Courtesy of Cristina Trevino
Donald Trump campaign chief pollster Tony Fabrizio is celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month by outlining how his candidate is set to win the presidential election through rigorous outreach to Latino communities.
And that is especially true in swing states, he told reporters on a call Thursday.
“In the target states and particularly in Arizona and Nevada, which have the largest Hispanic population of” the “battleground states that we looked at,” Fabrizio said, “President Trump is either leading or basically tied with Kamala Harris.”
Indeed, Arizona’s 2.3 million Hispanics are roughly a third of the population, and the group represents roughly 30% of Nevada’s 3.1 million people, with nearly 900,000 Latinos in the state’s last census.
Nationwide, 36.2 million Hispanics are eligible to vote this year, up from 2020’s 32.3 million.
Hispanic voters are “sour” on the economy, Fabrizio added, and data show the campaign they’re overall “more in tune with what white voters feel than African American voters” this election.
“Hispanics now are behaving politically and socioeconomically more like white voters than they are all the minority voters with the exception of perhaps API voters,” Fabrizio added, referring to Asians and Pacific Islanders.
A big contributing factor is that many of today’s Hispanic voters are second and third generation, with “assimilation” and “higher socioeconomic status” generating “their shifting loyalties politically.”
Many are also moving from Catholicism to “born-again, evangelical” Christianity, he added, leading them to GOP loyalty.
“So what we’re seeing is the combination of the economic climate, the combination of personal-security concerns and their desire to achieve the American dream is driving them to the Republican Party,” Fabrizio contended, “and that trend is helping us be not only competitive but having slight leads in states like Nevada and Arizona.”
In Pennsylvania, a state that polls almost without exception have said is too close to call, Fabrizio said, “Hispanics are very much on the radar screen” in terms of targets.
As they should be. While President Biden’s win in 2020 was just north of 80,000 votes, there are more than a million Hispanics in the Keystone State, with at least 580,000 registered voters.
“We are focused on particularly Hispanics that we have modeled, we have looked at them and modeled them in these states to see Hispanics that are potentially pro-Trump voters. And we are focusing particularly on the low-propensity-model Trump voters to get them to vote on Election Day in terms of registration efforts,” Fabrizio said.
Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said Puerto Rican voters in the state are a particular priority.