Bloomberg — About half of Latino Americans viewed President Joe Biden favorably in a poll that also hints at one of the challenges his reelection campaign faces.
While Biden’s 47% approval among the group is greater than in the US at large, the Ipsos poll also found that Latinos taking an unfavorable view of the president increased to 44%, 4 percentage points more than in a poll in October.
Latinos, a fast-growing US voter bloc, are a key constituency for both parties in 2024. Polling suggests Democrats have lost some ground with Latino Americans since 2020, though that doesn’t necessarily translate into increased GOP support, according to the Ipsos poll for Axios with Telemundo.
About 30% of Latinos view former President Donald Trump favorably, while 20% have that opinion about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest challenger for the Republican presidential nomination.
Biden has focused early campaign spending on Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — battleground states he won against Trump in 2020 — while Florida, a state with one of the largest Latino populations, was also part of the “7-figure ad buy,” Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a memo in May.
The last Democrat to win Florida in a presidential election was Barack Obama in 2012. Republican presidential candidates for 2024 include Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, the first Latino to enter the race.
The number of US Latino voters grew to 34.5 million in 2022, the fastest increase of any racial or ethnic group, according to Pew Research Center. In 2020, a majority of Hispanic Americans cast votes for Biden, though the margin was much narrower among those without a college degree, a Pew analysis found.
All candidates may have to contend with an increasingly pessimistic mood among Latinos: 40% said it’s “a bad time to be a Latino or Hispanic person in America,” compared to 31% in October, Ipsos reported.
The June 2-9 poll of 1,116 Latino Americans has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
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