President Joe Biden keeps bleeding support from the Latino community, painting an increasingly bleak scenario in his likely competition against Donald Trump in the 2024 elections, according to a new poll.
The study, conducted by USA TODAY/Suffolk University, showed Biden trailing Trump 39-34% with this demographic. The study highlights that in 2020 he had received 65% of the support, compared to Trump's 32%.
Another salient data point from the study regarding this demographic, which is set to comprise 14% of the electorate in this year's elections, is the fact that 20% said they will back someone other than the two main contenders.
A similar proportion of Blacks and young voters gave the same answer. "A young voter or a person of color voting 'third party' is a vote away from President Biden, and a vote away from President Biden is a vote for Donald Trump," said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk's Political Research Center.
The survey of 1,000 likely voters, conducted by landline and cellphone Tuesday through Friday, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, USA Today said in an article analyzing the poll's results.
The study, however, saw some silver linings for Biden. The first one was that the support he is seemingly losing is not going to Trump, but rather to third parties.
The other one is that voters' views of the economy are increasingly positive: 29% said it was recovering, 8 percentage points more than the previous survey, which took place in late October. However, that hasn't translated into support for Biden, at least yet.
This is the second poll to show Biden trailing Trump among Latinos. A CNBC All-America Survey from late December had Trump with a 5-point lead over current Biden, the first time the former President was ahead in such a poll over his likely competitor in next year's elections. The same poll from two months before had Biden with a 7-point lead.
The survey added that Biden's performance with Latino voters is not just lagging relative to Trump — "it is trending downward overall." "In December 28% of Latino adults approved of Biden as president, down from 35% in October," says the study.
Another poll from Cygnal published in mid November had Biden with a single-digit lead over Trump in four key states with a large representation from this demographic: Florida, Texas, Nevada and Arizona. And separate polls surveying the entire population had Trump on the lead.
The former President has been steadily gaining support with the Latino electorate during the past decade, increasing from 28% in 2016 to 36% in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2022, Republicans got 39 percent of the Latino vote, the highest percentage since 2004.
CNBC argues that while Latinos have traditionally aligned with Democrats' more progressive policies, the economy is set to play a critical role in next year's elections. And there, Trump has a clear lead.
A recent survey by UnidosUS showed that inflation, the labor market and the economy are currently the biggest concerns for this demographic.
Another challenge for Biden is the fact that many younger voters, a demographic in which the president still seems to have a lead, are less sure about turning out to vote next year. A December poll by Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics revealed that young Latino voters had the steepest decline among all groups who said they would definitely vote in 2024.
Concretely, the amount who said they would "definitely" vote next year dropped 16 percentage points, from 56 to 40 percent, compared to the poll conducted in the fall of 2019. That is almost 30 percent less than four years ago, making Latino voters the second group with the least amount of respondents behind Black voters.
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