Hispanic voters evenly split between Democrats, GOP: WSJ poll

Support from Hispanic voters is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll.

While the poll relies on an unusually small sample size of 165 Hispanic registered voters to arrive at its conclusions and has a 7.6 percentage point margin of error, it’s the latest data point in a worrying trend for Democrats. The party has come to rely on the Hispanic vote to win national and local elections and acknowledged that its underperformance among the voting block is partially to blame for 2020 defeats in key states like Texas and Florida.

According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), 44 percent of Hispanics would vote for President Biden if the 2024 presidential election were held today, and 43 percent would vote for former President Trump.

The breakdown of congressional support among Hispanics finds a similar trend, with support for Democrats and the GOP tied at 37 percent each. 

In keeping with most polls of Hispanic voters, the WSJ survey found greater support for Republicans and Trump among Hispanic men than among Hispanic women.

But the WSJ poll is an outlier in its conclusions on the overall support for the GOP, even accounting for the wide margin of error.

The WSJ report notes that a statistical tie among Hispanic voters would be a wild swing from the 2020 election, when Biden obtained 63 percent of the Latino vote, nearly 30 percentage points more than Trump.

Small sample sizes and lack of cultural competency in polling have long been a gripe among Hispanic political consultants, who say polls of Hispanics are often weighted toward English-speaking, wealthier Hispanic voters. 

The WSJ poll was conducted by ALG Research and Fabrizio, Lee & Associates, two well-known pollsters that earlier this year signed on with the newspaper to build an internal polling structure ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. 

The poll was conducted between Nov. 16-22 among known, registered voters, half on their cell phones, a quarter on landlines and a quarter through an internet survey.

The full poll included 1,500 registered voters with a reported margin of error of plus minus 2.5 percentage points.