New Latino Voters Poll Shows Big Democratic Swing

A new Latino voters poll released Sunday finds the Democratic Party is winning back Latino voters at a pace few pollsters expected. NBC News and Telemundo surveyed 800 registered Latino voters from Sept. 21 to 28 and found that 59% want Democrats to control Congress after the midterms, compared with 35% who prefer Republicans, a 24-point Democratic lead that is double the 12-point edge Democrats held at the same stage of the 2024 cycle, though still short of the 43-point margin they commanded before the 2018 midterms.

President Donald Trump's own standing has collapsed alongside his party's. The Latino voters poll finds just 27% of Latino voters approve of his job performance while 69% disapprove, according to USA Today. His economic record, the issue that helped return him to the White House, looks even worse: 78% disapprove of his handling of the cost of living against 20% who approve, and his approval on immigration sits at 30%, with border security his strongest issue at 38%.

Why the economy is driving the swing

Cost of living dominates every other concern. About one-third of Latino voters ranked inflation and the cost of living as their single most important issue, and 52% placed it in their top two, making it the top-ranked challenge in the Latino voters poll, reported by USA Today. The turnaround is remarkable because two years ago Latino voters trusted Trump more than Kamala Harris on the economy; today they say the Democratic Party would do a better job, handing Democrats a wide advantage on the issue that decides swing voters. NBC News and Telemundo conducted the survey through phone interviews and online text-message interviews with registered voters. For a president whose coalition depended on winning over voters who once voted Democratic, the cost-of-living numbers are the ones that should worry his party most.

How immigration divides Latino voters

On immigration, roughly two-thirds of Latino voters say Trump's enforcement efforts have gone too far, while 22% back his approach and 9% say he has not gone far enough, in the Latino voters poll. About one-quarter say they know someone who has been deported or detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the past two years. Immigration ranked as the sixth most important issue for Latino voters, behind the cost of living, government corruption, threats to democracy, the economy and the war with Iran.

The pollsters on both sides agreed the reversal is remarkable. The Republican pollster described Latino voters as the swingiest of swing groups and said the last election now looks like the outlier, while the Democratic pollster said the findings spell trouble ahead for Republican candidates. Republicans built their recent strategy around heavily Latino districts in Florida and Texas that looked deep red, but many of those districts are now shaping up as competitive, and statewide races in Texas and Nevada could hinge on the evolving Latino vote, which made up about a tenth of recent midterm electorates.

The reversal captured by the Latino voters poll matters because Latino voters were a cornerstone of Trump's victory in the last presidential election. Exit polls that year showed he won 46% of the Latino vote to 51% for Democrat Kamala Harris, breaking decades of Democratic dominance with the group. The country's roughly 36 million Latino voters have played a critical role in recent elections, and the Republican pollster on the NBC survey called the swing remarkable, describing Latino voters as the most swingable group in the electorate.

A separate CBS/YouGov poll released the same day points in the same direction as the Latino voters poll. It finds Latino likely voters favoring a Democratic House candidate over a Republican by 60% to 39%, while likely voters overall prefer Democrats by a single-digit margin, CNN reported. With the midterms weeks away, both parties now have hard numbers on the group that could decide Congress. Both surveys land as campaigns enter the final stretch, and taken together they suggest the gains Republicans made with Latino voters in the last presidential cycle have mostly washed out. Younger Latino voters, who make up a growing share of the electorate, will be watching whether either party turns these numbers into actual turnout.