Dusti Gurule
Posted September 24, 2026
CNN recently visited Colorado’s 8th Congressional District to ask: Will Donald Trump’s 2024 gains with Latino voters “stick”? The story takes viewers from Platteville to Greeley to Adams County, introducing Latino voters with different politics, frustrations, and experiences. CNN describes CD-8, where roughly 40% of the population is Latino, as a national “bellwether” and asks whether Latino voters will “continue to trend Republican” or “swing back.”
Those stories matter. But Latino voters are not a monolith, and a handful of individual stories cannot tell us what an entire community thinks. To understand Latino voters in Colorado in 2026, you need to listen to a much bigger conversation.
For the past six years, the Colorado Latino Policy Agenda has been guided by a simple premise: ask Latino people in Colorado directly about our lives, priorities, and policy preferences, and take the answers seriously. Year after year, Latino people in Colorado have told us what matters: whether our families can afford food and housing, whether our jobs pay enough, whether we can get healthcare, whether our immigrant families are safe, and whether elected officials actually deliver for us.
The 2026 Colorado Latino Policy Agenda surveyed 1,606 Latino registered voters across Colorado this summer. Forty-three percent say their financial situation has gotten worse, and the cost of living and wages are their top priorities for state leaders. Cost of living and wages outrank immigration among Latino voters’ federal priorities, while large majorities also support specific protections for immigrants and limits on cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, 42% of Latino voters statewide said none of the people or institutions we asked about, including candidates, campaigns, political parties, and community organizations, had contacted them to ask about politics or policy.
Our political behavior is important enough to become national news. Yet huge numbers of Latino voters are telling us that the political infrastructure interested in our votes isn’t meaningfully engaging them.
And we tested the premise behind the national conversation. The 2026 data does not show a Latino electorate in Colorado simply moving right and staying there. Latino voters currently give Democrats in Congress and the Colorado legislature higher approval than Republicans, while President Trump receives substantial disapproval. But the bigger lesson isn’t that Latino voters belong to Democrats instead. It’s that party loyalty is the wrong lens. Latino voters are telling us to look at what elected officials actually do: the policies they advance, the votes they take, and whether those choices align with our values and priorities.
A Latino voter identifying as Republican doesn’t make Latino communities Republican, just as generations of Democratic support don’t make our votes the property of Democrats. Neither party is entitled to Latino loyalty. Republicans and Democrats alike must answer for what their policies, votes, and decisions mean for our communities. Neither party is entitled to Latino loyalty. Republicans and Democrats alike must answer for what their policies, votes, and decisions mean for our communities.
Our political behavior is important enough to become national news. Yet huge numbers of Latino voters are telling us that the political infrastructure interested in our votes isn’t meaningfully engaging them. Political institutions and national media need to ask why they keep looking at us from so far away. Because Latino political power in Colorado did not suddenly appear in 2024.
Our histories here stretch back generations, including communities that existed before Colorado was a state and before this land was part of the United States. And when our communities faced discrimination, exploitation, displacement, and exclusion, we organized. Colorado’s Chicano Movement fought to end discrimination, secure civil rights, organize workers and students, protect culture, and build political and social power.
That history matters because something feels deeply familiar about institutions trying to define our communities from the outside: who we are, what we need, what our political interests are, and what our power means. The modern obsession with “decoding the Latino vote” carries that same fundamental mistake: the assumption that Latino political behavior is mysterious until somebody outside our communities explains it.
We are not a political trend to decode. We are a people defining our own future.
Dusti Gurule President and CEO of COLOR Action Fund.
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