Since 2020, one of the major questions hanging over the 2024 election is whether Latino voters will continue to ditch Democrats in favor of the GOP. Now, a new national poll of Latino voters offers some warning signs for Republicans as well as Democrats as the general election crystallizes: A sizable chunk of Latino voters appear to be willing to rethink their party loyalties.
Some 19.4 percent, or about one in five Latino voters, say they have considered changing their political affiliation either by switching parties or becoming independents, according to a national survey released by Florida International University (FIU) and the marketing firm Adsmovil. A majority of those wavering voters (61.1 percent) say they’d be open to leaving the Democratic Party and a plurality of those Democratic waverers (38.1 percent) would become Republicans.
Though that’s a small share of all Latino voters, that’s still a significant number for a demographic group whose loyalty to Democrats has been eroding since Donald Trump’s presidency.
“We used to say in political science that party [identification] was one of the most stable things that we could use to study,” Eduardo Gamarra, the co-director of FIU’s Latino Public Opinion Forum and the author of this study, told me. “It was generational. You could go back three or four generations of voters and [party ID] would remain stable. Now, all of that is changing, and especially so among Hispanics.”
To be sure, a majority of Latino respondents say they are still pretty firm in their political identity and affiliation. Democrats — including President Joe Biden — still win the support of an outright majority of Latino voters.
Some caveats are also in order when looking at polls: This result is just one data point — a snapshot in time at the end of 2023. And the election is still eight months away, so dynamics could definitely change.
But it’s a large, high-quality piece of data — a nationally…
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