The key voting bloc in American politics is not the black or Evangelical vote – it’s the Latinos. Now by far the largest racial minority in the nation, Latinos are also the great contested electoral territory.

Latinos’ political trajectory is complex and increasingly uncertain. In the past, Democrats imagined that Latinos, being ‘people of colour’, would follow the African-American pattern of near-automatic allegiance to their party. Progressives in publications like Salon scoffed at the notion that Latinos would ever head to the right.

But Latinos leaving the Democrats is exactly what has been happening. Republican support among Hispanic voters has grown by 10 points since 2018. In fact, in 2020, the odious Donald Trump increased his share of the Latino vote by eight per cent to 39 per cent, the highest percentage for a Republican since George W Bush won 44 per cent in 2004. Trump improved his margins in 78 of the US’s 100 majority-Hispanic counties.