With just weeks to go until the November midterm elections, 40% of Latino voters are still undecided about what candidates they will elect to Congress and 37% are undecided about who they will elect to the Senate, according to new poll results released this week.
These fourth-week poll results are part of the 2022 National Latino Voter Tracking Poll, conducted by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund in partnership with BSP Research. At least 2,000 Latino registered voters are expected to be surveyed over nine weeks for the larger poll.
Questions cover favorability of President Joe Biden, feelings about major issues facing the country and more. This week’s results were obtained through a poll of 532 Latino registered voters conducted from Sept. 20 to Oct. 2, as well as “crosstabs” data from 1,132 voters who were contacted from Sept. 3 Oct. 2.
While many Latino voters are still undecided, more voters over age 40 (74%) said they were “almost certain” who they would vote for compared to voters under 40 (58%).
According to the poll results, 50% of Latino voters said for the fourth week in a row that inflation and the rising cost of living is the most important election issue. Another major issue is the state of reproductive and abortion rights in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Supreme Court decision, with 28% of Latino voters ranking it as a top issue.
This shows a considerable shift from 2018, when just 4% of Latino voters ranked it as a top issue. This year, 33% of women surveyed by NALEO consider it a top issue, compared to 23% of men.
“Our results show that Latinas and Independents, in particular, are ready for mobilization by any party that invests in reaching out to the Latino community. We see a historically high interest in a woman’s reproductive rights and a community looking for answers to the rising costs of living,” said Adrian Pantoja, associate dean of faculty at Pitzer College and a pollster for BSP Research.
Other gender gaps observed in the survey of Latino voters show that 26% of women said they are doing better economically than two years ago compared to 36% of men and that men (41%) have higher approval ratings for former Republican President Donald Trump than women (31%).
Biden, a Democrat, has a a favorable position with Latino voters at 59 percent, per the poll results, and Latino voters appeared to favor Democrats over Republicans in congressional races by a margin of 54 to 30%.
“This week’s new data reveal the tremendous opportunities that both parties still have to engage the Latino electorate ahead of this year’s highly competitive midterms,” said Arturo Vargas, CEO of NALEO Educational Fund. “With just about a month away from Election Day and days before the beginning of early voting, we are seeing twice as many undecided Independent Latino voters as we did in 2018 and a growing young electorate that is still considering whether to vote in November. More than half of Latinos still have not been contacted by any political party, campaign, or other organization, but it is not too late for candidates to change course and engage voters.”
Previous poll results found that nearly two-thirds of Latino voters have been exposed to disinformation ahead of the midterms. These included 64% of respondents who heard that COVID vaccines contain 5G chips that allow the government to monitor and control the population, and 25% who believed the disinformation to be true.
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