Understanding The Latino Electorate
Latino voters could make a big difference in battleground states such as Florida, Arizona and even North Carolina today. In general, Latinos are more likely to be supporting Biden than Trump: According to a new NALEO/Latino Decisions poll of Latino registered voters, 69 percent of respondents were supporting Biden, while 26 percent were supporting Trump. (The rest were voting for someone else or undecided.) Another recently released NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll showed Biden with 62 percent support among Latino voters, and Trump with 29 percent support.
But the Latino vote is not a monolith, as Nathaniel Rakich and I wrote in September. Latino voters in Florida are likely to vote quite differently than Latino voters in Arizona or Texas; Hispanic men are likelier to support Trump than Hispanic women; evangelical Latinos are more of a swing group than Hispanic Catholics, who are a strongly Democratic group.
For example, aggregated results from nine weeks of NALEO/Latino Decisions polls of Latino registered voters showed that Biden’s support among Latinos is lower in Florida (57 percent) than in Texas (67 percent) or California (71 percent), and his lead in Florida was narrower in a separate Telemundo poll of the state released last week (48 percent support for Biden, 43 percent support for Trump).
These state-level divides are due, in large part, to differences between various ethnic groups. A plurality of Florida’s Latino population is Cuban, and although this traditionally Republican bloc has slowly been drifting toward the Democrats, there are signs that Trump’s confrontational stance toward Cuba is endearing him to Cuban-American voters in Florida this year. The Latino population in Arizona and Texas, meanwhile, is more heavily Mexican-American, which is a group that tends to lean toward the Democrats.
One macro-level factor to watch among Latinos, though, is enthusiasm. Biden clearly has the edge among the group as a whole, but his campaign has been criticized since the Democratic primary for its lackluster outreach to Hispanic voters. A lack of enthusiasm among Latinos for his candidacy could hurt him -- especially if Trump stays relatively strong with conservative Latinos and Hispanic men. So one question this year is whether Biden can match or exceed Hillary Clinton’s support among Latinos in 2016, which in turn fell short of Barack Obama’s support among Latinos in 2012. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in late September and early October indicated that Latinos are less interested in the presidential campaign overall -- we’ll soon see how much that affects Latino turnout and support for Biden.