Trump wooed Latino voters in 2024, then alienated them, with ICE tactics shifting Latino voters toward Democrats

Tuesday night’s explosive rout of the Republican party was supercharged by the fury of Hispanic Americans who turned out in record numbers in key battlegrounds to protest the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant assault on their communities.

“Trump went against us,” said Benny Melendez from Weslaco, Texas. “He made us the target of ICE operations, so we decided to punish him by voting against his party. That’s what happened.”

President’s party stripped of control after he spent weeks pleading with Americans to pretend he was on ballot

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The United States woke up to a radically altered political landscape on Wednesday after Donald Trump was dealt a devastating blow in the midterm elections, in which his Republican party was stripped of control of the Senate and the House as his handpicked “Maga” candidates were swept away by a blue tsunami.

With counting still going on in a couple of Senate races, and with 68 House seats as yet undeclared, Democrats were assured of a congressional majority far more comfortable than most pundits had predicted. They had flipped at least seven Senate seats, in such deep-red states as Texas and Kansas, which hadn’t sent a Democrat to the upper chamber for 94 years, along with more than two dozen House districts.

‘It’s the disregard for the rule of law. It just seems like they’re thumbing their nose at it’

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In the battleground state of Maine, Todd Cox, 63, has supported the state’s incumbent Republican senator Susan Collins not once, but twice, in previous elections. Not this time.

On Tuesday, Cox, a technology professional, cast his vote for Collins’s Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson – driven not by pressing local issues, but broader concern “for the direction the country is going in”, he said.