The survey by Voto Latino and polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner included voters from Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Texas, and Pennsylvania and was conducted from April 25 through May 7. “One of the reasons Voto Latino went into the field to conduct this extensive poll of over 2,000 Latino voters in key battleground states, was that we kept hearing the narrative Latinos were leaving the Democratic party and going to Trump,” María Teresa Kumar, Voto Latino co-founder and president, said in a press release about the initiative. In a hypothetical matchup presented by the poll, President Joe Biden is leading former President Donald Trump among swing state Latino voters by a 20-point margin (59 percent to 39 percent). “This is within striking distance of Biden’s 2020 performance and shows no meaningful rise in Latino support for Trump, which contradicts the widespread narrative,” Kumar explained. The survey data show that while Latino voters remain in support of Biden’s policies, they are not supportive of his handling of the economy — a top issue among this voting bloc. As a result, Voto Latino found that many have been defecting not to the GOP, but to third-party candidates. Of respondents who back a third-party candidate, 62 percent are women, which Kumar says speaks to the opportunity for the Biden campaign to address “the issues that are bread and butter to the Latino community they care about.” More than 35 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 to 29 say they’ve signed up for government assistance within the past year. More than 22 percent say they have had to take on a second job to make ends meet. When the survey expands the candidate field to include third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, and Jill Stein, Biden’s support among Latino voters drops to just 47 percent, while Trump’s support falls slightly to 34 percent.A Hispanic advocacy group has conducted a new poll of 2,000 registered Latino voters from key battleground states, and has found there is no “rightward shift,” contradicting other polling showing large swaths of this demographic defecting from the Democratic Party.
