With less than four months to go before Election Day, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton holds a commanding 46-point lead over her Republican rival Donald Trump among Hispanic voters, according to an exclusive poll released Thursday by Fox News Latino. The poll found that 66 percent of registered Latinos would head to the ballot box to vote for Clinton and her running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine.
The gap between the two candidates widened 7 percent since May, when Clinton held a 39-point edge among Hispanics. “The results are not that surprising given the reaction of Latinos to some of Trump’s proposals,” Alfonso Aguilar, the executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, told Fox News Latino. The poll, which was conducted over the phone from August 7-10, surveyed 803 Latino registered voters and has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
The poll also found that Clinton outperformed Trump in a number of issues that are relevant to Latino voters. Hispanics are an important source of support for the Democrat, given that Latinos are among the fastest growing electorate in the country, and the expectation is that their numbers will grow only bigger in future decades. A record 27.3 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in the 2016 presidential elections, according to Pew Hispanic Research.
Conservatives such as Aguilar, however, contend that Trump has recently toned down his rhetoric on immigration. The real estate mogul told Bloomberg News in June that he wouldn’t issue mass deportations if elected, but would “get rid of a lot of bad dudes.” “Trump may not get the 40 percent of the Latino vote that the typical Republican candidate needs to win the White House,” Aguilar said. “He’s drawing in people who would not be particularly interested in voting if he were not the candidate.”
Hispanics overwhelmingly believe that the former secretary of state represents their views better than Trump (72 percent to 14 percent). They also trust her more than Trump when it comes to making decisions on education (73 to 19 percent), foreign policy (70 to 21 percent), health care (69 to 22 percent) and the economy (61 to 31 percent), among other issues.
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