The New Yorker seems to think that President Donald Trump will again be running for re-election in 2028. Perhaps they take the "TRUMP 2028" seriously since Jack Herrera wrote a piece in their Tuesday issue that makes that assumption in "Democratic Schadenfreude and the Latino Vote," with the subtitle of "Trump’s once strong approval rating among Latinos has collapsed, but Democrats can’t count on their support."
Herrera bases his sweeping conclusion of a "collapse" of Latino support for Trump on a total of two polls with an incredibly poor track record on this topic. This led Herrera to engage in a high level of liberal Hopium as you can see in his story based on dubious sources:
After close to half of Latino voters chose Donald Trump in 2024, Democrats reacted like someone catching their grandpa giving money to a chatbot. “A lot of folks are asking on the Democratic side, ‘Why would they do this to themselves?’ ” the CNN anchor Jim Acosta said. He asked whether Latinos had “just had the wool pulled over their eyes.” Online, the reaction got ugly. Some posters (who claimed to be Kamala Harris voters) shared the tip-line number for ICE, encouraging their followers to call and report undocumented family members of Latinos who had voted for Trump. Those posts represented an angry fringe; however, even among levelheaded Democrats, I heard some species of vindictiveness. They understood why Latinos, buffeted by years of inflation and rising housing costs, had rejected Joe Biden. But they felt these voters would—and should—pay for supporting Trump.
For anyone who felt that way in 2024, reading polling conducted during the past year must’ve been a deeply gratifying experience. As ICE agents laid siege to Minneapolis and gas prices shot up after bombs began falling on Iran, numerous surveys showed Trump hemorrhaging support among Latino voters.
And here are the two polling organizations upon which Herrera bases his conclusion of "Trump hemorrhaging support among Latino voters."
A recent NBC News poll found that sixty-four per cent of Latinos disapproved of the job Trump was doing. Equis, a polling firm established to study Latino communities, has found that a third of all Latinos who supported the President in 2024 now feel “disappointed,” or outright regret their vote. The leading reason for this disappointment, according to Equis, was “Trump’s broken promises and lies.”
NBC News poll? Gee. Guess which way they reliably lean as to bias? However, their leftist bias could be disregarded if the NBC News poll at least had a good track record on this topic. Unfortunately for them, and Mr. Herrera, they do not as a perusal of their 2024 election record reveals.
Less than a week before the 2024 election, on September 29, 2024, the NBC News Poll had Kamala Harris leading Trump by 14 points as you can see in "Poll: Democrats' advantage with Latino voters continues to shrink." The results the following week showed that Trump received almost half the Latino votes.
As to the Equis poll, they should be disqualified from any consideration just based on their use of the widely despised term "LatinX" which appears several times on their home pages including their About Page with this gem: "Moonshots are a set of audacious, large-scale infrastructure and power-building initiatives spanning democracy, media, culture, and talent. Moonshots work to address the most pressing and complex issues keeping the Latinx community on the margins of democracy and society."
Okay, it is established via their use of "LatinX" that Equis is completely clueless about how Hispanics absolutely hate that term so let us turn to their track record based also on the 2024 election which you can see starting with their prediction in "Latino Update October 2024."
In a poll of registered Latinos fielded October 4 - 18, Harris continues to lead Trump among Latino voters in the presidential battleground, 55% - 38%, virtually unchanged from the 54% -38% margin in a late September poll.
So Equis had Harris leading Trump by 17 points shortly before the election. A prediction so far off the final election result that Equis had to post a an explanation on November 15, 2024 for being so wrong called "A Preliminary Look at the 2024 Latino Vote" but which could more accurately be called "OOPS!"
A Preliminary Look at the 2024 Latino Vote
Since Election Day, the Equis team has been collecting precinct-level data to try and make sense of the shift in support we saw among Latino voters. Below is a preliminary analysis. But first, remember: studying big Latino shifts is separate from a diagnosis of how Trump won, which can't be pegged on any single demographic.
1. Let’s get this out of the way: this looks and sounds like a realignment. Trump’s Latino support will be at least 13 points higher in 2024 than it was in 2016 (from ~30% to ~43-48%). The realignment may be unique to Trump… but functionally it doesn’t matter as the Trump Era continues.
The bulk of Herrera's apparent fantasy seems to be nothing more than a liberal trying to convince himself of a intensely desired result based primarily on laughably faulty sources, namely the NBC News and the Equis polls.
Exit question: Does the New Yorker have editors that at least do a minimal amount of fact checking when sources are cited? This story appears to have been about as poorly vetted as Graham Platner in Maine.
