Mitch Perry
Donald Trump is doing better with the Latino vote in Florida than he is nationally, according to a new poll released on Friday.
Hillary Clinton leads Trump, 62* percent to 27 percent in the Sunshine State, according to a new poll of 400 Latino Floridians taken by the group Latino Decisions late last month. Of the remaining 10 percent, three percent said they will not vote for president, two percent will vote for another candidate, and five percent say they’re undecided.
Nationally, the poll of 3,700 people shows Clinton leading Trump, 70 percent to 19 percent. Trump’s comments regarding undocumented immigrants from Mexico last year has made him unpopular among Latinos, though he appeared to try and mend that fissure by visiting Mexico last week.
The disparity between the GOP vote nationally and in Florida is not dissimilar to what happened in 2012, with Florida Hispanic voters more supportive of the GOP candidate than was the case nationally.
Trump’s poll numbers are worse than how Mitt Romney ultimately performed in Florida in 2012, when he narrowly lost the state to Barack Obama. Obama won Florida by getting 60 percent to Romney’s 39 percent, according to exit polls taken by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.
Nationally, Obama took the Latino vote 71 percent to 27 percent in 2012. Most pollsters/demographers have said the Republican candidate must improve on that number to win the election nationally. More than 27 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in November, a 60 percent increase from a decade ago.
The poll also looks at the U.S. Senate race in Florida, where Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy leads Republican incumbent Sen. Marco Rubio among Latino voters, 47 percent to 43 percent.
On the issue of immigration, where Rubio has backed away from supporting a comprehensive reform bill and instead preaches border security first, 26 percent support that policy, 27 percent don’t, and 47 percent don’t know.
A much bigger percentage of Florida Latino voters, 63 percent, say they don’t know where Murphy stands on the issue. Murphy does support comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented people in this country. Of those who knew his policy, 29 percent said they support that, while eight percent are opposed.
The poll of 400 Floridians was taken between Aug. 19-30, and has a +/- margin of error of 4.9 percent.
*The total breakdown for Clinton in Florida comes out to 99 percent. An official with the poll tells FloridaPolitics “the pollsters rely on decimals that may affect how the numbers round up or round down.”
