President Donald Trump speaks while participating in a tour of U.S.-Mexico border wall prototypes near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in San Diego, California. U.S., March 13, 2018. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

LOS ANGELES — On Tuesday, Donald Trump will embark on his first trip to California as president, touching down at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar near San Diego before heading south to inspect various prototypes of the much-ballyhooed “wall” he hopes to build on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The visit comes one week after Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, sued California for passing a trio of “sanctuary state” laws that have (according to Sessions) blocked the administration from enforcing federal immigration statutes — and followed it up with a fiery speech in Sacramento accusing state and local Democrats of “boldly validat[ing] illegality.”

The fast-and-furious response from those same Democrats — “Outright lies,” snapped Gov. Jerry Brown; “White supremacy and white nationalism,” added state Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de León — has prompted another round of breathless California vs. Trump media coverage, with the president rallying his right-wing base around hardline anti-immigration policies and the immigrant-rich Golden State relishing its role as ground zero of the so-called resistance.

“With a handful of exceptions — North Korea comes to mind — there are few governments that have worse relations with President Trump than California,” wrote the New York Times.

Yet the political stakes here are higher than many pundits seem to realize. That’s because the latest immigration clash between California and Trump isn’t just about California and Trump. It’s also about the broader constituency the president has been antagonizing since taking office and is now antagonizing again: America’s growing Latino electorate.

When Trump won the 2016 election, the chattering class immediately declared that the Latino vote — which was supposed to show up in force and keep the Manhattan mogul out of the Oval Office — had failed, once again, to materialize, despite the candidate’s near-constant provocations (such as Mexican “rapists,” “The Wall,” “bad hombres,” threatening to revoke birthright citizenship, claiming a judge could not be impartial because of his Mexican heritage).

View photos Latinos, immigration and workers’ rights advocates and their supporters protest against Donald Trump and other Republican president hopefuls, outside the Republican Presidential Debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Sept. 16, 2015. (Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images) More

But over the last year, studies have cast serious doubt on this assumption. Subsequent elections — especially Virginia’s, in 2017 — hinted that Latino voters have become more energized and mobilized, not less, since Trump took office. And looking ahead to the 2018 midterms, it appears that many of the races set to determine control of the House and Senate are taking place in areas with significant Latino populations.

Which means that in November, backlash to Trump among Latino voters could, in fact, decide the election — especially if Trump continues to energize the right-wing over immigration, as he seemed determined to do Tuesday in California.

“It’s a comparative status question,” says Gary Segura, Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and co-founder of the polling and research firm Latino Decisions. “Latinos tend not to vote in midterm elections; older, whiter, higher-income people tend to vote instead. So what will the presence of a president like Trump do? In theory, it will narrow that gap. Latinos will turn out in higher numbers than people expect — and that will make a difference in at least some of these races.”

The first data point to consider is 2016. The national exit polls showed Hillary Clinton winning 65 percent of the Latino vote to Trump’s 28 percent — a landslide, to be sure, but a smaller one than Barack Obama enjoyed in 2012, when he clobbered Mitt Romney among Latinos 71 percent to 29 percent. Seeing that — and noting that Latinos still made up 11 percent of the electorate, the same as 2012 — pundits concluded that there had been no anti-Trump “surge” in 2016.