Exit polls show President-elect Donald Trump won 46% of the Latino vote on Election Day, the largest share for a Republican presidential contender in more than 40 years, Axios reported.
An exit poll conducted by Edison Research shows that 55% of Latino men voted for Trump, while 38% of Latina women said the same. Former President George W. Bush received the next-highest level of Latino support for a GOP presidential candidate in 2004, with 44%. The late President Ronald Reagan won 37% of the Latino vote in 1980 and 34% in 1984.
"Latinos were saying, 'I don't care what Trump says. I want to be able to pay the bills. I want to be able to send my kid to college. I want to pay the mortgage, to afford a new car,'" Jeronimo Cortina, a professor of political science at The University of Houston, told Axios.
Vice President Kamala Harris won 52% of the Latino vote, which is tied for the worst share by a Democrat presidential candidate since former Secretary of State John Kerry ran in 2004.
"I think this is really a story of the headwinds that were obviously too much to overcome for Democrats structurally [and] with the economy" said Álvaro J. Corral, assistant professor of political Science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.