By james art
CNN
—
Donald Trump’s Sunday rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden featured numerous instances of speakers making racist or bigoted remarks. Perhaps none more famous than comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s offensive comments about Puerto Rico.
What makes the remarks — from which the former president’s campaign has sought to distance itself — so remarkable is that they come at a time when Trump appears to be making inroads with Hispanic voters. In fact, he appears on track to do better with this group than any GOP presidential candidate since George W. Bush in 2004.
Consider an average of recent polls of Hispanic voters: Kamala Harris leads Trump by just 13 points. That’s well below the post-2020 post-election and exit poll average, when Joe Biden led Hispanic voters by 26 points.
Remarkably, that 26-point deficit is itself an improvement for Trump since 2016. Trump lost Hispanic voters by 39 points to Hillary Clinton, according to the exit poll average and post-election data.
The polling data and 2020 results are a big reason why the Trump campaign has made a concerted effort to win over more Hispanic voters. That helps explain why the former president held a huge rally in the heavily Hispanic Bronx earlier this year and visited a barbershop in the same New York neighborhood this month.
Trump’s improvement with Hispanic voters also helps explain the current electoral map. Harris’ best path to securing the 270 electoral votes needed to win appears to be through the Great Lakes battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. She was nearly tied with Trump in polls in those states, if not slightly ahead.
Meanwhile, in Arizona and Nevada, two southwestern battlegrounds with larger Hispanic populations, Trump is doing well.
He has consistently had the advantage of error in the Arizona polls. In fact, it was the best state for Trump of any that Biden won in 2020. The polls from Nevada were limited, but they also went more for the former president than the average polls in the Great Lakes battleground states indicated .
Both Arizona and Nevada have more Hispanic voters than any of the other five battleground states, which also include Georgia and North Carolina.
Trump is doing particularly well among Hispanic men, as well as Hispanic voters without a college degree.
Will a rally like the one on Sunday change that support? It is not clear.
Notably, however, such rallies are more reminiscent of the rhetoric used by Trump’s campaign during the 2016 cycle, when he fared much worse with Hispanic voters.
Still, I’d be hesitant to think too much will change after Sunday.
For one thing, most Hispanic voters are not from Puerto Rico, especially in the battleground states. On the other hand, Hispanics are not single-issue voters.
According to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, the No. 1 issue for Hispanic voters is the economy (29%). That matches the 27 percent of all likely voters who said the economy was their top issue in deciding their vote this year.
Immigration ranked third for all likely voters at 12%, again mirroring the 15% of likely Hispanic voters who felt the same way.
Of course, one could argue that Sunday’s rally could alienate non-Hispanic voters. We already know that Harris does historically well for a Democrat among white college-educated voters. They are the ones who have moved furthest to the left since Trump entered the political scene, in no small part because of his rhetoric.
White college-educated voters are top of mind for Harris in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Detroit and the areas around Madison, Wisconsin. Given how close the races are in these states, any move could make all the difference in the world.
If anything, the Madison Square Garden rally seemed to focus people’s attention on Trump (see Google searches), but for a negative reason.
I doubt the Trump campaign likes that.