Republican party image at a low point among Latino voters

The extreme rhetoric used by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and at times other candidates of the party, has worsened the already devalued image that Latino voters of the Republican Party, according to a survey conducted found in 14 battleground states .
The survey, conducted by ImpreMedia and Latino Decisions, found that 84% of Latino voters think that the Republican Party in general is hostile or does not care much about that community. The last time this question was asked in a survey of Latino voters, the figure was 65%.
It is the worse review received by the GOP in a Latino poll, said Sylvia Manzano, directors of the Latino Decisions polling.
“Nearly half of these voters say the Republican Party is openly hostile to the Latino community,” Manzano said. “In Florida, a state where Republicans are traditionally closer to Latinos, 41% think the same.”
Latino voters were asked the same question on the eve of the midterm elections in 2014, and only 23% of them said that the Republican Party was hostile to Latinos, 42% said they did not care.

Trump’s harsh words about immigrants, joined at times by Ben Carson and others, are deepening the mistrust that Latinos feel for the national Republican party in a similar way to what happened in California during the nineties.
In states that are usually more friendly to Lations, like Florida, Latinos are not feeling good about Republicans either.
“Nobody goes around talking about anchor babies in Florida- Republicans have a good image there and have for years among the Latino community. But now more than 4 in 10 Latino voters think the party is hostile to them, another 43% see it as indifferent”, Manzano said.

Words have consequences

The survey questioned voters about phrases that Trump and Carson have said and about some of their campaign plans, as the two most popular candidates in the Republican primary.
Trump’s famous phrase “Mexicans are drug dealers, criminals, rapists”, his plans to deport 11 million immigrants and build the border wall were cited to these voters with a question about how it affected their view of the party.
Unsurprisingly, 80% of these voters said that this gives them a very unfavorable image of the GOP. The figure reached 84% among immigrants and 93% among young Latino voters, those between 18 and 35 years of age.

Second they were introduced to comments by Ben Carson that he would use the military to secure the border and deploy drones to destroy the tunnels and trenches used by drug traffickers. “A drone strike, boom, on the border and we finish them” Carson once said.
About 70% of Latino voters said that this kind of rhetoric has damaged the image of the Republican Party as a whole and not just individual candidates.
Carson was recently critical of Trump´s rhetoric of mass deportations but argued that “it hurts him more than the party.” However, the results of the survey deny this theory.

“Many say that the individual candidates do not speak for everyone, but what these voters hear is something else,” Manzano said. “If there were companies that severed ties with Trump because they felt his comments damaged their brand message, why do Republicans think it will not damage the party´s brand?” Manzano said.