Former President Donald Trump appears to be making inroads with Latino voters, performing better with the demographic from his two previous presidential runs, according to recent polling.
Trump’s gains with the critical voting bloc come as polling shows the demographic ranks concerns about the economy as one of their top concerns heading into November, an issue the former president has made a cornerstone of his campaign.
A new NBC-Telemundo-CNBC poll released over the weekend found Trump is cutting into Vice President Kamala Harris’s lead among Latino voters, marking Democrats’ lowest level of support among the group in the past four presidential cycles.
2024 VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: VANCE AND WALZ TO GO TOE-TO-TOE IN CBS CONTEST
Harris has 54% support among registered Latino voters compared to Trump’s 40%, and another 6% said they wouldn’t vote or are unsure. The margin of error in the poll is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Democrats previously led with Latino voters by 39 points in 2012, 50 points in 2016 and 36 points in 2020, according to NBC polling from previous cycles.
The most recent poll shows a dramatic improvement of Trump’s Latino support during his previous runs for president. In 2016, only 19% of Latinos said they’d vote for Trump, according to NBC News polling data from that election cycle. The former president’s current numbers among Latinos are also better than during his 2020 campaign, in which he had 27% Latino support.
“We could be in a historically new era. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, if you’d ever told me that the national number for Hispanics would be in the mid to high 30s, I’d say you’re crazy,” said Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican operative.
Madrid, who recently published a book, The Latino Century, which details how to win over this key voting group, said he’s still skeptical that Trump will ultimately achieve a 40% support rate among Latinos in the general election but noted a key shift that’s been occurring over the last decade.
“Latinos are the fastest growing segment of the non-college-educated workforce, so in many ways, Latinos, there’s an explosion of these new voters that are happening with third and fourth generation voters,” Madrid said. “They view themselves and are voting much more like what they would determine or characterize as typical Americans.”
Some Democrats are not convinced by the latest polling but admit they need to adapt their thinking when it comes to courting these voters.
“A lot of these polls don’t fully capture the full demographic, which means those that are not bilingual tend to be overlooked and they don’t have enough of those voters featured,” said a Democratic operative in Washington D.C., who asked to speak on the condition of anonymity. “That sometimes leads to these polls skewing more toward Republicans since it’s the third-generation Latinos who typically have been more supportive of Trump.”
“One thing we need to constantly convey is that we understand these voters do very much care about the economy, we see it time and again in our internal data,” the person said.
According to a Pew Research Center study published last week, 85% of Latino voters say the economy is very important to their vote in this year’s presidential election, followed by healthcare (71%), violent crime (62%), gun policy (62%), immigration (59%) and Supreme Court appointments (58%).
Among the most important issues for Trump’s Latino supporters were the economy (93%), violent crime (73%), and immigration (71%). By contrast, for Latinos who back Harris, the economy (80%), healthcare (78%), and gun policy (66%) are the three top issues.
The Pew data back up a recent UnidosUS poll that revealed Latino voters ranked inflation, rising cost of living, jobs and the economy, and lack of affordable housing and high rents as the most important issues that elected officials should address. Trump is working to appeal to these voters by making the case that Harris is not the solution to their concerns about the economy.
The recent NBC polling out over the weekend found Trump’s support among Latino voters is particularly strong among men, especially those under 50 without college degrees. Latino men over 50 support Trump over Harris, 51% to 42%, and those without college degrees prefer Trump 51% to 38%. However, Harris has a 26-point lead with Latina women.
“It’s clear that the real and concerted outreach by Republicans nationally and at the state level in places like Florida and Texas are paying off,” said Dennis Lennox, a GOP strategist. “It took a while but more and more Republicans are realizing the party must look like the America of the second decade of the 21st century.”
“Republicans like María Salazar, Tony Gonzales, and Juan Ciscomani are rock stars and tremendous voices,” he added.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The Harris campaign is still working to court this critical group. Earlier this month, it announced it would be spending $3 million in spending on a Spanish-language radio effort and an organizing push in battleground states around baseball games and boxing matches. The campaign is adding Hispanic consultants and has sent top surrogates and Latino leaders to battleground states to turn out support.
Meanwhile, The Trump campaign said it is working to engage voters at events and rallies, door-to-door canvassing, phone banking, and participating in festivals and parades. In early June, the Trump campaign rebranded its Hispanic outreach switch from “Latinos for Trump” to “Latino Americans for Trump,” emphasizing that Latinos are American.