'All Paths to 270 Lead Through the Latino Electorate'
With less than seven weeks left until Election Day, alarm bells are sounding as a barrage of recent polls from battleground states like Florida and Arizona show a Latino electorate with higher-than-expected support for Donald Trump, a pronounced gender gap and a puzzlingly high rate of undecided voters.
On the first two counts, Stephanie Valencia, the co-founder of Equis Research, a Democratic polling and research firm that focuses on Latino voters, urges restraint. Yes, Florida is tight — that’s to be expected — but compared with previous Republican nominees, Trump still is underperforming among Latino voters. Yes, the gender gap is real, with polls reflecting the fact that Latino men are more supportive of Trump than Latinas, but “there’s a big drop-off between those who have ‘Trump intrigue’ versus those who will actually go in and vote for him.”
It’s that third issue, though, that ought to concern Democrats, Valencia told POLITICO on Wednesday: undecided Latino voters.
“Joe Biden is well-known, but not sharply defined,” said Valencia, a former aide to President Barack Obama. And with early voting already underway in some states, “the window is narrowing for Joe Biden to introduce himself.”
The risk, she says, is not so much that undecided Latino voters will end up supporting Trump. It’s that they won’t vote, period — potentially plunging Democrats into a version of their 2016 debacle, when lower-than-expected turnout among Black voters helped tilt swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin into the Trump column.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/17/latino-voters-2020-trump-biden-florida-arizona-nevada-swing-states-417315
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