Resistance by Hispanic voters to President Trump in Colorado and Nevada, two critical White House battlegrounds, could complicate President Trump’s path to reelection.
Trump won his first campaign narrowly, and on the cusp of Tuesday’s scheduled 2020 kickoff in Orlando is facing considerable headwinds in Midwestern states crucial to that victory. To compensate and improve the president’s odds of a second term, the Trump campaign is preparing to expand the map by pouring resources into Colorado and Nevada.
But flipping two Western melting pots that have voted Democratic in three consecutive presidential elections could be a tall order for Trump. Despite Hispanic support for the president holding up nationally, in Colorado and Nevada this significant and growing share of the electorate is particularly troubled by his nationalist rhetoric and hard-line border security policies.
“I don’t know what he can do to improve his numbers without any major moves on immigration reform,” said Albert Morales, senior political director with Latino Decisions, a liberal group that studies the Hispanic vote.
“We’re not doing well in finding a message that appeals,” added Joe Heck, a Republican former congressman from Las Vegas who lost his bid for a Senate seat in Nevada three years ago.
Across the country, public opinion surveys and exit polling from the midterm elections saw Trump’s support from Hispanics at roughly 30%, about where it has been for Republicans since after the George W. Bush administration. That’s not great, but it’s also not catastrophic, as some had predicted for Trump during the 2016 campaign.
Beneath the surface, the picture is more problematic for Trump. Some Hispanics who vote in strong numbers, such as Cubans in Florida, give him high marks, boosting him in a key battleground. But other ethnicities, like the Mexicans and Central Americans prevalent in one-time swing states like Colorado and Nevada, view the president poorly, making an uphill climb even steeper.
According to exit polling of the 2016 presidential race, Trump garnered 30% of the Hispanic vote in Colorado. Two years later, exit polling of the midterm elections in Nevada showed Republican Dean Heller, who lost his bid for reelection to the Senate, also received 30% of the Hispanic vote. But in conversations with the Washington Examiner, Democratic and Republican strategists say those figures could be misleading indicators for where Trump’s support sits heading into 2020.
At least in these two states, where newer, working class immigrants proliferate, polling of Hispanics tends to oversample second- and third-generation Americans — many of whom also are college educated. More recent citizens of Hispanic descent with blue-collar jobs tend to be underrepresented, skewing the data to imply more support for Republicans than actually exists.
“Most pollsters have a really hard time polling Hispanics in Nevada,” a veteran GOP strategist familiar with the state said. “They only are able to reach the more affluent portion of that demographic and show Republican candidates doing better than they actually are with Hispanics.”
Republicans are working to improve the party’s and Trump’s relationship with Hispanics in Nevada through concentrated outreach. A Nevada GOP official said watch parties organized around Trump’s Tuesday campaign launch rally in Orlando would target the Hispanic community. Additionally, the Trump campaign, under its Nevada state director, has hired Americans of Hispanic and Chinese heritage to senior roles in its voter turnout operation there.
Meanwhile, some Republican operatives who have worked recent campaigns in Colorado contend that Trump’s approach to immigration is having a profoundly negative impact on the GOP that goes far beyond the Hispanic community, revealed in last fall’s elections that saw Democrats make big gains there.
“It was problematic not just because of how Hispanics felt about the rhetoric, but also because how suburban women viewed his policies and rhetoric,” a Republican consultant said.
