Shock waves ran through the White House this month when a Siena College/New York Times poll showed President Biden trailing former President Donald Trump among Hispanic voters.
Many analysts said Mr. Trump’s 6-percentage-point lead couldn’t be accurate, but few denied he had gained ground.
Battered by inflation and worried about crime and chaos at the border, Hispanic voters are turning away from Mr. Biden, particularly in states where they play an outsized role.
In Nevada, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by just 2 percentage points, 42% to 40%, in a survey by the conservative-leaning American Principles Project.
In Arizona, the candidates are tied at 46% in a head-to-head matchup. Mr. Trump lost Hispanics in both states by roughly 25 percentage points in 2020.
“Democrats have taken the Hispanic community for granted for far too long, and no amount of money the Biden campaign spends will change the fact that Biden and Harris have been a disaster for our community, from the failing economy to the border crisis and the uncontrollable rise of crime in our neighborhoods,” said Jaime Flores, director of Hispanic communications at the Republican National Committee.
Stunned Democrats are ramping up efforts to recapture Hispanic support.
The Biden campaign launched a $30 million “Latinos con Biden-Harris” advertising campaign. The first ad cast the election as a referendum on Mr. Biden’s support for lowering insulin costs and defending abortion rights.
Campaigning in Arizona this month, Mr. Biden said he deserves Hispanics’ support.
“Look, I want to remind folks, because we turned out in 2020, we achieved the lowest unemployment rate for Latinos in a long, long time,” Mr. Biden said in Phoenix. “We cut Hispanic child poverty to record lows. We lowered health care costs. We made historic investments in Latino small businesses. And we addressed gun violence in the communities.”
He said he followed through on his vow to fill Cabinet seats with Hispanic voices, including Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, and highlighted his campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, a granddaughter of civil rights leader Cesar Chavez.
Mr. Biden has some work to do to persuade voters to give him another shot.
His approval rating among Hispanics nationwide dropped from 74% in 2021 to 32%, according to the Pew Research Center. It’s not that Hispanics are eager for Mr. Trump, whose favorability rating has ticked up slightly from 28% in 2022 to 34%. They simply don’t like the way Mr. Biden’s policies have affected their lives.
“For Latinos, it is the economy,” said Mark Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center. “Things are not going as well for them as hoped, and maybe they are linking that to the president.”
Others said Mr. Biden’s economic populism doesn’t always resonate with a population that tends to appreciate the power of business and work.
“I think a lot of immigrants, specifically in the Hispanic community, are very much pro-business, pro-entrepreneurship, and they’re not, you know, into the rhetoric about eating the rich or taxing the rich more,” said Carlos Alfaro, a Hispanic immigrant and policy advocate in Arizona. “When it comes to first- and second-generation voters, I still think that that kind of language is pushing people away because they know someone that is in business or they are in business.”
Mr. Alfaro said Mr. Biden has some good openings to rebuild himself or for Mr. Trump to lose some of his gains as Hispanic voters sour on a man whose legal troubles mean social media posts and stolen election claims are tough to accept.
“All of that seems too silly and too unstable for people to vote for him — specifically in the Hispanic community,” Mr. Alfaro said. “If he gets convicted, on top of that, it will ring true of politicians in other countries. This, I think, is what turns the Hispanic tide against Trump — where they see other leaders in him, the leaders that they don’t like and the leaders that they left” in their home countries.
Hispanics are projected to account for about 15% of the vote nationally in November, though they will represent a much larger share in Arizona, Nevada and Florida. Pew figured they made up at least 22% of eligible voters in those states in the 2022 congressional elections.
The best a Republican presidential candidate has done among Hispanics in the past 40 years is George W. Bush, who collected more than 40% of the vote in 2004. The exact figure has been heatedly debated.
Mr. Trump won 28% of the Hispanic vote in 2016 and 32% in 2020, defying many prognosticators who cited his tough immigration policies.
Alfonso Aguilar, director of Hispanic Engagement at the American Principles Project, said Democrats have become too extreme for the community.
“Of course, this shouldn’t be a surprise,” he said. “Hispanics, like most Americans, don’t agree with the radical idea that men can magically become women and vice versa. They want to protect their children from being indoctrinated into gender confusion in schools and being preyed upon by a transgender industry eager to turn them into lifelong medical patients.”
Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 in Las Vegas, whose membership is 60% Hispanic and 60% women, said Mr. Biden has started to energize working-class voters by taking on big corporations and has plenty of time to rally Hispanics to his side.
“The key is he is a working-class guy,” Mr. Pappageorge said of Mr. Biden. “Trump is the boss, he’s an owner. So when we talk to working-class voters, Latino voters, if you have that conversation, there’s an opportunity to win.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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