Donald Trump won a record share of the Latino vote for a Republican candidate in last November’s presidential election — but two new polls show how badly he’s squandered those gains less than 100 days into his second presidency.
In a Pew Research poll released last week, a stunning 72% of Latino voters said they disapprove of the job President Trump is doing — with most of them disapproving strongly.
This week a survey from the nonprofit UnidosUS, a large and Democratic-leaning Latino advocacy group, corroborates the Pew findings and puts Trump’s approval rating with Latinos at just 37%. Almost two-thirds of them said the country is going in the wrong direction.
That’s in remarkable contrast to exit polling that showed Trump winning as much as 46% percent of the Latino vote last November — historic numbers for a Republican.
In Florida, Trump was the first GOP presidential candidate to win Miami-Dade County since George H.W. Bush 1988. But the UnidosUS poll found almost two-thirds of Florida Latinos now have an unfavorable view of Trump.
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The biggest reason, the polls indicate, is his erratic economic performance.
Trump's November opponent, Democratic presidential candidate and then Vice President Kamala Harris, won the Latino vote last year with about 55%. But a sizable portion of that swing bloc turned against her and the Democrats largely because of nagging post-pandemic inflation, which had hit Latinos hard when it came to basic needs like rent and food.
Most voters feel Trump has not addressed those pocketbook problems — and, in fact, many feel he's worsened them with his aggressive global trade war.
"Latino voters are frustrated that their economic priorities are being ignored," said UnidoUS president and CEO Janet Murguía. "Over half of [Latino] voters feel the economy is worse now than a year ago, and nearly as many believe it will be worse a year from now."
The White House disputes the polls' findings, and it's calling the UnidosUS survey biased because its sampling — which featured an ample Florida representation — did not include a share of pro-Trump voters commensurate with his November exit polling.
Many Latino voters also moved to Trump last year because, perhaps surprisingly to many non-Latinos, they agreed with his tougher stance on immigration and the border crisis.
But the Pew and UnidosUS polls both suggest Latinos feel his massive campaign to deport millions of undocumented migrants, most of them Latinos, has gone too far — beyond the focus on criminal migrants Trump originally laid out, to include an inordinate number of people with clean records and longstanding ties to their communities in places like South Florida.
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In the UnidosUS survey — conducted by BSP Research and Shaw & Co., with additional funding from the nonprofits League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and Climate Power En Acción — only about a fifth of Latinos back Trump's pledge to deport all undocumented migrants.
