If polls are accurate, the Hispanics who helped Donald Trump win a second presidential term are poised to abandon the Republican Party in next week’s midterm elections. It’s tempting—and liberals almost certainly will give in to this temptation—to put this down to the administration’s hard-line immigration policies. But there are better explanations that Democrats would be foolish to ignore.

Hispanic support for Republicans grew from 28% in 2016 to 34% in 2020 and then rose to 44% in 2024, according to New York Times/Siena survey data. Minority support for the GOP increased among Asian and black voters as well, albeit to a lesser extent. The GOP now stands to lose progress it had made with reliably Democratic constituencies. When Mr. Trump won re-election two years ago, the Democratic advantage over Republicans among Latinos had narrowed to 11 points. Today, they favor Democrats by 30 points.

For the past decade, liberals have insisted that Mr. Trump owed his political success to a resurgence of racial and ethnic bigotry, even as Republicans were attracting more minority voters as well as millions of white voters in states like Iowa and Wisconsin that had backed Barack Obama twice. These Obama-Trump voters weren’t motivated by race. If anything, they saw past it. Blaming Mr. Trump’s rise on racism fit a preferred narrative of the left—one that conveniently allowed the Democratic Party to avoid looking inward—but it never fit reality.

Democrats would make a similar mistake in assuming that Hispanic voters are abandoning the GOP due primarily to the Trump administration’s border policies. On immigration, Mr. Trump never changed his stripes. In 2016 he campaigned on building a “big, beautiful wall” across the southern border. Since then, he has blamed foreign nationals here legally or illegally for everything from unemployment and inflation to violent crime and “stolen” elections. His 2024 campaign promised mass deportations and an end to birthright citizenship. If Latinos are repelled by Mr. Trump’s harsh views, how did he win so much support from this voting bloc to begin with?

It isn’t complicated. A Pew Research Center survey this month asked Hispanic voters to name their top issues. Immigration ranked fifth, after the economy, healthcare, education and “the future of democracy.”Moreover, “issues around race and ethnicity” ranked second from the bottom on their list of concerns. It stands to reason that immigration isn’t what attracted Hispanic voters to Mr. Trump in the first place and isn’t what is driving them away now. “They’ve been left behind in the past by Democrats,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) told Politico this week. “Now they feel they’re left behind by Donald Trump.”

During Mr. Trump’s first term, Hispanics experienced record low unemployment and poverty rates. Like blacks, Hispanics are overrepresented in the working class, and blue-collar workers saw wages rise at faster rates than management in the years leading up to the pandemic. “Real median U.S. household income in 2019 rose nearly 50% more than during the eight years of Barack Obama’s Presidency,” according to a congressional report on the effect of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

“Median household incomes increased 7.1% for Hispanics, 7.9% for Blacks, 10.6% for Asian Americans and 8.5% for foreign-born workers.”Compared with Mr. Obama’s second term, wage growth “more than doubled for those with less than a high school diploma” and for those who attended college but didn’t complete a four-year degree.

The GOP is shedding support from Latinos and other less prosperous minority groups because large numbers of working-class voters no longer trust Mr. Trump to deliver economic gains. The Bureau of Labor Statistics just reported that inflation-adjusted wage growth has been largely stagnant since Mr. Trump’s return to the Oval Office. In the third quarter, weekly earnings for full-time workers were 1.5% higher than a year ago, but the Consumer Price Index was 3.5% higher. Inflation, driven by energy prices, continues to gobble up wage gains.

The good news for Republicans is that a growing economy and tight labor markets are an effective way of winning over less-educated minority voters without pandering. The bad news for Democrats is that these same voters increasingly respond to pocketbook concerns rather than explicitly ethnic political appeals. To the extent the MAGA right plays footsie with white nationalists, it’s likely to have the same problem. Large majorities of Americans oppose racially drawn voting districts, just as they dislike racial preferences in hiring and college admissions. Most of us want to get past race, if the political class will let us.