Former President Trump is leading Vice President Harris by 7 percentage points among Florida Hispanics, according to a new Telemundo poll.
The poll, conducted by Mason-Dixon, highlights a trend among Sunshine State Latinos, who have traditionally been more open to GOP messaging than their counterparts elsewhere.
According to the poll, 48 percent of Florida Hispanics support Trump, 41 percent support Harris, 7 percent are undecided, and 4 percent back other candidates.
Florida Hispanics are divided regionally, by gender, by age and by country of ancestry.
Trump leads Harris 53 percent to 38 percent in southeast Florida, but Harris has leads among Latinos in central Florida — 45 percent to 39 percent 1 and the Tampa Bay area, where she leads 48 percent to 43 percent.
Harris also has a lead among the state’s Latinas — 53 percent said they support the vice president and 37 percent declared for Trump.
Trump’s lead with Hispanic men is wider — 60 percent for Trump to 28 percent for Harris.
The state’s two biggest Hispanic populations by country of origin, Cubans and Puerto Ricans, are near mirror images of each other when it comes to presidential voter intent.
Trump is backed by 61 percent of the poll’s Cuban respondents, while 28 percent support Harris.
Among Puerto Ricans, 58 percent support Harris and 33 percent support Trump.
The state’s other Latinos, including relatively large populations of Mexican, Colombian and Venezuelan origin, skew toward Trump, 47 percent to 41 percent.
According to the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO), 18.3 percent of Florida’s 13.3 million registered voters are Hispanic.
While 3.5 million Hispanic Florida residents are voting-age citizens, roughly 2.4 million are registered to vote, and NALEO projects 2 million will cast a ballot — a 13.8 percent jump from 2020, when 1.8 million Latinos voted in the state, and a 31.2 percent increase from the 1.6 million votes cast by Hispanics in 2016.
Between 2020 and 2024, the number of non-Hispanic voters in Florida grew by 2.8 percent, according to NALEO.
The poll numbers favoring Trump suggest the state’s GOP has been effective at bringing in those new voters, regardless of whether they align with Trump’s policy prescriptions.
In 2020, the Edison exit poll found 53 percent of Hispanic respondents voted for President Biden over Trump, and in 2016, that same poll found 62 percent voted for then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and only 35 percent for Trump.
Cuban voters in 2016 favored Trump — 54 percent chose the Republican over Clinton, according to the Edison poll.
Telemundo’s 2024 poll shows a Hispanic electorate likely to support more liberal positions while supporting GOP candidates.
Florida’s initiatives to legalize marijuana and abortion both have majority support from the state’s Latino electorate.
The marijuana initiative is the more contentious of the two — 50 percent of Latinos overall support it, though it is underwater with Cuban-Americans, 51 percent of whom oppose the measure to 42 percent who support it.
The abortion initiative has majority support across all demographic groups of Latino voters.
Immigration reform with a path to citizenship has even broader support — 70 percent of respondents said they support such a measure, and 65 percent support the Biden administration’s parole program for Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan migrants.
But 55 percent of Florida Hispanics said they trust Trump to handle immigration, while 38 percent said the same of Harris.
And 51 percent of respondents said they trust Trump to handle the economy, to 41 percent who sided with Harris on the issue, ranked as the top priority by 41 percent of respondents.
The Telemundo poll was conducted Sept. 23-25 among 625 registered Hispanic voters in Florida with a 4-point margin of error.
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