Biden set to Launch Wide-Ranging Push to Win Over Latinos as Polls Show Declining Support

President Joe Biden is set to launch on Tuesday "Latinos con Biden-Harris," a campaign push aimed at reaching out to this demographic as several polls have been showing declining levels of support, with the president even being overtaken by Donald Trump in several of them.

Axios reported that Biden will make the announcement today at a stop at a Mexican restaurant in Phoenix. He will also travel to Nevada and hold a fundraising trip through Texas in the context of this effort.

"The Latino vote was critical to the President's victory in 2020, and 2024 will be no different," said Biden-Harris 2o24 campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez.

The latest poll focused on Latinos, released this month by The New York Times and Siena College, shows the former president with a six percentage point lead over the current one, 46 to 40%.

An accompanying article provides some nuance on the figures: it says that "because Latino voters make up just 15 percent of the electorate, the poll's sample size is not large enough to assess small difference reliably," and that for a "subgroup that size, the margin of error is 10 percentage points."

However, it does show a continuing trend, as previous surveys have reached similar conclusions despite Democrats' analysis that Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies would continue to repel Latino voters. Even though that has been the case for many years, it's increasingly not anymore.

Trump has been steadily gaining support with the Latino electorate during the past decade, increasing from 28% in 2016 to 36% in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2022, Republicans got 39 percent of the Latino vote, the highest percentage since 2004.

Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, said that according to aggregated data from Split Ticket Biden is still ahead with Latinos. However, he's winning with the demographic by seven percentage points, compared to 24 in 2020.

A similarly concerning trend for Biden is taking place with Black people, as Silver's figures have Biden ahead by 55 percentage points, compared with 83 in 2020.

The Biden campaign has been investing in addressing this with campaign events and ads. Conexión, a communications and content production firm, was recruited by the Biden campaign's operatives in late 2023 to bolster its efforts with the demographic.

Trump, on his end, has boasted about gaining Latino support, but Axios reported that his team "appears divided on the best way to reach them." "After a backlash from RNC members, Trump's new team at the Republican National Committee is reversing its plans to cut the party's community centers for minority voters," the outlet added.

Despite the nuances from this particular campaign, a recent deep-diving analysis by the Financial Times' John Burn-Murdoch concluded that this is part of a larger trend and that "Democrats' advantage among Black, Latino and Asian voters at its lowest since 1960."

Burn-Murdoch points at a dynamic whereby "many of America's non-white voters have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest" and that the migration we're seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realizing they've been voting for the wrong party."

Support for gun rights, the size of government and its input on people's daily lives are some of the preferences illustrating the "incongruity between many black Americans' policy preferences and votes," the author adds to back up his point. "Very few white voters who take these positions identify as Democrats, but much larger shares of Black, Latino and Asian conservatives do," he adds.

Community norms have played a role in this, but as they weaken and the U.S. becomes less racially segregated, "the frictions preventing non-white conservatives from voting Republican diminish." This trend could create a "cascade," potentially leading to further defections from Democrats.