It’s official: Hispanics in the U.S. continue to refuse to refer to themselves as LatinX. Nearly 80% refer to themselves as Hispanics versus 1.3% as LatinX, revealed Florida International University’s (FIU) Annual Hispanic Public Opinion Survey unveiled this Wednesday.
Are Hispanics Mostly Democrat or Republican?
While most Hispanics remain registered Democrats, support for the party is eroding, said Eduardo Gamarra, FIU’s Latino Public Opinion Forum director, and the survey’s author, “which could be a determining factor, especially in swing states like Florida, where 2-3% could mean the outcome of the election.”
A majority of U.S. Hispanics identify as Democrats (56%) versus Republicans (26%), while 14% say they are Independent.
Additionally, although 58.4% consider that the Democratic Party best represents their values, versus 24.1% who think it’s the Republican Party, 17.5% say neither party represents them, or they don’t know.
Interestingly enough, nearly 20% of respondents said that they had considered switching political parties this past year, and, of those, most (61%) said they left the Democratic Party, 38% to the Republican Party and 23% became Independent.
Contrary to general perceptions, most Hispanics consider themselves “middle of the road” (35.2%) or liberal (39.3%), versus conservative (21.8%).
2024: Biden or Trump?
Most Hispanics do not want either as presidential candidate. 44.7% say they do not want Biden to run again, with Trump fairing worse, 57.2% say they don’t want him to run and 32% want him to run. If the elections were tomorrow, 53.4% would vote for Biden and 33.2% would vote for Trump. However, 13.4% don’t know who they would vote for.
More than half of respondents believe the U.S. is heading in the wrong direction (52.9%), and most said that the economy was the main challenge facing the country (inflation/cost of living: 20%; economy/poverty: 16.6%).
Support for Biden has eroded from 67% in 2020 to 43.8% today.
73.8% say they are very likely to vote in the next presidential election.
Candidates’ Foreign Policy Views are Key for their Voting Decision
An overwhelming number of respondents (88%) said that foreign policy views of a candidate are important in their voting decisions, something that struck Gamarra as a key insight for potential U.S. presidential candidates.
In terms of how to deal with non-democratic governments like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, 46% of respondents said the U.S. should negotiate or engage with them, while 20% said the U.S. should exert maximum pressure and 18% said we should have nothing to do with them at all.
A majority of respondents surveyed (45.2%) agreed that the U.S. should provide humanitarian assistance to non-democratic countries like Cuba and Venezuela to address the crises fueling mass migration, even in the absence of a political solution, versus 17% who disagreed.
As far as how to deal with U.S adversaries China, Russia, and Iran in Latin America, 34% said the U.S. should do its best to keep these countries out of our Hemisphere, and 29.7% said the U.S. should promote U.S investments to compete with them, while only 18% said the U.S should step aside.
The majority of respondents surveyed (54.5%) agreed that economic sanctions have not worked and it’s time to revise them and try something else, while only 10.5% disagreed. However, 47.6% agreed that economic sanctions should be maintained until non-democratic governments allow a democratic transition to occur, regardless of their effectiveness.
Gamarra believes that this apparent contradiction results from the fact that the U.S. government “has not provided any other foreign policy options” but sanctions and therefore, “people don’t know what the alternative [to sanctions] is.”
Nationally, Hispanics are tepid about the Biden administration’s policies for both Cuba and Venezuela, with nearly half saying they neither agree nor disagree with its policies or don’t know about them.
The 1,221 poll respondents were randomly selected from registered voters in the 22 U.S. states with the highest concentration of Hispanics, according to the U.S. Census. They were surveyed from Nov. 18 to Dec. 3, 2023. The survey results have a margin of error of ±2.8%.
