MIAMI (AP) — From Pennsylvania to Florida to Texas, areas with large numbers of Hispanics often had little in common on Election Day other than support for Republicans. Donald Trump on democrat Kamala Harris for the president.

Trump, the president-elect, has been making inroads into heavily Puerto Rican areas of eastern Pennsylvania, where the vice president spent the last full day of her campaign. Trump has transformed the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, a decades-old Democratic stronghold populated by both new immigrants and Tejanos who trace their roots to the state for several generations.

He also improved his standing with Hispanic voters along Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor connecting the Tampa Bay area — home to people of Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Colombian and Puerto Rican descent — with Orlando, where Puerto Ricans make up about 43% of the local Hispanic population. population. Trump was the first Republican since 1988 to win Miami-Dade County, home to a large Cuban population and the nation’s metropolitan area with the highest proportion of immigrants.

This is a realignment that, if sustained, could change American politics.

Texas and Florida are already reliably Republican, but more Hispanics turning away from Democrats in the upcoming presidential elections could further undermine the party’s “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which had helped to catapult to the White House before Trump crosses all three. this time. This change could even make it more difficult for Democrats to win in the West, in states like Arizona and Nevada.

Harris attempted to highlight ways in which Trump may have insulted or threatened Latinos.

Trump, during his first term, reduces usage of Temporary protection statuswhich Democratic President Joe Biden extended to thousands of Venezuelansand tried to end the Obama era Deferred action for child arrivals program. He also delayed release of humanitarian aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 until the end of his term, after long criticizing the island’s officials as corrupt and incompetent.

Once back at the White House, Trump pledged to organize the the largest deportation operation in US history. This could affect millions of families living in mixed-status households, where people residing illegally in the United States live with U.S. citizens or legal residents.

But Democratic warnings don’t appear to have paid off with enough voters for Harris. The party must now find a way to win back the votes of a critical and rapidly growing group.

“Trump is a very confusing character,” said Abel Prado, a Democratic operative and pollster who is executive director of the advocacy group Cambio Texas. “We don’t know how to organize against him. We don’t know how to react. We don’t know how not to take the bait.

Ultimately, concerns about immigration did not resonate as strongly as wallet concerns did among many Hispanics.

About 7 in 10 Hispanic voters were “very concerned” about the cost of food and groceries, or just over two-thirds of all voters, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters in nationally. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic voters said they were “very concerned” about their housing costs, compared to about half of voters overall.

Trump had a clear advantage among Hispanic voters who were “very concerned” about the cost of food. Half said he would manage the economy better, compared to about 4 in 10 for Harris. Among Hispanic voters very concerned about crime in their community, Trump had a similar advantage.

“When they looked at the two candidates, they saw who could improve our economy and our quality of life,” said Marcela Diaz-Myers, a Colombian immigrant who led a Hispanic outreach task force for the Pennsylvania Republican Party . “Did he ever offend?” Yes. But it happens during political campaigns. Many of those who voted for President Trump were able to overcome this situation and are confident that he will move the country in the right direction.”

Harris promised to lower food prices by fight corporate price gouging and increase federal funding for first-time home buyers. Additionally, recent violent crime rates have declined in many parts of the country.

Shen also spent much of the final days of the campaign trying to capitalize on on comments from a comedian who spoke at a Trump rally in New York and joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.” She even relied on Puerto Rican celebrities – from Bad bunny has Jennifer Lopez – to denounce racism.

But Trump nevertheless gained ground in some of the areas with the highest concentration of Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania, the state where Harris spent more time campaigning than any other. He won Berks, Monroe and Luzerne counties — and lost Lehigh County by fewer than 5,000 votes to Harris. Biden carried it by nearly three times that margin in 2020.

Trump’s victory was even wider in Florida, where nearly a quarter of residents are Hispanic. He won the state by 13 percentage points, about four times his 2020 margin.

Trump also flipped Central Florida’s Seminole and Osceola counties, where many Venezuelans have immigrated as their home countries become increasingly unstable, and narrowed Democrats’ advantage in Florida County. Orange, which is also heavily Venezuelan.

Further south, Trump won Miami-Dade County with an 11 percentage point advantage after losing it by 7 percentage points to Biden and 30 percentage points to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Kevin Marino Cabrera, a Miami-Dade County commissioner who served as state director for Trump’s 2020 campaign, said Hispanics reject “woke ideology.” Trump has made his opposition to transgender rights central to his campaign.

“To be clear, Hispanic voters are not buying what Democrats are selling,” Cabrera said.

The same was true in South Texas, where Hispanics are largely of Mexican descent.

Prado, the Democratic operative and pollster, lives in Hidalgo County, which is 92 percent Hispanic and the most populous part of the Rio Grande Valley. Trump won after losing by more than 40 percentage points in 2016. Trump swept every major county along the Texas-Mexico border.

Prado said Democratic county commissioners and state legislators helped secure funding for new bridges across the Texas-Mexico border and other initiatives that boosted trade, economic growth and l employment in the region. Still, he said, “the Republican Party has done a very good job of establishing itself as the answer to non-existent problems and then taking credit for (things) that it doesn’t have.” do. »

Prado said many Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley, especially the devoutly religious, were alienated by national Democrats’ emphasis on reproductive and transgender rights, with the latter becoming a key political weapon for Republicans.

“This nonsense that you’re going to send your son to school and he’ll come back as a girl,” he said. “Our camp was laughed at because we said, ‘No one is going to believe this.’ But no, it struck a chord.

Others were simply looking to vote defiantly, Prado said, or were inspired by the idea of ​​self-made people embracing the American dream, even though Trump got his start in business with a large loan from his father.

Daniel Alegre, CEO of TelevisaUnivision, which owns Spanish-language television Univision, as well as other television and radio properties, said Trump’s victory among Hispanics was less about party and more about issues and that Hispanics were more concerned about the economy and immigration.

Alegre, whose network held town halls in October with Trump and Harris, also noted that there is a growing sense among Hispanic citizens that new immigrants benefit from more government services than were available when immigrants settled here since longest have arrived in the United States – and that the Trump campaign has exploited the resentment around this issue.

“The most important thing every party can do is stay tuned and stay connected to the community,” he said, and in this case, the Trump campaign clearly accomplished that goal.

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Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Linley Sanders in Washington and David Bauder in New York contributed to this report.

Will Weissert and Adriana Gomez Licon, Associated Press