Latino voters disenchanted with the two-party system are more likely to consider supporting a third-party ticket than a full shift from left to right, according to a new poll to be released by Voto Latino on Monday.
According to preliminary poll results reviewed by The Hill, President Biden maintains a similar lead as he did in 2020 among Latino voters in swing states over former President Trump, but younger and female Hispanic voters are increasingly increasingly open to voting for third-party candidates, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. .
“If you look at where Latinos are in swing states, 59% of them are voting for Biden and 39% of them are voting for Trump,” said María Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino, the group that conducted the survey of 2,000 Latino voters.
“And our research asked the thorniest question: If we open up… including a third party, how does that research work? What we found was really alarming, in the sense that 14 percent of them would vote for a third party, with the majority of votes going to Biden. So instead of being at 59%, it dropped to 49%. And Trump only dropped five points.”
Kumar will present the full results of the survey on Monday, which follows large surveys of Latino voters conducted by Voto Latino in previous election cycles.
Kumar said that despite massive coverage of a potential move to the right by young Latinos, his group is more concerned about the openness to third parties among Latinas, driven by economic concerns.
“The second thing that was really surprising was that this was a defection not of Latino men who became third parties, but of Latino men who became third parties, who are advocating for socioeconomic issues of social justice,” Kumar said.
“Then again, the headline that Latinos are Republican-leaning isn’t very new — it wasn’t borne out in 2022, when we did that massive survey of 5,000 Latino voters in key battleground states, and it wasn’t borne out last. week in our survey of 2,000 Latino voters in five swing states. What we’re finding is more disillusionment because the economy is not changing fast enough for them to basically survive, which is a real, real challenge.”
According to Kumar, Voto Latino plans to raise and spend $44 million this cycle to reach Hispanics in their communities and ensure they vote.
The 2024 effort, Kumar said, will be substantially different from the group’s $36 million effort in 2020, when the pandemic forced much of the campaign into the digital world.
Kumar’s pitch to Voto Latino’s core constituency – young Hispanic voters – this year is that the absence of elections will disproportionately affect the Hispanic community.
“You know, this idea that Trump is going to take office and overthrow democracy on day one, he’s not going to. But I’m confident that what he will do is turn America into a democracy, on paper, more like Latin America than anything else we’ve seen. And in this, only a few prosper,” Kumar said.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
