Trump’s support among Latinos is growing, new polls show

President Biden continues to lose crucial support among Latino voters, with a growing number of those voters saying they are more likely to vote for former President Donald J. Trump, a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College shows.

The poll shows Trump trailing Mr. Biden among Hispanic voters, with 46 percent supporting the former president and 40 percent preferring Mr. Biden, but with Latino voters making up just 15 percent of the electorate, the sample size of the group in the poll is not large enough to reliably assess small differences. For a subgroup of that size, the margin of error is 10 percentage points.

But the poll, and others like it, make clear that Trump has made remarkable progress with Hispanic voters.

Few observers could have predicted this kind of support for a former president who, when he first ran for the White House nearly a decade ago, claimed that many Mexican immigrants were rapists and criminals. During the 2020 election, many Democrats were stunned to see Trump dramatically improve support from immigrant-heavy areas.

For much of that campaign, many Democrats assumed that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies would turn off Latino voters. And in much of the country, that suspicion turned out to be true. About 60 percent voted for Biden, and Latino voters helped flip Arizona to Democrats in 2020. They also played a central role in the party’s ability to hold Nevada, both in that election and in the 2022 Senate race. But Latino voters in South Texas and Florida were also critical to Republican victories in those states in 2020.

Still, many leaders in the Democratic Party argue that Hispanic support for Trump does not represent a broad ideological shift toward Republicans. Polls repeatedly show such voters saying they are attracted to Trump’s positions on the economy and the border. Many Latino voters have also pointed to Trump’s personality as a key part of his appeal. Trump’s lead among Latino voters has grown over the past four years, according to Times/Siena polling.

The number of Latinos eligible to vote has increased steadily over the past two decades, and this year there are more than 36 million eligible voters, an increase of nearly four million in the past four years, according to the Pew Research Center. Latinos now account for nearly 15 percent of eligible voters, a record high.

Since 2020, both Republicans and Democrats have made efforts to shore up support among Latino voters, largely because they see the group as crucial to creating a winning majority. Trump does not need the support of a majority of Latinos to win in November; just peeling off a few percentage points among the group could be decisive.

Historically, about a third of Latino voters have supported Republicans in presidential elections. But there have been examples of greater Republican success – in 2004, George W. Bush received support from about 40 percent of Latinos.