Latino voters, we have been told ad nauseam, are uniquely hostile to Donald Trump. As conventional wisdom has it, the property magnate’s hostility to illegal immigration will doom him with this crucial, and growing, voting bloc. (This despite the fact that half of Latino voters say they are willing to vote for a candidate whose views on immigration they disagree with; and that Trump won the GOP Latino vote in Nevada, New York City, and elsewhere during the primaries.)
A new poll from Fox News Latino is certainly packaged that way. “Latinos favor Clinton over Trump by 39-point margin,” screams the headline. CNN ups the ante with its own treatment of the story: “Poll: Trump trails Clinton by nearly 40 points with Latinos,” the network reports.
And yet, for all the hype, Clinton’s margin over Trump among Latino voters is actually smaller than Barack Obama’s was over Mitt Romney’s in 2012. That year, according to exit poll data, the president bested Romney by some 44 points among Latinos. Another poll, meanwhile, from earlier this week, has even better news for Trump: NBC News and Survey Monkey find that Clinton leads Trump among Hispanics by only 65 to 28 percent—that is, 37 points.
