WASHINGTON — A new national poll of Hispanic voters shows widespread dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump as he reaches his 100th day in office, with cost-of-living pressures driving the negative views of the nation’s second-largest voting bloc more significantly than deportation policy.

Trump’s approval rating is just 37% with Latinos in the new UnidosUS survey and his favorability score is even worse, languishing at 34%.

The poll, administered by BSP Research and Shaw & Co., took the views of 1,002 registered Hispanic voters in Arizona, California, Colorado, Texas and Florida during a week in mid-April. The League of United Latin American Citizens, which endorsed Kamala Harris for president, as well as Climate Power Action, helped pay for the survey.

A Pew Research poll released late last week measured Trump’s approval rating among Hispanics to be even worse, at just 27%, adding to the morass of evidence that shows the president’s receding political position.

‘Severely biased’

Trump pollster John McLaughlin called the UnidosUS poll “severely biased against President Trump,” for including Trump voters as only 39% of the survey sample, when exit polls of 2024 election show Trump won between 42% and 46% of the Latino vote. Fifty-nine percent of UnidosUS survey participants were Harris voters even though exit polls showed her winning between 51% and 56% in November.

“That’s a 15-point skew against President Trump. How do they explain their bias against Trump?,” asked McLaughlin.

Daron Shaw, one of the UnidosUS pollsters, told the Miami Herald that the survey is nationally representative.

“Our poll shows a recall vote only slightly different from the AP Votecast, which showed 42% Trump, 56% Harris nationally,” Shaw said. A UnidosUS representative also stressed that exit polls are only estimates and hard demographic breakdowns of the 2024 vote won’t be finalized until voter information data is finalized.

Nine percent of Hispanic voters who cast ballots for Trump in November now say they likely wouldn’t again, according to the UnidosUS data set.

The survey found cost-of-living, jobs and housing costs and affordability to be the top three issue concerns, with immigration reform lagging at fifth and border security as only the eighth-biggest concern.

But while a majority of Latinos showed support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have been in the country awhile, a robust minority (46%) listed cracking down on human smugglers and drug traffickers to be the most pressing issue facing them.

Only 37% of Latinos support providing asylum to migrants fleeing violence in their home countries and just 37% support increasing legal immigration through employment visas, adding a layer of complexity to their attitudes on immigration. Just 22% of Latinos said Trump should follow through with his promise to deport all undocumented immigrants. The number of Florida Hispanics who favored summary deportations was just 18%.

The UnidosUS survey did not ask about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to a prison in El Salvador accidentally even as he’s been accused of being a gang member by the Trump administration.

On Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration was only in the “beginning stages” of carrying out the largest deportation campaign in American history. She touted that nearly 800 undocumented migrants were arrested by immigration officials in South Florida over the weekend.

But the datasets of the prized political demographic demonstrate a second-term president hemorrhaging Latino support due to persistent economic concerns that haven’t allayed since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic five years ago.

Ray Serra, the national director of research and policy at LULAC, said the survey reveals the “rise and immediate fall of the possible Trump Latino Democrat.”

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