As President Joe Biden gears up for a tough reelection fight, a narrative has taken hold that former President Donald Trump is ascendant among voters of color.
As co-founder and president of the largest organization promoting Latino civic participation, I’ve long argued that this storyline cherry-picks facts and ignores others. Stories are often written based on polling crosstabs, the microgroups within a polling sample that are rarely a reliable sample size. A poll that surveys 1,000 American voters, for example, might include a crosstab of Latino voters that number 100 people or fewer.
To gain greater insight into the dynamics of the 2024 election, Voto Latino commissioned the respected national polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner to poll 2,000 likely Latino voters to dive deeply on their feelings and preferences heading into the presidential election. The results completely challenge the conventional wisdom.
Among swing-state Latinos, Biden actually leads Trump
The good news for the president: In a head-to-head matchup, Biden's leading Trump among swing-state Latinos by a robust 59% to 39%. This is within striking distance of his 2020 election results.
Considering how quickly the Latino population and vote share are growing, approximating his 2020 numbers would significantly boost Biden’s raw vote totals in key states.
But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. When our survey expands the field to include third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein, Biden’s support among Latino voters plummets to just 47%, with Trump falling slightly to 34% and Kennedy taking 12%.
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These voters moving from Biden to Kennedy are precisely those who will decide the outcome of the 2024 election. They are no fans of Trump, but they view their personal financial circ*mstances as abysmal.
This leaves them extremely open-minded about supporting alternatives, especially Kennedy.
Make sure Latinos see Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for who he really is
Most prognosticators suggest that 2024 will be a pure turnout election. Both campaigns are approaching the race as if there are few truly undecided voters between Biden and Trump, so the winner will be whoever best turns out his base.
However, our poll reveals a key reality for the Biden campaign: For all-important Latino swing-state voters, this will be a persuasion election after all – between Biden and Kennedy.
Historically, most third-party candidates lose support over time. When Election Day is still an abstraction, voters are more willing to register a protest vote. But when the outcome becomes more tangible, voters typically end up choosing between the two major party candidates – even if it means choosing the one they perceive as the lesser of two evils.
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Our poll suggests that the Biden campaign cannot count on this historical pattern bringing Kennedy supporters back into the fold. These Latino voters skew young and progressive: We found that 59% of third-party voters are between 18 and 39, which is critical.
Latinos trend far younger than the overall U.S. population, so voting trends among this group play an outsized role.
The risk isn’t that they start trending more conservative; it’s that they opt out of the two-party system entirely. This is not a potential protest vote akin to choosing “none of the above” out of frustration. It’s an emphatic cry for a changing of the guard, born out of a belief that only a third party can break a system they see as stacked against them.
If the Biden campaign assumes Latino voters will return to the traditional Democratic coalition, he will lose. The Latino swing voters who are expressing support for Kennedy are squarely outside the tent, and it’s going to take real work to bring them back in. There are signs that this work is underway. It needs to accelerate.
Even so, there is a clear path. While we intend to dive deeper into how Latino voters perceive Kennedy, the topline is that he benefits from being vaguely seen as both a Democrat and an outsider. The Kennedy brand is powerful in the Latino community: It stands for social activism and economic progress.
Knowing little about his actual policy positions, Latinos can squint and imagine him as the progressive working-class champion they want Biden to be.
Kennedy has the unique advantage of being a highly undefined product wrapped in a blue-chip brand. But that edge can be erased if the Biden campaign stops ignoring him and starts defining him.
That’s what Voto Latino intends to do. Our polling makes it clear that Latinos continue to be repelled by Trump. Yes, we will continue to remind our community just how catastrophic his return to power would be.
At the same time, we’ll be shifting our resources to ensure Latinos see Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for who he really is: no champion of social justice and no friend to working people.
Maria Teresa Kumar is the co-founder and president of Voto Latino.
