Polling data from a Democratic firm shows Donald Trump with a sizable lead over President Joe Biden among Latino voters in five key battleground states with large Latino populations.
The poll data from Equis Research, which was obtained by journalist Adrian Carrasquillo, shows Trump leading Biden among Latinos in Nevada, Florida, and Texas, and tied with the president in Arizona. Of the five battleground states included in the poll, Biden was only slightly ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania. The poll appears to have been conducted in January.
Overall, Trump was leading Biden 41 percent to 34 percent in those five states, with 17 percent supporting independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to the poll.
In a report in Politico on Thursday, Carrasquillo wrote that the growing support for Kennedy, if it holds, could “effectively splinter Biden’s Hispanic coalition from 2020” and could “represent a seismic break in the Democratic coalition and a remaking of the electoral map.”
It comes on the heels of Trump and Republicans making up ground in Hispanic-heavy South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas in recent elections.
Giancarlo Sopo, a media strategist who led Trump’s Hispanic advertising in 2020, said the poll shows that while Trump’s support is growing in Hispanic communities, Biden is losing support to Kennedy. And, he added, “I’m not the least bit surprised by that.”
Biden has long struggled to connect with Hispanic voters for a variety of reasons, Sopo said. For one, Hispanics are the nation’s youngest demographic group, “and they have very little in common with this guy,” he said. They also tend to have larger families, and have been hit hard by rising inflation under Biden, he said.
“Biden’s Latino outreach has been clumsy at best,” Sopo said, noting the Biden administration’s push of politically-correct terms like “LatinX” and the president’s recent apology for calling the man accused of killing Georgia nursing student Lake Riley an “illegal”—“I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal’; it’s ‘undocumented,’” Biden told MSNBC after receiving criticism from his far-left flank.
Sopo said that Hispanics are not, as a whole, particularly politically correct. He believes Biden is getting bad advice from Hispanic staffers in a Washington, D.C., bubble who cut their teeth in left-wing immigration politics.
“No blue-collar Hispanic guy who works roofing, or as a mechanic, or runs a taco truck, is preoccupied with pronouns,” Sopo said.
Meanwhile, those voters are not generally put off by Trump’s brash style and the way he flaunts his success and his wealth. Rather, they appreciate it, Sopo said.
“Trump, culturally, has a lot more in common with your average blue-collar Latino than most Democrats would ever care to recognize,” he said. “Trump’s personae as a bull in a China shop and kind of this rambunctious billionaire is very appealing to many blue-collar Hispanics.”