There is one year left before the presidential elections in the United States, which will be held on November 3, 2020. Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy, Inc. conducted a poll for Telemundo, between October 24th and 28th, in which they found that 64% of Hispanics surveyed would vote to take Trump out of the White House and vote for a Democrat to replace him.
Among them, however, 36% are undecided as to which Democratic candidate would represent them best. On the other hand, 26% said they would vote for Joe Biden, 18% for Bernie Sanders, and 10% for Elizabeth Warren. The options that followed were Kamala Harris (3%); Julian Castro (2%); Beto O’Rourke (2%);
Pete Buttigieg (2%) and Corey Booker (1%). Other names scored less than 1% in the results.
This survey was conducted on a sample of 1,000 Latino elegible to vote aged 18 and over 65, living in the northeastern, midwestern, southern, western, and Pacific coast regions of the country. The margin of error is 3.2%.
Forty-eight percent of respondents are Mexican-American and the rest are mixed (23%) and from countries in Central America (8%), Puerto Rico (7%), Cuban-American (7%), and South American countries (5%). A 2% of interviewees refused to answer about their origin.
53% were women. In 33% of the cases, Spanish is the language they speak at home, 24% are bilingual and 24% have English as their dominant language.
It also emerged from this survey that 58% identified themselves as Democrats, 20% as Republicans and 22% as Independents.
Twenty-nine percent of respondents said health was the first criterion for choosing a candidate. The economy and employment is for 24%, immigration for 14% and 10% chose the environment or climate change.
Eight percent said a political trial of President Trump would be a factor in choosing a candidate. However, 57% of respondents said they support an impeachment of Trump and 64% disapprove of his government.
The Republican president’s immigration policy is rejected by 65% of those polled and an equal percentage feel that Latinos are being persecuted and discriminated against.
When asked whether “President Trump’s rhetoric encourages anti-immigrant sentiment, racism and discrimination or not”, an even higher percentage, 70%, says yes and a further 56% thinks that this will prejudice his re-election in 2020.
Specifically, 35% of respondents said they are very concerned about being a potential victim of a hate crime such as the shooting at the Waltmart in El Paso, Texas, on August 3 of this year.
Historically, Latinos/Hispanics in the United States have registered little interest in the elections and their turnout tended to be low. For the November 2016 elections, it was a challenge to mobilize the Latino electorate.
Things seem to be changing for the 2020 ballots, but whether Hispanics will actually vote will make a difference. A study from January this year from the Pew Research Center, signed by Anthony Cilluffo and Richard Fry, estimates that in 2020, for the first time, Hispanic voters will be the largest racial minority elegible to vote. That is 13% of elegible voters. Some 32 million Hispanics will be able to vote in 2020.
The research estimates that next year one-third of elegible voters will be non-white: one in ten potential voters will be born outside the United States, “the highest proportion since 1970.”
This new profile, say the study’s signatories, would have an impact on the results, “because nonwhites have long been significantly more likely than whites to back Democratic candidates.”
It remains to be seen if Latino turnout in the 2020 election grows. According to the same research of the Pew Research Center, from 1996 to 2016, the numbers of Latino who didn’t vote was higher than those who did.