A poll worker walks past voting booths as he waits for voters to arrive at the Miami Beach Fire Station 4 to cast their ballot during the primary on March 19, 2024 in Miami Beach, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Latino voters are concerned with the high cost of living, the minimum wage and rising housing costs heading into the November elections, according to a comprehensive survey released Wednesday by UnidosUS, the largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy center in the nation.
“Laying out a coherent economic policy agenda that will resonate with Latinos … would go a long way, I think, for our community,” Janet Murguía, the president and CEO of UnidosUS, said on a call with reporters detailing the results of the survey.
The survey included 3,000 eligible Hispanic voters who were interviewed in either English or Spanish, from Aug. 5-23, with oversampling of residents of Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Florida, Texas and California. The poll, conducted by BSP Research, had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.8 percentage points.
Murguía said Latinos are the second-largest voting-age population and 1 in 5 of them will be casting ballots for the first time in a presidential election this November.
“Top of mind are pocketbook issues,” she said. “Hispanic voters are most deeply concerned, like many of their fellow Americans, about the rising cost of living.”
Another issue that Latinos strongly supported is access to abortion. By a 71% to 21% margin, Latinos oppose abortion bans, according to the survey.
“They do not support making it illegal,” Murguía said.
Minimum-wage workers
Wages and jobs that provide economic security are a top priority for Latino voters, Gary Segura, who conducted the research poll for UnidosUS, said.
Latino workers are disproportionately workers who earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which has not increased since 2009. If the federal minimum wage had kept pace with inflation, it would be around $24 an hour, according to the AFL-CIO.
“The lived economy for Latinos is different than the lived economy for the nation as a whole,” Segura said.
Segura said during the poll, interviewers followed up with respondents on their concerns about jobs and wages and found that being able to afford necessities like food and housing were top issues.
“People are struggling to make ends meet,” he said.
The number one response was that “jobs don’t pay enough, or I have to take a second job to make ends meet,” Segura said. “We talk a lot about the low levels of unemployment in this society now, which is certainly good news, but the issue is that many of those jobs do not pay enough for the holder of that job to essentially pay their basic living expenses.”
Opinions on immigration
Murguía noted that immigration, which the Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, has made a core campaign issue, ranks fifth in priorities among Latino voters, tied with concern about gun violence and too-easy access to assault weapons.
“We want to be crystal clear that Latino voters overall are not buying into campaign tactics that demonize immigrants,” Murguía said. “They know the difference between those who mean us harm and those who are contributing to the fabric of our nation.”
Latino voters strongly support a legal pathway to citizenship for those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, referred to as Dreamers, and for long-term undocumented immigrants, the survey found.
Trump has promised mass deportations should he win a second term, a policy issue that has “virtually no support” by Latino voters sampled in the survey, Segura said.
Segura added that while Trump has campaigned on the issue, his promise to launch mass deportations is not particularly well known in Latino communities.
“Many of the people we speak to believe that (Trump) will do it if he can, but they just don’t actually believe that he can pull that off,” Segura said. “So there’s both a lack of awareness of these really draconian measures or proposals and then a lack of belief that they would actually come to pass.”
He added that he thinks it’s an opportunity for Democrats to campaign on the issue, but Vice President Kamala Harris has mainly criticized Trump for tanking a bipartisan border security deal.
“Our own results suggest that the primary border concern comes from voters who lean in the GOP direction in the first place, and so I don’t see a lot of movement there or a lot of risk for (Democrats), particularly in targeted advertisements and Hispanic voters,” Segura said.
‘Dismissive and diminishing language’
The poll found that 55% of those Latinos had not been contacted by either political party this year.
“We often hear a really dismissive and diminishing language about Latino participation in elections,” Segura said. “‘Latinos don’t vote as often as they should. Latinos will let you down’ and so forth, and no one ever wants to address the elephant in the room, which is that no one is asking Latinos to vote.”
The Harris campaign last month launched a bilingual WhatsApp campaign to target Latino voters. Michelle Villegas, the national Latino engagement director for the Harris campaign, said during a Hispanic Caucus meeting at the Democratic National Convention that the Latino vote is key to victory in three battleground states — Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
The survey also found that running mates had an impact on Latino voters. Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, gave her a 3-point boost, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, made his rating drop by 3 points.
“Vance has (a) negative impact on the Republican ticket, which is consistent with his low favorability among Latino voters,” according to the survey.
While Democrats have an advantage with Latino voters, and Harris has seen a boost in support compared to when President Joe Biden was in the race, she is still not reaching the levels of Latino support seen in previous elections, Clarissa Martinez De Castro, the vice president of the Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS, said.
“There is work to be done to reach the levels of support Democrats need and had achieved in previous elections, and more intense communication with these voters is needed, particularly on economic issues and immigration,” Martinez De Castro said.
Equis Research, which conducts research and polling specifically about Latino voters, found in a recent poll that Harris has gained significant support from Latinos but that Harris “remains a few points shy of what Biden received in 2020” across battleground states.