A new poll from NBC News and Telemundo finds Latino voters shifting sharply away from President Donald Trump and the Republican Party ahead of the midterm elections.
The poll surveyed 800 registered Latino voters nationwide from Sept. 21-28. It found 69% disapprove of Trump’s performance, while only 27% approve.
Roughly 66% of respondents said Trump’s deportation policies have gone too far. And 75% said Trump has mishandled the economy and cost of living.
On the question of which party should control Congress, 59% of Latino voters picked Democrats, versus 35% for Republicans — a 24-point gap. That’s up sharply from the 12-point Democratic lead among Latino voters heading into the 2024 election, showing Trump and the GOP have given back ground they had gained with this group of voters.
Republicans still stand well ahead of where they were a decade ago with Latino voters. Support for a GOP-controlled Congress among Latino voters was just 21% in 2016 and 26% in 2018.
NBC News and Telemundo conducted the survey through phone interviews and online text-message surveys. The poll carries a margin of error of 3.5%.
This result adds to a run of recent polling showing Democrats with a wide edge over Republicans heading into the midterms.
Trump addressed the numbers directly Saturday night at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, telling the crowd that polling fails to capture the effect of his own campaigning.
“These fake polls, they don’t account for one thing. They don’t account for the fact that Trump is out campaigning. They never thought this was good. They never thought this was going to happen,” Trump said.
“With you at my side, we have always prevailed and prevailed by a lot and got record-setting votes and record-setting victory. We’ve won every battle. We’ve defeated every hope. We’ve overcome every threat. And now we are on the cusp of beating the communists, socialist, radicalized lunatics and villains once and for all. We’re going to put them down once and for all,” he told the crowd.
Current projections have Democrats winning 215 House seats to the GOP’s 201, meaning Democrats would need just three more wins out of 19 remaining toss-up races to take the majority. Republicans would need to win at least 17 of those 19 races to hold control.
