Harris leads Trump among battleground Latino voters: Poll

Vice President Harris is leading former President Trump among Hispanic voters in all battleground states, according to a new poll commissioned by Voto Latino.

The poll, conducted by GQR, shows about a third of battleground Latinos have consistently supported Trump, while third-party voters have dwindled in favor of Harris.

The Sept. 25-Oct 2 survey found 64 percent of respondents support Harris, 31 percent support Trump and 5 percent support third-party candidates. A similar poll in April found 48 percent support for then-presumptive Democratic nominee President Biden, 33 percent for Trump and 12 percent for independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The new poll found substantial differences in Latino voter intent state-to-state. Eliminating third-parties in Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin, respectively, 59 percent, 62 percent and 61 percent of respondents voiced support for Harris.

In Arizona, 66 percent said they support Harris, as did 67 percent in North Carolina and 77 percent in Pennsylvania.

“In a place like Arizona, where she's doing really well, part of the reason is that Sheriff [Joe] Arpaio is not a distant memory. He's fresh. He's what got a lot of these people in the game. And so the fact that she was able to swing and not just tear into Trump, but also diminish the stronghold of independent voters, that really struck me,” said María Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino.

According to Kumar, Harris’s relative weakness among Midwestern Latinos is due in part to the lack of government services available to rural communities — and to Evangelical churches filling those gaps.

“You go to the government, the government can tell you where to get extra help for learning English or childcare or X-Y-Z, right? And in rural communities, you don't have that, you have the church. In this case, it's an Evangelical church. And so you're seeing a trend where more Latinos are going into Evangelical church [not] because of conversion, but because of necessity, and then they convert,” she said.

The poll, conducted among 2,000 Hispanic likely voters across battleground states — 400 each in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania and 200 each in Michigan and Wisconsin — claims to be the largest of its kind.

GQR reports a plus or minus 2.19 percentage point margin of error in the overall poll, a plus-minus 4.9 margin of error in states with 400 respondents and a 6.92 margin of error in states with 200 respondents.

It comes as polling overall shows the two presidential candidates neck-and-neck nationally and in battleground states, with both campaigns cramming in the last two weeks before election day.

Though Harris has a plus-51 point advantage in net favorability among respondents and leads Trump on every issue in the poll, Trump’s relative strength reflects a 100 percent name recognition candidate whose policy positions are well-known to voters.

According to Kumar, some Latinos in battleground states are still fuzzy about Harris’s specific proposals on the economy, which is by far the top issue for respondents.

“I also think that there's a space for her to talk more on economics, because they are aligned with her on an economics but they don't know — they can't tell you what economic policy is crystal clear to them what she's going to do next,” said Kumar.