Shockwaves ran through the White House earlier this month when a Siena College/New York Times poll showed President Biden trailing former President Donald Trump among Hispanic voters.
Many analysts complained that Mr. Trump’s 6-point lead in the poll couldn’t be real — but few denied that he had gained ground.
Battered by inflation and worried over crime and chaos at the border, Hispanic voters are running away from Mr. Biden, particularly in key states where they play an outsized role.
In Nevada, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by just two percentage points, 42-40, in a new survey by the conservative-leaning American Principles Project.
In Arizona, the men are tied at 46% in a head-to-head match-up. Mr. Trump lost Hispanics in both states by roughly 25% last time.
“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 an effort to recapture Hispanics.
The Biden campaign launched Latinos con Biden-Harris, promising $30 million in advertising targeting the community. The first ad cast the election as a referendum on Mr. Biden’s support for lowering insulin costs and defending abortion rights.
Mr. Biden, campaigning in Arizona this month, 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 healthcare 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 his cabinet with Latino voices, including Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, and highlighted his campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, who is the granddaughter of civil rights leader Cesar Chavez.
Mr. Biden has some work to do to convince voters to give him another shot.
His approval rating among Latinos nationwide, which, according to the Pew Research Center, stood at 74% in 2021, is now just 32%. It’s not that they’re eager for Mr. Trump, whose favorability rating has only ticked up slightly from 28% in 2022 to 34% now. They just don’t like what’s happened to them under Mr. Biden.
“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 Latino 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.”
Still, Mr. Alfaro said Mr. Biden has some good openings to rebuild himself, or, more precisely, for Mr. Trump to lose some of his gains, as Latino 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 be a much larger share in places like Arizona, Nevada and Florida, where Pew figured they were at least 22% of eligible voters in the last midterm congressional elections.
The best a Republican presidential candidate has done among Hispanics in the last 40 years is George W. Bush, who collected north of 40% of the vote in 2004 — though the exact figure has been heatedly debated.
Mr. Trump earned 28% in 2016 and 32% in 2020, defying the predictions of many prognosticators who said his tough immigration policies would send him in the other direction.
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 percent Latino and 60 percent women, said Mr. Biden has started to energize working-class voters by taking on big cooperations and still has plenty of time to rally Latinos 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.”