Latino voters have turned sharply away from President Donald Trump and the Republican Party heading into November’s midterm elections, two national polls released this week found — a notable reversal for a bloc that helped power Trump’s victory just two years ago, according to CNN.
In an NBC News/Telemundo poll, Latino voters said they would prefer Democrats to win control of Congress over Republicans by 24 points, 59% to 35%.
As CNN noted, that is double the 12-point Democratic edge among Latino voters at the same point in the 2024 cycle, though still short of the party’s standing before the 2018 midterms.
A CBS News/YouGov survey released the same day found much the same: Latino likely voters said they would back the Democratic candidate in their House district over a Republican, 60% to 39%.
The surveys put hard numbers to a shift that has been building all year.
In the NBC/Telemundo poll, just 27% of Latino voters approved of Trump’s overall job performance, and only 20% approved of his handling of the cost of living. A 62% majority rated the Republican Party negatively — up from 46% in September 2024, and by 48% to 27%, Latino voters said Democrats would do a better job than the GOP on the economy.
The movement is striking because of where it started. The country’s roughly 36 million Latino voters broke from their long history of favoring Democrats in 2024, when, according to exit polls cited by CNN, Trump drew 46% of the Latino vote against 51% for Democrat Kamala Harris, a performance that helped return him to the White House. The new polling suggests much of that gain has eroded.
Economics appears to be the engine. Across both surveys, affordability dominates: in the CBS poll, 70% of registered voters said they believe Trump’s policies have led to higher food and grocery prices, and 56% said they think he is doing a worse job in his second term than in his first. Among the full electorate, CBS found Democrats favored by 9 points on the generic ballot, in line with other recent polling.
The immigration findings are the most telling.
Trump’s approval among Latino voters on immigration, at 30%, was marginally higher than his overall rating, but two-thirds said his administration has gone too far in its enforcement approach. Roughly one in four Latino voters said they personally know someone who has been detained or deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the past two years, according to CNN.
We should note that both polls are snapshots taken weeks before Election Day, and come with the usual caveats.
The NBC News/Telemundo survey was conducted September 21–28 in English and Spanish, by phone and online, among 800 Latino registered voters, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
The CBS News/YouGov poll was conducted September 30 to October 2 among 2,166 adults, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 points overall and 3.1 points among likely voters. Attitudes can move, and turnout, not stated preference, decides elections.
Still, the direction is consistent across both surveys and echoes other recent polling showing Republicans losing their longtime advantage on immigration. With a month until the vote, the numbers point to a bloc that shifted the 2024 map now shifting again — and, by its own account, doing so largely over the cost of living and how immigration enforcement has played out in its own communities.
Source: CNN.
https://ctninfo.com/latino-voters-sw…terms-polls-find/
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