Donald Trump’s Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City featured numerous instances of speakers making racist or bigoted remarks. Perhaps none more notoriously so than comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s offensive comments about Puerto Rico.
What makes those remarks – which the former president’s campaign has sought to distance itself from – so noteworthy is they come at a time when Trump seems to be making inroads with Hispanic voters. In fact, he seems to be on his way to doing better with this group than any GOP presidential nominee since George W. Bush in 2004.
Consider an average of recent polling data on Hispanic voters: Kamala Harris is ahead of Trump by just 13 points. That’s well off an average of post-election and exit poll data from 2020, when Joe Biden carried Hispanic voters by 26 points.
What’s remarkable is that this 26-point deficit, itself, was an improvement for Trump from 2016. Trump lost Hispanic voters by 39 points to Hillary Clinton, according to an average of exit poll and post-election data.
The polling data and 2020 outcome represent a big reason why the Trump campaign has made a concerted effort to win over more Hispanic voters. It helps to explain why the former president held a massive rally in the heavily Hispanic Bronx earlier this year and visited a barbershop in that same New York City borough this month.
Trump’s improvement with Hispanic voters also helps to explain the current electoral map. Harris’ best path to securing the 270 electoral votes needed to win seems to run through the Great Lakes battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. She has been basically even with Trump in polling of these states, if not running slightly ahead.
Meanwhile, in Arizona and Nevada, two Southwest battlegrounds with larger Hispanic populations, Trump has been doing well.
He has consistently held a margin-of-error advantage in Arizona surveys. In fact, it’s been Trump’s best polling state of any that Biden won in 2020. The polling from Nevada has been limited, but it too has moved more toward the former president than what polling averages indicate in the Great Lakes battleground states.
Both Arizona and Nevada have more Hispanic voters than any of the other five battleground states, which also include Georgia and North Carolina.
Trump has been doing particularly well among Hispanic men, as well as Hispanic voters without a college degree.
Will a rally like Sunday’s make a difference in that support? It’s unclear.
What is notable, however, is that such rallies hark back more to the rhetoric the Trump campaign used during the 2016 cycle, when he performed far worse with Hispanic voters.
Still, I would be hesitant to think too much will change after Sunday.
For one thing, most Hispanic voters are not from Puerto Rico, especially in the battleground states. For another, Hispanics are not one-issue voters.
According to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, the No. 1 issue for Hispanic voters was the economy (29%). That matches the 27% of all likely voters who said the economy was their top issue in deciding their vote this year.
Immigration ranked third for all likely voters, at 12%, which, again, mirrors the 15% of likely Hispanic voters who felt the same way.
Of course, one could argue that Sunday’s rally could have turned off non-Hispanic voters. We already know that Harris is doing historically well for a Democrat among White college-educated voters. They’re the ones who have been moving most to the left since Trump entered the political scene, in no small part because of his rhetoric.
White college-educated voters are of paramount importance to Harris in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Detroit and the areas around Madison, Wisconsin. Given how close the contests in those states are, any movement could make all the difference in the world.
If nothing else, the Madison Square Garden rally seems to have focused people’s attention on Trump (see Google searches), but for a negative reason.
I doubt the Trump campaign likes that.
