Listen to “New Poll Suggests Hispanics Prefer Trump” on Spreaker.
President Trump is preparing for a bruising re-election fight in 2020, but a new poll suggests he may have a lot of allies who will shake up the conventional wisdom in this campaign.
In a new McLaughlin & Associates survey, Trump stands with a 49 percent approval rating while 50 percent disapprove. But factored into that mix is 50 percent of Hispanics approving of the job Trump is doing and 48 percent disapprove.
The poll quizzed 1,000 likely voters, including 111 Hispanics, which pollster John McLaughlin says tilted towards the Democrats in registration by a 5-3 margin.
McLaughlin, who conducted polling for Trump during the 2016 campaign, says he’s not surprised by those numbers.
“The Hispanic vote is not monolithic in the United States. A lot of people like to put it in a box,” said McLaughlin. “These are citizens. These are citizens who are likely voters…These are people who mainly came here legally.”
In fact, McLaughlin says other research he’s done shows that legal Hispanic immigrants are “the group that is most upset about the current immigration crisis where you have illegal immigrants coming here (and) jumping the line over those who did it right and spent money and time to come here legally.”
But do approval ratings translate into votes?
“In the post-9/11 era, where things have gotten very partisan, it’s a very strong determinant of how votes are going to go,” said McLaughlin, noting that he twice polled George W. Bush at a 51 percent job approval in 2004, when Bush won with 51 percent of the vote.
Listen to the full podcast as McLaughlin explain the ever-widening marriage gap in voting and explains why his time with the Trump campaign left him convinced there was nothing to the Russian collusion accusations.
