Donald Trump is expected to win more Latino votes than any other Republican in recent history

Recent polls suggest that Donald Trump could win more of the Latino vote than he or any other Republican presidential candidate has ever received.

Trump, a former president and the presumptive Republican nominee for the next presidential election, has been gaining popularity among Hispanic voters and could outperform previous Republican presidential candidates.

Hispanic voters, along with other previously disenfranchised minorities, were granted the right to vote under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This law allowed this demographic to vote in the 1968 presidential election and all subsequent elections.

An estimated 36.2 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in the 2024 presidential election, nearly 4 million more than in 2020, according to data from the Pew Research Center. Latinos are projected to make up 14.7% of all eligible voters this year, up from 13.6% in 2020.

In 2020, Trump won 32% of Latino votes while Democratic candidate Joe Biden won 65% of the vote among that demographic, up from 28% in 2016.

Recent polls suggest that Trump could increase his share of the vote again in November's polls. Newsweek A representative for Trump was reached via email seeking comment.

a The New York TimesA Siena College poll of 1,532 voters found Biden leading Trump by just 1 percentage point among this demographic, with 47% saying they would vote for Biden and 46% saying they would vote for Trump.

The survey, conducted June 28 to July 2, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

If the poll is correct, Trump will not only outperform his previous performance but also win more of the Hispanic vote than any Republican since 1972, according to an analysis of the Pew data.

Newsweek Demographic voting data was not available for the 1968 election, but most estimates indicate that Richard Nixon received 40% of the Latino vote in 1972. In 1976, 18% of Hispanic voters chose to vote for presidential candidate Gerald Ford. In 1980, Ronald Reagan received 35% of the Hispanic vote; by 1984, he had increased this percentage to 37%. In 1988, George H. W. Bush received 30% of the Hispanic vote, but by 1992, this percentage had dropped to 25%.

Four years later, in 1996, Bob Dole won 21 percent of the vote, and in 2000, George W. Bush won 35 percent. In 2004, Bush won 40 percent of the Hispanic vote, and in 2009, John McCain won 31 percent. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.

Trump has been working to gain Hispanic votes ahead of the election. On June 9, he launched the “Latinos for Trump” coalition, which includes public officials such as Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. The coalition aims to appeal to Hispanic voters on issues such as crime and inflation. The Trump campaign has described these issues as “issues on which Biden failed miserably.”

“In 2020, we won more Hispanic American votes than any Republican in over 50 years, and we won border counties in Texas that no Republican has won in over a century,” Trump said.

“In 2024, we will win more of the Hispanic American vote and set a new record for the Republican Party,” he continued.

talk NewsweekThomas Gift, associate professor of politics at University College London and director of the Centre for American Politics, said it was “clear” that a large and growing proportion of Latinos “leaned Republican”.

“For decades, Democrats have largely assumed that 'demographics decide our destiny' – that a growing share of minorities, including Latinos, would naturally help Democrats gain a permanent majority in Washington,” Gift said. “The reality is much more complicated. Latinos are a diverse population, and their voting patterns often depend on their immigrant country of origin, but what is clear is that a significant (and growing) number of them lean Republican.”

“The fact that Trump is likely to win the largest Hispanic vote of any Republican presidential candidate in history likely speaks less to Trump's own appeal among the community and more to a set of shared beliefs, such as religion and 'traditional' family values, that are not necessarily emphasized in today's modern Democratic Party,” he added.

“An often (lazy) assumption by Democrats is still to assume that most Latinos are 'single-issue' voters on immigration, but as time goes on, that's becoming less and less true.”

There are still signs that Biden will hold onto this base: A YouGov poll in early May found that 45% of Hispanic voters supported him as their candidate, compared with 39% for Trump.

The presidential election is scheduled to take place on November 5th.