Latino voters in battleground states favor Hillary Clinton, deeply dislike Donald Trump
ImpreMedia and Latino Decisions survey the Latino electorate in 14 key states. Jeb Bush scores highest among Republicans, Trump registers record negatives.
Trump y Clinton. Crédito: Getty Images
Latino voters in 14 battleground states favor Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary and Jeb Bush in the Republican primary while holding a very negative view of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Donald Trump’s image among Latino voters in these states is in tatters: 71% have an unfavorable image of the tycoon. Of these, the vast majority (67%) describe it as “very unfavorable”.
Ben Carson, who heads the Republican polls today, is a virtual unknown to Latino voters: 58% do not know who he is or have no opinion.
The survey, conducted by Latino Decisions (LD) in conjunction with ImpreMedia, measured the “favorable or unfavorable” image of various presidential candidates from both parties. Full results can be found here.
Democrat Hillary Clinton is the leader of the pack, with a 61% favorable rating and 27% negative image.
Clinton’s popularity holds steady among Latino men and women, but it is slightly higher among Latinas, 68% of whom have a favorable view of her compared with 54% for men.
“Hillary Clinton is far and away the most favored candidate by a large margin” said Sylvia Manzano, a political scientist and a principal of Latino Decisions. “She is the only candidate who tops 50%.”
Clinton, along with Donald Trump, are the best known candidates among Latino voters. Others like Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, suffer the most serious problem of all when it comes to attracting voters: they are not that well known among these voters.
Sanders is the most popular candidate after Hillary among Latinos in the Democratic primary as he recorded a positive rating of 39%. At the same time 4 out of 10 say they do not know who is or have an opinion about him.
Latinos do not like Donald Trump
On more than one occasion, the Republican candidate has said that “Hispanics love him”.
But so far nothing seems to support Trump´s theory, and this survey is no exception.
His negatives among Latino voters are staggering: only 15% have a positive view of the tycoon and 71% gave him a negative rating, including 67% who thought of him “very negatively”.
Jeb Bush is the Republican candidate with the highest favorable ratings among this group of Latino voters, scoring higher positives than the two candidates with Latino background, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
Bush´s 42% favorable score is slightly higher than his negatives, which stand at 37%. He does better with these voters than any of the other Republicans mentioned in the survey, including Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina.
Much of the positive image in the sample comes from Florida Latinos, 55% of whom favor Bush. He does particularly well among immigrants, 52% of whom have a positive view of the former Florida governor.
“Bush has made an effort to indicate that he is friendly toward Latinos, so it makes sense that he has a higher favorability score” Manzano said, “A year ago we found similar numbers for him in another survey of Latino voters”.
Bush may be getting a lot of his support from Cuban Americans in Florida, which may tilt the outcome as he is better known by that community. “He got a lot of support from those community leaders early on”, Manzano said.
But nobody scores with Latino voters in battleground states as low as Donald Trump: 71% of Latino voters in battleground states have a negative image of the candidate, and only 15% see him in a positive light. This is consistent for all groups of Latino voters but it may be a bit worse among Latino women: 8 out of 10 Latinas have a negative view of the reality TV star.
Marco Rubio, who has overtaken Jeb Bush in among republican primary voters, is not doing so well with the Latino voting population, even in the state of Florida, which he represents in the US Senate and served in the state legislature.
Among these Latino voters, Rubio has a higher negative than positive image: 40% negative and 32% positive. About 20% do not know who he is or don´t have an opinion. Cruz, whose father is Cuban, has similar negative numbers (40%) but a lower positive image, 24%.
