The aftermath of the 2024 elections highlighted Latine voters’ increasingly pivotal influence on American politics, as their record-high, pro-Republican support helped Donald Trump cinch the presidency. While many were surprised by this political shift, we propose that historically contextualizing Latines’ political allegiances can illuminate the motivated, social identification process that underlie them. We argue that Latines’ individual differences in racial phenotypicality and power motives influence the plausibility and desirability of strong, politically consequential, psychological ties to their ethnic (i.e., Latine) and national (i.e., American) group memberships. In Study 1 (N= 3,753 Latines), using a large, post-election survey, we show that bearing greater physical resemblance to a prototypical (i.e., White, non-Hispanic) American indirectly predicts pro-Republican support in 2020 via greater feelings of inclusion in U.S. society and greater prioritization of American (vs. Latine) identity. In Study 2 (N= 493 Latines), analyses show that racial phenotypicality (i.e., looking like the prototypical “American” vs. looking like the prototypical “Latino”) moderates the indirect relationship between power motives and pro-Republican support in the 2024 election via feelings of similarity with, and positive attachment to, the American group.