Exits polls published by CNN suggest that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump did better among Latino voters than his party’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney. Trump lost the Latino vote to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton by a 29 percent-65 percent margin. That is significantly better than Romney did when he lost that demographic group to President Obama by a 27 percent-71 percent margin.

Trump was expected to do poorly among Latinos. He not only opposed immigration reform but promised to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. He was widely criticized for his rhetoric on the issue, stating, for example, at his campaign launch that “rapists” were immigrating from Mexico. Liberal leaders like the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka denounced him as a racist. Romney eschewed such rhetoric though he also opposed immigration reform, calling for illegal immigrants to “self-deport.”