The Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, takes questions from Latino voters at a town hall hosted by Univision on Oct. 16, 2024. (Photo by Felipe Cuevas/TelevisaUnivision)
A national exit poll survey of Hispanic voters in 10 states showed that only in Florida did Donald Trump win a majority of Latino voters over Kamala Harris in last week’s presidential election.
Trump overall defeated Harris, 56%-43%, in Florida — and that’s the exact same breakdown for how Hispanic voters in Florida decided between the two major candidates for president, according to an exit survey of 500 voters in Florida conducted by the 2024 American Electorate Poll of Hispanic Voters.
The 10-state survey featured interviews with 3,750 Hispanic voters — a number organizers say is larger than in the Edison Research national exit poll released last week used by many major media outlets with 2,152 Latino respondents. That study showed Trump backed by 46% of Latino voters, surpassing Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush for the biggest share of the national Latino vote by a GOP presidential contender.
However, in the American Electorate Poll of Hispanic Voters in the seven battleground states plus California, Texas, and Florida, Trump got 37% of the Hispanic vote, compared with Harris’ 62%.
In California and Michigan, Hispanic voters chose Harris over Trump by 33 points, 66%-33%. In Wisconsin, Harris beat Trump by 30 points, 64%-34%, and in Georgia, Harris won by 29 points, 64%-35%.
“The low-water mark again is Florida, where we have President Trump winning by 13 percentage points over Vice President Harris,” said Gary Segura, co-founder of BSP Research, a Latino-owned polling firm, in a Zoom call organized to discuss the poll on Tuesday (the other co-founder of BSP Research, Matt Barreto, consulted for a Harris super PAC and conducted polling for the DNC and the Biden White House).
Demographics
The survey separately interviewed Puerto Rican voters in 10 states. As was the case with all Hispanic voters in the survey, only in Florida did Trump come out ahead with this demographic, in this case defeating Harris by 14 points, 57%-43%.
(The Phoenix reported last week that Osceola County in Central Florida, which includes one of the biggest Puerto Rican communities in the state, voted for Trump by 1.5 points over Harris. Four years ago, it voted for Biden over Trump by 14 points.)
The survey did not breakdown how Cuban voters in Florida or more specifically in Miami-Dade County voted for president. A Florida International University survey of 1001 Cuban voters in Miami-Dade County before the election showed that 68% preferred Trump to just 32% for Harris.
The American Electorate survey nationally reported that Cubans went for Trump 54%-45%.
In the U.S. Senate race between GOP incumbent Rick Scott and Democratic candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, Hispanic voters in Florida went 52%-42% for Scott over Mucarsel-Powell. That’s close to how the entire electorate voted last week, when Scott won by 13 points, 56%-43%.
On the question of whether Latino voters supported a Democratic or Republican candidate for Congress in their district, 58% of those voters in Florida said they supported the Republican, while just 40% said they voted for a Democrat. Nationally, 62% said they voted for a Democratic candidate, with 34% saying they voted for a Republican.
The survey asked Latino voters about abortion rights, which were on the ballot in three states that they surveyed: Florida, Arizona, and Nevada.
Regarding Amendment 4, the proposed amendment that would have enshrined abortion rights in the Florida Constitution, Latinos voted for the measure, 63%-37%. That’s a bigger margin than the Florida electorate as a whole did last week, when the measure received 57% support, short of the 60% threshold required for passage.
However, that support was lower than the Hispanic vote on similar abortion rights measures in Arizona and Nevada. In Arizona, the survey showed that 79% supported that proposal with just 21% opposing (the measure passed with 62% support). In Nevada, 81% of Hispanic voters supported an abortion rights proposal, with just 19% opposed (that measure passed with 64% support).
Abortion and reproductive rights were the fifth highest priority among Latino voters. The top four were: 1) Cost of living/inflation (52%); 2) Jobs and the economy (36%); 3) Housing costs and affordability (27%); and 4) Health care costs (25%).
The sixth highest priority was immigration and border security. Eighty percent of Latino voters said they supported passing a law to provide permanent legal status to undocumented immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for a long time, including Dreamers who were brought to here as children.
And it showed that 77% of Hispanic voters support passing the bipartisan border security bill to block avenues for asylum, increase the number of border patrol agents and asylum officers, and expand detention and technology at the U.S.- Mexico border.
That bill was sponsored by three U.S. senators earlier this year: Oklahoma Republican James Lankford, Arizona independent Kyrsten Sinema, and Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy. It was immediately criticized by Republicans, including Trump, who labeled it “horrendous.” The final vote on the bill was 50-49, but it needed at least 60 votes to overcome the Senate filibuster.
Support for legal status
“We know that the American public, even amidst this year’s results, opposes the Trump agenda of mass deportation, separation of families and his promises to ‘un-document’ and deport some with current legal status,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, one of the organizations that worked on the survey, said in a written statement.
“American voters, and Latino voters in particular, still strongly support legal status for long-settled immigrants. In this poll and in the main network exit polls, when put head-to-head, the American people overall choose legal status for undocumented immigrants living here over deportation and that is even more true for Latino voters. So, let’s be clear: Trump does not have a mandate for mass deportations or sending in the military to round up our immigrant neighbors or family members.”
The 2024 American Electorate Voter Poll was conducted by the African American Research Collaborative and BSP Research, and sponsored by the Service Employees International Union, UnidosUS, First Nations Development Institute, Climate Power, Indivisible, Rural Organizing, Voter Participation Center, America’s Voice, and the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s margin of error was +/- 1.62% and was available in both English and Spanish.