By Niall Stanage - 09/20/16 06:00 AM EDT
Donald Trump is performing about as well with Hispanic voters as GOP nominee Mitt Romney did in 2012, according to opinion polls — something that unsettles Democrats and surprises even some Republicans.
Skeptics had suggested that Trump would suffer a blowout among Hispanics, given that his rhetoric, on illegal immigration in particular, has been controversial.
Trump’s promise to build a wall on the southern U.S. border and force Mexico to pay for it is perhaps the best known of his campaign pledges. And at his campaign launch in June 2015, he said people coming into the country illegally were “rapists.”
But as of right now, there is not much evidence to suggest that Trump is faring any worse among Hispanics than did Romney, who at one point argued that illegal immigrants in the United States could be persuaded to “self-deport.”
In some places, Trump is actually outperforming Romney. In Nevada, for example, President Obama ran up a 47-point margin of victory among Hispanic voters in 2012, according to exit polls, defeating Romney 71 percent to 24 percent. A recent Marist poll in the state for NBC News and The Wall Street Journal showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton leading among Hispanics, but by the smaller margin of 35 points, 65 percent to 30 percent.
A series of Univision polls earlier this month surveying Hispanic voters in four battleground states — Arizona, Colorado, Florida and Nevada — also put Trump in the same ballpark as Romney four years ago. Clinton’s lead over Trump among Hispanics in Colorado was smaller than Obama’s margin in that state in 2012.
That has led some Democrats to question Clinton’s strategy. In a Washington Post report over the weekend, some suggested her campaign was too slow to begin Spanish-language advertising.
Others are simply scratching their heads at the poll numbers or insisting that things will be different come Election Day.
Clinton “has the right team in place and I think people will ‘come home,’ ” said Chuck Rocha, a Hispanic Democratic strategist who worked as a consultant for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) during this year’s Democratic primary. “Latino voters may not have come home yet.”
Rocha, as well as some Republicans, noted another important factor. Romney’s performance among Hispanics in 2012 was seen at the time as exceptionally bad — so much so that the Republican National Committee commissioned a “post-mortem” report after the election to examine how it could expand its support with Hispanics and other growing demographics.
In that light, Trump running apace with Romney is hardly anything to boast about.
But it does point to the danger of Democrats thinking that Clinton can expand upon Obama’s margins with Hispanic voters to make up for an apparent lack of enthusiasm among other stalwart Democratic blocs, such as young voters.
more
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/296747-trump-is-doing-better-with-hispanics-than-you-think
