Hillary Clinton is besting Donald Trump by an historic 30-point margin among Florida Hispanics, according to a new bipartisan poll that indicates Latinos could play an outsized role in delivering the White House to a Democrat for the third election in a row.
Clinton’s 60 percent to 30 percent advantage over Trump with Florida Hispanics overall is fueled by outsized support from voters of Puerto Rican descent, who favor her 71 perccent to 19 percent, according to the survey of 800 likely Hispanic voters jointly conducted for Univision by Republican-leaning Tarrance Group and Democratic-leaning Bendixen & Amandi International.
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Trump, meanwhile, has relatively weak backing from Cuban-Americans. They historically vote Republican but only support him over Clinton by 49 percent to 42 percent, the poll shows. And Hispanic voters of other national origins heavily prefer Clinton over Trump by 71 percent to 20 percent. The overall margin of error for the poll is 3.5 points.
“These Florida numbers are not only ominous for Donald Trump — they’re downright terrifying for Republicans nationwide,” said Fernand Amandi,
Bendixen & Amandi’s pollster, who called Clinton’s 30-point margin “historic.”
“The share of the Hispanic vote is growing every election and this will be the third presidential election in Florida where Hispanics trend heavily against the GOP,” Amandi said. “And if that continues, it could turn Florida into the next California in future presidential elections, a blue anchor state.”
Without Florida’s 29 Electoral College votes, Republicans generally can’t win the White House.
The Florida Republican best-situated to appeal to Hispanics in the nation’s biggest battleground state: Sen. Marco Rubio, although he’s now losing the state’s Hispanic vote overall to Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy by 44 percent to 50 percent.
As a bilingual Cuban-American who’s well known in Florida and hails from the Miami-area, Rubio has built-in advantages that few Republicans in the state have. Murphy, meanwhile, is little-known.
Thanks to the strong support of non-Hispanic white voters, Rubio has been beating Murphy overall in dozens of other statewide polls of the entire electorate. Trump, too, enjoys the disproportionate support of white voters.
Unlike Rubio, Trump has terrible Hispanic support numbers that make his path to a Florida win much harder.
Hispanics account for almost 16 percent of Florida’s 12.9 million active registered voters. In 2012, they were about 14 percent of the registered voters. At the same time, white voters have decreased 2 percentage points to 64 percent of the voter rolls.
