Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has dramatically improved her advantage over former President Donald Trump among Hispanic voters.
A poll released by YouGov/The Economist on Wednesday finds that 56 percent of Hispanic registered voters prefer Harris, while 34 percent prefer Trump, the Republican presidential nominee. The remaining 10 percent consists of 4 percent undecided voters, 4 percent who said they would not vote, and 2 percent who said they would vote for another candidate.
In a version of the poll conducted from July 21, the day President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, to July 23, Harris was leading Trump by a much closer margin of 44 percent to 38 percent among Hispanic voters. Support for the Democrat has increased in nearly every weekly iteration of the poll since then, peaking with this week’s survey.
However, the improvement for the Democratic ticket may be driven by Hispanic enthusiasm for Harris rather than a significant drop in support for Trump. While this week’s 34 percent is the lowest share of the former president’s Hispanic vote, he has never dropped below that mark, losing 4 points since Harris entered the race.
The new poll, conducted between August 25 and August 27, has a margin of error of 3.2 percent, compared to 3.1 and 3.3 percent for the older polls.
Newsweek reached out to the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment via email on Wednesday.
Support from voters who are Hispanic or Latino, a category that includes anyone with ethnic origins in Latin America, including areas that are not Spanish-speaking, could be critical to Harris’s winning the White House in November.
An advantage could prove decisive in swing states with large Latino populations like Arizona and Nevada. A poll released by Univision earlier this month found that the Democratic nominee had a 25-point lead over Trump among Latino voters in Arizona, a state Biden won by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2020.
The number of Latinos eligible to vote in U.S. elections has risen by nine million over the past eighteen years, faster than any other demographic. The demographic now makes up around 13.8 percent of the voting population, with the share being significantly higher in some states.
“Forty percent of the gain in the eligible voter population nationally is due to Latinos, so they are going to count, especially in place like Nevada and Arizona,” demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institute previously told Newsweek.
While support for Harris among Latinos and Hispanics may be growing, the latest YouGov/The Economist poll shows the vice president leading Trump among all voters by just 2 percent.
An average of recent national polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight finds Harris with a 3.4 lead over Trump as of Wednesday. She also maintains small leads in averages of at least five swing states, including a tiny 0.8 percent edge in Arizona and Nevada.
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