A quick note on Latino voters: Latinos are a notoriously late deciding vote. We are also challenging to poll because sample sizes often aren’t big enough to accurately reflect voter sentiment in baseline polls. The FL polling is instructive but needs to be considered cautiously
Any poll looking at Hispanic voters in Florida with a sample size <200 in a state as diverse as Florida can’t accurately gauge sentiment. Hispanics are 18% of the statewide vote, Cubans are about 1/3rd, Puerto Rican’s about 1/3rd and the remaining is other South & Central Am’s.
That means, if properly weighted, the sample sizes of Cubans & Puerto Rican’s in the poll had sample sizes of 60 people or so - not a good look at all. Having said that I & others who specialize here, have been very vocal about warning signs with the Latino vote all year
There are very few pollsters who I have any degree of confidence in when gauging Hispanic political opinion. Many are run by partisans & academics more interested in leveraging contracts than being competent political advisors. This is a very big on-going problem for DEMs
PEW remains the gold standard but doesn’t chase political campaign dynamics.
Regardless while I am and have been concerned about the Latino vote for Biden (I raised the same alarms about Clinton in ‘16 - she had the exact same problem just smaller) there is time to correct it with a change in tactics. This can be fixed but time is getting short.
There needs to be both a massive investment in a GOTV program with Puerto Ricans & non-Cuban Hispanics coupled with an aggressive campaign challenging Trump in Miami-Dade to mitigate the Cuban vote expansion. Ceding ground on socialism when Trump is already a dictator is crazy.
Bottom line: This is fixable. It needs to be addressed seriously now and resources sufficiently. This is a MAJOR problem in the Democratic Party. It’s one I’ve watched and competed against successfully on the GOP side for years. Latinos will pass blacks as 2nd largest votinggroup
Stop ignoring and delaying attention to Latino voters. Those days are gone if you want to be a competitive party nationally.
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Another credible poll comes out showing Trump gaining ground.
It’s not a methodology problem. No it’s not a sample size problem.
It’s really. So what gives?
Here’s the latest poll that came out today.
No doubt there’s gonna be some panic and the talking heads are gonna start telling us the polls bad for whatever reasons they can conjur up. nbcnews.com/politics/2024-…
But folks this comes just days after Pew Research put out a poll showing a problem also (Trump up to 39%) pewresearch.org/race-and-ethni…
The biggest tell is the first paragraph “The very early polling on a Harris-Trump election suggests a reset in the fight over Latino voters. The Hispanic electorate now looks more in line with the other Trump-era elections of 2020 and 2022 than with a wide partisan realignment.”
A PAC supporting Kamala Harris is up with a new ad focused on housing and homeownership - take a look and let’s discuss how this effects Latino voters shall we?
More than any other policy specific on the economy homeownership explains Latino men drifting to the GOP - homeownership is central to both the Latino economy and is a critical first step into the middle class.
The Biden years have been tough on Latinos here
Interest rates have tripled & inflation has chopped off 20% of the dollars value in recent years.
This has crushed the home building industry where 1 in 5 Latino men are employed in construction or related fields.
I can’t explain how significant a shift this is for Democrats. It’s extraordinary and it is a complete reversal of basically everything they’ve been doing since 2012.
In fact, it’s basically a repudiation of that approach.
This is very good news.
This ad is sharp, direct, no nonsense and establishes Harris as a border hawk and tough on crime - essentially saying illegal immigration is criminal behavior.
Remarkable for a Democrat. Stunning.
This ad is effective, powerful and designed to protect from what’s coming
Kamala Harris just dropped an ad targeting Latino voters. Here it is - take a look and then let’s discuss, shall we?
This is a biography ad seeking to introduce Harris to Latinos. Which Latinos? We’ve got some strong clues and that tells us a lot about how the campaign is looking at Latino voters
Good news is the ads are also in English (Thank God) so they’re making progress
Despite the chirping from Latino Democratic consultants yesterday saying that buying in Spanish is ALSO something they should be doing….yeah, no.
That’s wrong symbolically and substantively.
Again, good news is this ad shows they’re breaking out of that mindset
In 2020 when The Lincoln Project led the effort to move Republican voters away from Trump and to Joe Biden we used the phrase “The Bannon Line” to explain that moving a marginal 4-5% of GOP voters would determine the winner.
We exceeded those numbers in every swing state.
This year the numbers look different and in looking at the same swing states where The Lincoln Project made a difference there is the potential for greater gains.
The data from primary states is showing Trump fatigue setting as well as new messaging opportunities
By incorporating a more aggressive issue focused strategy there is the opportunity to make more GOP gains for Harris. I believe 1-3% is possible nationally and possibly more in a few battleground states (esp. PA, AZ & WI)