Philadelphia
Donald Trump has said, with characteristic braggadocio, that he will “win the Latino vote.” Probably not. But if a new poll from Latino Decisions is to be trusted, the real estate magnate is doing better among Latinos than conventional wisdom would ever have thought possible.
The poll of 800 registered Latino voters in 12 battleground states, which was released during a press conference a couple of miles from the site of the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday afternoon, found that Hillary Clinton takes 71 percent of Latino support, versus 24 percent who back Trump, and five percent who are undecided. That’s nearly identical to the exit polls from the 2012 presidential race, which found that Barack Obama took 71 percent of the Latino vote, against 27 percent who pulled the lever for Mitt Romney. (Though because that national exit poll included states like Texas, where Latinos tend to vote more heavily Republican, the Latino Decisions poll, which covered only battleground states, may actually understate Trump’s Latino support.)
Polls of Latino voters has varied slightly recently, though they’ve tended to peg Trump’s support at somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of that community. A Pew Research survey from early this month, for example, was somewhat more favorable to Trump than Latino Decisions: It found Trump winning 24 percent of Latino voters. But a Univision poll in mid-July was less rosy for the tycoon. That network—which Trump sued last year for $500 million—pegged Trump’s Latino support at only 19 percent.
Still, the less-than-overwhelming numbers can only come as a disappointment to the Clinton campaign, which has courted the Latino vote heavily, ghost-writing Spanish-language tweets for monolingual Hillary, trumpeting its Spanish-speaking vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine, and embracing a nearly anarchistic immigration stance, which essentially says that anybody who enters the United States can stay here indefinitely. Yet for all that, Clinton is merely replicating Obama’s performance among Latinos. She may not be able to afford that and still win the presidency, given Clinton’s historic hemorrhaging among white voters. Stay tuned for more Spanish language tweets.
