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Juan Tejada, a second-generation Latino voter in Nashua, said his top issues were cost of living increases since the pandemic and housing, a hot topic for many in the Granite State As a result, he voted for Donald Trump. “I voted for Trump-Vance mostly because of how the economy is doing right now in the state of New Hampshire, things are way too expensive,” said Tejada, whose parents immigrated from the Dominican Republic. “Rent is uncontrollable.
It’s getting up there to the point where it’s just unaffordable. Buying a house is out of the question.” By many accounts, Trump won the presidential election, in part thanks to the Latino and Hispanic voter base that swung heavily towards him in historic numbers in comparison to previous elections.
Latinos make up around 20% of America’s population and 15% of the electorate, and in the past, this key demographic has, by and large, voted for the Democratic candidate. However, in this year’s election, that vote shifted and had a large impact on key battleground states. In New Hampshire, where about 5% of the population is Latino, voters like Tejada interviewed by the Monitor reflected that split.
Kamala Harris narrowly won in New Hampshire by a 3% margin overall. Tejada said that he felt like Trump appealed to the needs of the Latino community better than Harris did and that Trump offered solutions to increasing inflation costs of living that outpace increases in wages. Latino men disproportionately work in lower-paying and blue-collar construction, maintenance and manual labor jobs in comparison to all other demographics, a ccording to the Washington Center for Equitable Growth .
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Cross|Word Flipart Typeshift SpellTower Really Bad Chess “In terms of action, it feels like Trump and Vance are actually representing the Latino voters,” Tejada said. “What we’re looking is for jobs, civility and opportunities, which are few right now. And some manufacturing, where a lot of Latinos work here in New Hampshire, is slowing down significantly due to COVID.
” Trump garnered about a third of the Latino vote in 2020, which elevated to 45% in 2024. Trump gained around 18 percentage points between 2024 and 2020 – up from 36% to 54% – among Hispanic men. He also gained among Hispanic women but only by seven percentage points, according to exit polls.
In 2020, around 60% of Latinos voted for Joe Biden but their support for the democratic party waned this time around and Harris was only able to rally just over half of the their votes. Many Latino voters in New Hampshire on Tuesday still felt alienated by Donald Trump’s rhetoric and appeal to their demographic, which led them to vote for Harris. Noel Cora, a 41-year-old Puerto Rican man in Nashua’s Ward 4, went to vote at Ledge St.
Elementary with his young daughter. He explained that he felt nervous by Donald Trump’s direction and that he felt he had a duty to vote for women’s rights in the face of Roe v. Wade being repealed.
“I got a little daughter, so I want her to be able to have her choices and make her choices when she gets older, and being a man as a minority, I always think about that too,” he said. The Puerto Rican population across the country was predicted to potentially sway elections in swing states, such as Pennsylvania, after a comedian made disparaging comments towards Puerto Rico, calling it a “floating island of garbage” at a Trump rally in New York before the election. In Concord, a 68-year-old Puerto Rican woman, Carmen Kosow, teared up and said that she was primarily concerned with protecting women’s rights and the future of women in the country.
She said she felt affronted by the anti-immigrant and anti-Puerto Rican comments from the Trump campaign. “As a Latina, Puerto Rican, what Trump has said about my people, my island, and my family that lives there, relating them to trash?..
Well, one of his surrogates said it but I feel it comes from him,” said Kosow. Kosow worked as an educator in Nashua and Manchester for deaf children for over 36 years and expressed concerns over the charter amendments on the ballot in Concord. The Monitor published a series, Rethinking Rundlett , regarding the amendments that have been in the spotlight as the Concord school board plans to build a new middle school.
Kosow said she voted yes on the school location decision amendment, and no on the property sales decision, “I knew how I wanted to come in and vote, but then when I started to read the question...
the way it was written was not conducive to someone who’s not a native English speaker. I’m not a native speaker,” she said. “So I had to read it several times because it just wasn’t processing.
” Alexander Rapp can be reached at [email protected].
