On Thursday we discussed the California recall’s bad news for Republicans—namely, that Democrats plan to campaign against Donald Trump in every future election, possibly until 2052. A potentially better sign for the GOP concerned Latino voters.

Tuesday’s electorate in California, according to exit polls at CNN, was 24% Latino. Sixty percent of them opposed the recall, preferring to keep Gov. Gavin Newsom in office. That’s a good margin, but it’s also down four points. Mr. Newsom won 64% of Latinos in 2018.

The...

A voter casts his ballot at the Sacramento County Registrar of Voters office in Sacramento, Calif.

Photo: Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press

On Thursday we discussed the California recall’s bad news for Republicans—namely, that Democrats plan to campaign against Donald Trump in every future election, possibly until 2052. A potentially better sign for the GOP concerned Latino voters.

Tuesday’s electorate in California, according to exit polls at CNN, was 24% Latino. Sixty percent of them opposed the recall, preferring to keep Gov. Gavin Newsom in office. That’s a good margin, but it’s also down four points. Mr. Newsom won 64% of Latinos in 2018.

The numbers are more intriguing for Latino men, 55% of whom opposed the California recall. Three years ago Mr. Newsom won 61%. It isn’t an exact comparison: Tuesday’s ballot was a yes-or-no question about booting a politician in the middle of his term. The 2018 race was a head-to-head matchup, and that year’s Republican nominee fared poorly overall.

But the Democratic dip is interesting particularly because it follows a trend. Exit polls from 2020 say that Mr. Trump, while losing the election, improved his share of the Latino vote by four points. He won five Texas counties where the population was at least 80% Latino, all of which he’d lost in 2016, according to the L.A. Times.

Another data point: Javier Villalobos won an election this June to become the Republican mayor of McAllen, Texas, a border town of about 140,000 that is 85% Hispanic. No one is predicting a total realignment, and the effect Tuesday wasn’t big enough to make Larry Elder the next Governor of California. But in a country that’s about evenly split, a little shift can matter, and it’s no longer easy to dismiss this as a fluke.

“Donald Trump got a historic number of Latino votes in 2020, and you can claim it was because of this or because of that, but it’s not like Larry Elder broke through for these folks,” a Democratic strategist in Los Angeles told NBC News. “There is something else going on.”

Main Street (06/07/21): The long-expected migration of Latino voters to the GOP may finally be starting and it’s in part thanks to the Democrats’ leftward lurch. Images: Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition