Why Biden's Standing Among Latinos Continues to Drop While Trump Climbs?

The amount of literature showing that President Joe Biden is losing support among Latinos got bigger on Tuesday, with a new Axios-Ipsos poll showing that the decline has continued in 2024.

Concretely, the survey showed that even though the incumbent is still ahead with the demographic, the favorability advantage is significantly lower than before, going from 30 percentage points in December 2021 to 9 in March of this year.

Current figures show that Biden's favorability among Latinos stands at 41%, compared to Trump's 32%. The gap is even smaller among Latinos who said they plan to vote in November, sanding at only 3 points.

And the poll highlights another "troubling gap": "Many Latinos — a rapidly growing and crucial voting bloc, particularly in swing states Nevada and Arizona — appear to like Democrats' ideas more than they like Biden," reads a passage of the document.

"In almost every case, Trump performs better than the Republican brand and Biden performs worse than the Democratic brand," Ipsos pollster and senior vice president Chris Jackson said.

Frustrations over the Biden administration's handling of issues like inflation and crime have contributed to the decline in the president's standing. More than half of respondents (53%) said that the former is the issue they find most worrying. Crime came in second with 34%, while immigration stood at 28%.

Chris Jackson noted that "Democrats are actually slightly better positioned relative to Republicans versus when we'd asked this last June 2023 ... across all sorts of different issues." Regarding the economy, the party reduced the gap from 7 to 3 percentage points, while crime went from 8 to 4 points since June of last year.

However, the perceptions haven't translated to increased support for Biden: when asked who they prefer to handle these issues, Trump overperformed Biden in both the economy (42% to 20%) and crime and public safety (31% to 20%). In turn, the current president did better on abortion issues (30% to Trump's 21%).

As for Trump's weak spots, over half of Latino respondents (52%) said that they worry a mass deportation effort like the one he has touted would target all members of the demographic, regardless of their immigration status. Trump isn't likely to change his rhetoric any time soon. Last week, he called immigrants who are in the country illegally "animals" and "not human."

Biden has already launched a push aimed at recovering support from the demographic, with a series of campaign stops and interviews, as well as increased field work, especially in Latino-heavy states. He is also set to speak to Univision's Enrique Acevedo on Thursday, following a high-profile interview Trump gave to the network last year.

Another passage of the poll shows broad discontent with both candidates: at least two-thirds of all respondents said neither Biden nor Trump should be their party's nominee. The poll didn't identify an independent candidate, but 11% of registered and likely voters said they expect to back neither of them in the elections, while 28% said they weren't sure.