Why Hispanics will be ‘the deciding factor’ in 2024
This article was originally written by Samuel Benson for Deseret News and can be found on their website here.
Yes, Biden has a Hispanic problem
I’ve written before about President Joe Biden’s issues with Latino voters. Poll after poll show Trump gaining ground among Hispanics. And it’s not just Biden — the Democratic Party as a whole seems to be hemorrhaging support from Hispanics, who once formed a reliably blue voting bloc.
Polling is never perfect, though. The New York Times/Siena College poll in March that showed Trump up six percentage points among Hispanics was slammed by critics for oversampling English-speaking Hispanics (only 3% of interviews with Hispanics were done in Spanish). The NYT/Siena poll course-corrected in May and conducted 19% of interviews with Hispanics in Spanish. The result? A 31%-31% tie between Trump and Biden among Hispanic voters.
That doesn’t mean Biden is out of the woods. In fact, I’m even more convinced that there is a real sea change among Hispanic voters after seeing a fascinating poll from the U.S. Hispanic Business Council (USHBC). The council routinely sends out a survey to its tens of thousands of members across the country. This month, they focused on the presidential election, offering a glimpse into a niche — and severely under-sampled — group
of voters: Hispanic small-business owners and workers.
Of the over 1,000 Hispanic respondents, the vast majority — over 70% — said they do not believe Biden’s policies have positively impacted them or their businesses. Over one-third of them — 34% — said Trump was better than Biden for their business’ bottom line; only 21% said Biden was better. And when asked who they plan to support in the presidential election, Trump had a 10-point lead, 43% to 33%.
I caught up with Javier Palomarez, the USHBC’s president and CEO, at a trade summit in Salt Lake City last week. Palomarez encouraged me — and you — to consider three things while parsing through the data.
First, Hispanics are not a monolith. “One of the big shocks for me in 2016 was that then-candidate Trump garnered about 29% of the Hispanic vote,” Palomarez said. “And then he turned around in 2020 and garnered about 39% of the Hispanic vote.” How did he do it? “He had a ground game — he had people on the ground in local communities, making the connections between his campaign and their needs,” he said. “I don’t see the same effort on the behalf of the current administration.”
Second, immigration is not the top issue for Hispanics. When asked to rank a number of issues from most to least important during this presidential election, Hispanics ranked the economy as the top issue. Only 13% of Hispanics said immigration was No. 1. “The fact of the matter is, most Hispanics in this country were born here,” Palomarez said. “Hispanic worry about the same kitchen-table issues that all Americans worry about: we worry about getting our kids to school, we worry about paying the bills, we worry about interest rates and mortgage loans.” Palomarez’s advice for the campaigns was simple: “Don’t make everything about immigration.”
Third, Hispanic voters could decide the election. “The current administration is spending a very large amount of time talking to African Americans,” Palomarez said. “That is right and good, and they should continue. But consider this: there are more Hispanics in this country than there are African-Americans and Asians combined.” There are significant Hispanic populations in swing states like Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, and the winning candidate will have to speak to those voters. “The Hispanic vote will be the deciding factor,” he said.