Michael Anton remarked in our podcast last Saturday that he hasn’t seen any hispanics in the videos of protests and riots going on around the country, and I’ve been remarking that out here in California, we’re hearing nothing but crickets from the hispanic community about the whole “Defund the Police” and Black Lives Matter protests. It’s almost as though hispanics may be wondering why Democrats are talking exclusively about black interests, and don’t buy the whole intersectionality/”people of color” boilerplate, still less the trendy academic term “Latinx” that surveys shows 98 percent of actual hispanics don’t use and don’t like.
And now we have a “mainstream” poll from NBC News/Marist that not only finds Trump even with Biden in Florida, but actually leading Biden among hispanics:
Yet in a significant break from four years ago, Trump holds the narrow edge over Biden among likely Latino voters, 50 percent to 46 percent — with Trump leading sizably among Latinos of Cuban descent, and with Biden just slightly ahead among all other Latinos in the state. . . In the 2016 race, Hillary Clinton bested Trump among Florida Latinos, 62 percent to 35 percent, according to the exit poll.
I guess Florida hispanics didn’t get the DNC memo on how they’re supposed to think and vote.
If this pattern is repeated elsewhere, Trump may have a shot at Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. I know, people will point to the heavy GOP-leaning Cubans in Florida as the reason for this poll finding, but in fact there is a lot more genuine diversity among hispanics in other states than Democrats know or care to admit, such as Texas, where the GOP does well with hispanic voters chiefly because Texas offers more opportunity to reach the middle class than, say, California or Illinois. Heck, I’ll bet a lot of them actually like Trump’s border wall.
Chaser—this part is interesting, too:
As national polls also show, Florida voters give Trump the advantage on the economy, with 53 percent of likely voters in the state saying the president would better handle the issue, versus 40 percent who think Biden would.
