,” he said. “There’s a segment of the American populace that is no longer locked in to one political apparatus … and that middle ground will now emerge as an independent electorate that will need to be convinced every four years.”

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