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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A little history you likely haven’t heard about ‘Mass Deportations’ as we near a historic change in immigration policy.
Thousands of US citizens were rounded up the last time the US did this - maybe over a million, many children open.substack.com/pub/greattrans…
The first mass deportation of Mexicans & US citizens of Mexican descent occurred during the Great Depression when farm jobs were prioritized for white Okies, dustbowlers & ‘real Americans’ over Latino citizens.
The government also wanted New Deal dollars going to whites first.
This was known as the ‘Mexican Repatriation’ and it was anything but. It’s a whitewashed name for a history never taught in public schools.
1.8 million Mexicans & US citizens were deported - over half believed to be US citizens, many of them children.
The Selzer poll was a big bolt of lightning and thunder in a race defined by very little movement in polling numbers.
This is great news for Harris -no other way to spin it. Great for the narrative, momentum & even if the numbers aren’t perfectly accurate they show big movement
Why does that matter in swing states? Well Almost all of the movement in this poll towards Harris came from Republicans and Independent women.
In fact the poll shows Trump losing 11% of GOP voters in one of the whitest most conservative states in the country.
The Selzer poll can also be viewed as a good sample of this critical bloc of voters in swing states - a key group Harris needs to overperform with in order to win.
So why is there such big movement in Iowa and not other swing states?
The racial slurs at Trumps rally in Madison Square Garden could cost him the election. Why?
First, even if it just moves Pennsylvania marginally its game over and it’s likely to move Latino’s and Republicans there.
Puerto Ricans are the largest Latino plurality in PA and
Harris is doing best in PA with Latinos of all the swing states.
PA had huge Latino rightward shifts in 2020 & 2022 meaning there was a lot of Democratic crossovers to Republicans. That existing registration history suggests they can also be brought back.
450K Puerto Rican voters in PA (33,500 in Allentown alone)
Just a few points return of these voters could be a disaster for Trump and Bad Bunny, Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez, Residente and Geraldo Rivera weighing in can move 1-3 points.
You do not need a permission structure to defend your body or your country.
I’m deeply honored & grateful for those Republicans who have the courage to step forward against Trump. Everything helps at this moment.
But let’s be clear - we’re way past a ‘permission structure’
We’re not selling toothpaste folks.
The threat to our country and our rights is existential and that’s why 17-20% of Republicans were peeling off Trump - before Nikki Haley, before Liz Cheney, before the convention.
Republican defections will win this race for Harris but…
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.”