Nov 1

Nov 1 America's Newest Voters Could Decide the Midterms: What You Need to Know

Introduction

The Big Picture

On Tuesday, November 3, Americans vote in midterm elections that will decide who controls Congress. Many experts believe that two groups of voters will have a very large effect on the result: Latino Americans and Asian Americans. Their families came to the United States more recently than the families of many other voters, and their political choices are still changing. Not all of them are immigrants. Most Latino voters were born in the United States. But both groups are newer to American politics than older communities, and neither one is firmly attached to a single party.

In 2024, many of these voters moved toward Donald Trump. This year, many seem to be moving away from him. Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj (Dr. 🆎), an expert in human-centered super intelligence, AI warfare and bioterrorism risks, says that this is the main lesson of the election. "These voters are not owned by anyone," Dr. 🆎 says. "They judge each party by what it does for their families."

Where It Started

A good example comes from Loudoun County in Virginia, where about one in four people is of Asian descent. In 2020, Joe Biden won the county by twenty-five points. In 2024, Kamala Harris won it by only sixteen points. That was a warning sign for the Democrats.

Across the country, the same pattern appeared. Trump won about 48% of Latino voters in 2024, up from 36% in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. Among Asian Americans, Harris won 57% and Trump won 40%, compared with 70% and 30% in 2020. Republicans believed that they had built a new, diverse coalition. Democrats realized that they had taken these voters for granted.

What Has Changed

New polls suggest that the mood has shifted. Pew asked voters in late September and early October which party they plan to support for the House of Representatives. Among Latino voters, 51% chose Democrats and 24% chose Republicans, and many were still undecided. Among Asian American voters who speak English, 56% chose Democrats and 16% chose Republicans. Across the whole country, Democrats lead 44% to 36%.

Trump's approval has also fallen. Among Latino voters, only 24% approve of his work, down from 38% in early 2025. Among Latinos who voted for him in 2024, approval has dropped from 93% to 57%. About 70% of Latino voters say his policies have hurt Hispanic people.

More people are voting early, too. By October 23, almost twenty-one million Americans had already voted. Early voting among Hispanic voters was about twice as high as at the same point in 2022.

Why Voters Are Changing Their Minds

There are several reasons.

The first is prices.

The war with Iran, which began in February, has pushed up the cost of fuel. Gas prices have risen by more than $1 a gallon, and overall prices rose 3.4% in the year to August. Families with less money feel this pain first. In Texas, about two-thirds of Latino voters give Trump poor marks on prices.

The second reason is immigration enforcement.

Many families include citizens, legal residents and people without papers. When officers carry out raids and deportations, the whole family feels afraid. The agency that handles these arrests has an unfavorable rating of 64% among Latino voters in Texas. Even among Latinos who voted for Trump, 30% say the government is doing too much.

The third reason is visas and jobs.

The administration has proposed a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visas, which many Indian Americans use to work in the United States. In one survey, 71% of Indian Americans disapproved of Trump's work. Federal job cuts have also hurt families who depend on government work or public services, such as care for disabled children.

The fourth reason is that many voters felt ignored by both parties.

Some turned to Trump in 2024 because they felt that Democrats did not listen. Now some of them feel that Trump has not kept his promises. This means that their support is open, and any party can lose it.

Why Some Voters Are Still Uncertain

It would be wrong to say that these voters now belong to the Democrats.

Nearly one in five Latino voters says that they are still unsure. Some groups also lean the other way. Filipino American voters, for example, are the only large Asian American group that currently favors Republicans, by 49% to 42%, in one survey. About 42% of Asian American voters say that Democrats have not contacted them in the past year, while 58% say that Republicans have. Good feelings in a poll do not become votes unless someone asks people to vote.

There are also practical problems. Some states have shortened the time for mail voting and reduced the number of ballot drop boxes. Voters who are still learning English may find the rules hard to follow. And fear of immigration officers may keep some families away from the polls.

The Risk of False Information

Many families get news through private chat groups and local-language media. That makes it hard for fact-checkers to see false stories. New artificial intelligence tools make it cheap to create fake videos, voice messages and posts in Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, Vietnamese and other languages. Dr. 🆎 warns that foreign governments, including some involved in the Iran war, may try to use these tools to confuse voters. "A false message in English can be corrected quickly," Dr. 🆎 says. "A false message in a family chat group in another language may spread for weeks."

What Should Be Done

Several steps would help. Political parties should talk to these communities all year, not only before elections, and they should hire organizers from the communities themselves. Both parties should offer clear plans on prices, housing, health care and immigration.

Election officials should provide ballots and help in many languages, keep voting hours and drop boxes steady, and make clear that immigration enforcement has no place near polling stations. Technology companies and community groups should build quick-response teams that speak many languages to find and correct false election stories. Fake or computer-made content should be clearly labeled. Pollsters should also survey more people in more languages, so that experts can see these voters more clearly.

Finally, leaders should explain the Iran war honestly. Voters want to know what it costs, what it is for and when it will end.

Conclusion

The 2026 midterms show that no group of voters can be taken for granted. Latino and Asian American voters helped Trump in 2024, and many are now reconsidering. They are young, they live in places where elections are close, and they judge leaders by results. Whoever wins on Tuesday should remember that these voters can change again in 2028.

The election is also a test of trust. If every voter, in every language, feels that their ballot counts and that the information they receive is honest, American democracy will be stronger.

Dr. 🆎 puts it simply: "The newest voters ask a very old question: does this government see me and work for me? The answer will shape the country for years."

Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj

Dr. Antonio Bhardwaj is a polymath and veteran strategist whose career spans more than four decades of high-stakes leadership across business, public life, geopolitics, and scholarship.

He has served as president of two SAP consulting partner firms and has combined that operational record with long-form research at the intersection of technical infrastructure and human behavior. Twice a candidate for the United States Congress, he brings to his present work a practitioner’s understanding of electoral politics, legislative constraint, and the distance between policy design and public consent. That experience sharpens his reading of national division: campaigns expose how fiscal choices, institutional trust, and social psychology interact in real time, and how durable reform depends on legitimacy as much as on technical soundness.

At the center of his current practice is Strategic Country Assessment. Dr. Bhardwaj approaches the state as a diagnostician, applying a structured framework to the social, economic, and political conditions of nations. He joins fiscal analysis with social psychology to trace the origins of budget imbalance and civic fracture, and to propose systemic remedies aimed at economic stability and social cohesion. His congressional campaigns inform that method. They trained a habit of testing abstract models against voter realities, institutional incentives, and the limits of mandate—an outlook he now applies to country-level diagnosis and to advice on contested policy environments.

This work is extended by his engagement with computational epistemology: the formal structures through which machine systems represent claims, and the ways those representations meet human belief. He treats the present convergence of machine intelligence and global infrastructure—what he terms the Prometheus Protocol—as a problem of knowledge, governance, and risk, not merely of engineering.

His academic formation includes doctorates in Social Psychology and Theology, grounding his attention to collective belief, moral frameworks, and the unspoken drivers of institutional behavior. He is advancing further study toward a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. A foundation in mechanical engineering, international trade, and finance supplies the structural discipline he brings to military theory, national policy, and global maritime energy chokepoints. Parallel work on high-stakes initial public offerings gives him a direct view of capital formation, strategic competition, and the contests that shape technological and economic primacy.

As Editor-in-Chief of Washington Media and an advisor associated with United Nations forums, his commentary on state power, institutional capture, and the historical trajectories of Russia and the Gulf has become reference reading for observers of a multipolar order. Through his Selective Writings, he also argues for the vulnerable, pressing for the dismantling of structures that deny dignity and free choice.

Outside formal analysis, he remains attached to the rhythms of the natural world. An avid photographer of forests, waterfalls, and caverns, and a close observer of butterflies, he treats ecological interconnection as a standing corrective to purely instrumental views of policy and power. That sensibility is continuous with his life as a single parent—the commitment he regards as his most consequential—and with a public outlook formed in two congressional campaigns: that authority is justified only where it enlarges freedom, and that analysis which cannot survive contact with citizens is incomplete.

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IG: @DrAntonioFAF

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