Some polls are suggesting Donald Trump has made serious inroads among Latino and Black voters. Should we be worried? First off, for the most part, it doesn’t help to dig too far into polling crosstabs—i.e., how respondents break down by demographic. For example, if a poll has a national sample size of 800 adults, that means the pollster wants around 152 Latino respondents since Latinos make up about 19% of the U.S. population. While the margin of error for the overall poll would be around 3.5 percentage points, it would be around 8 points for the Latino respondents. In other words, that poll’s Latino numbers aren’t ones you want to base a narrative on. But not all punditry around the Latino vote has come from such small samples. The New York Times/Siena College polled over 900 Latino voters in a recent poll. “Like our other surveys this cycle, the polls find Mr. Trump faring unusually well for a Republican among Black and Hispanic voters,” The New York Times’ wrote Nate Cohn about the poll. “Overall, [Vice President] Kamala Harris is ahead, 78 percent to 15 percent, among Black voters, and she’s leading, 56-37, among Hispanic voters. … In 2020, Joe Biden’s Black support was 92 percent among major-party voters; his Hispanic support was 63 percent, according to Times estimates.” In other words, the Times’ numbers suggest Trump is doing about 5 points better with Hispanics than in 2020. That’s not insignificant. But another poll of Latinos suggests that things may not be as dire. On behalf of the Latino Victory Foundation and Hispanic Federation, BSP Research surveyed 1,900 Latino registered voters (twice the Times/Siena sample) in battleground states, in both English and Spanish (same as Times/Siena). Overall, 54% of Latino voters nationally favored Harris and 33% favored Trump in a multicandidate field, compared with 56% to 31% in the battleground states (excluding Florida). In a two-way race, Harris leads 59% to 37% nationally, and 62% to 34% in the battlegrounds. This would indeed be Democratic slippage from 2020, but it is a little more modest of a slide than what Times/Siena and other polling has shown, though it’s close to a margin-of-error difference. The memo also shows why it is important to poll in Spanish, which not enough pollsters do (though Times/Siena did). In BSP’s two-way matchups, Harris won Spanish-language households 64-32, but English-only ones 51-42. In other words, English-only polls fail to fully capture the sentiments of the Latino electorate. It’s probably a major reason why polling consistently misses in Nevada. The state simply has too many Spanish-speaking Latino voters, and that same dynamic applies to Arizona. My guess is that when the votes are counted, the Latino vote will end up looking a lot like 2020. The poll also shows that Harris is more trusted on the issues of abortion (63-23), immigration (64-23), LGBTQ+ rights (60-21), and health care (60-28). And Harris has even more room to grow, as 84% of Latinos would be more likely to vote for a candidate who advocates cutting middle-class taxes while raising taxes on corporations and billionaires. And 78% say the same for the candidate who would safeguard abortion protections, and 75% for the candidate advocating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The reason Harris appears to be doing better among Latinos in battleground states than the national Latino electorate is because those are the states in which those voters are most exposed to her message. Donald Trump speaks during a Univision Noticias town hall event on Oct. 16, 2024, in Doral, Florida. Trump’s disastrous performance in front of a skeptical Univision audience this week won’t help his case. While Univision’s dominance among Latino viewers is fading thanks to the internet and the same media trends affecting the country at large, a Pew Research Center study found that 44% of them get all or some of their news in Spanish, and Univision is the 800-pound gorilla in that category. Trump’s gains among the Latino electorate are still on the margins, and it might not take much to move those margins back. The moral of the story? Don’t trust tiny crosstab samples, remember that polls are polls, and not final results, and make sure any Latinos you know are fully informed about which candidate stands for reproductive freedom, economic justice, and treating immigrants with respect and dignity. We need your help if we’re going to defeat Trump, Vance, Project 2025, and Republicans up and down the ballot. Click here to volunteer to write letters so we can increase voter turnout.
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