Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gestures. | AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin Clinton’s 30-point lead in Florida Hispanic poll is ‘terrifying’ to GOP nationwide

MIAMI — Hillary Clinton is besting Donald Trump by an historic 30-point margin among Florida Hispanics, according to a new bipartisan poll that indicates Latinos could play an outsized role in delivering the White House to a Democrat for the third election in a row.

Clinton’s 60 percent to 30 percent advantage over Trump with Florida Hispanics overall is fueled by outsized support from voters of Puerto Rican descent, who favor her 71 perccent to 19 percent, according to the survey of 800 likely Hispanic voters jointly conducted for Univision by Republican-leaning Tarrance Group and Democratic-leaning Bendixen & Amandi International.


Trump, meanwhile, has relatively weak backing from Cuban-Americans. They historically vote Republican but only support him over Clinton by 49 percent to 42 percent, the poll shows. And Hispanic voters of other national origins heavily prefer Clinton over Trump by 71 percent to 20 percent. The overall margin of error for the poll is 3.5 points.

“These Florida numbers are not only ominous for Donald Trump — they’re downright terrifying for Republicans nationwide,” said Fernand Amandi, Bendixen & Amandi’s pollster, who called Clinton’s 30-point margin “historic.”

“The share of the Hispanic vote is growing every election and this will be the third presidential election in Florida where Hispanics trend heavily against the GOP,” Amandi said. “And if that continues, it could turn Florida into the next California in future presidential elections, a blue anchor state.”

Without Florida’s 29 Electoral College votes, Republicans generally can’t win the White House.

The Florida Republican best-situated to appeal to Hispanics in the nation’s biggest battleground state: Sen. Marco Rubio, although he’s now losing the state’s Hispanic vote overall to Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy by 44 percent to 50 percent.

As a bilingual Cuban-American who’s well known in Florida and hails from the Miami-area, Rubio has built-in advantages that few Republicans in the state have. Murphy, meanwhile, is little-known.

Thanks to the strong support of non-Hispanic white voters, Rubio has been beating Murphy overall in dozens of other statewide polls of the entire electorate. Trump, too, enjoys the disproportionate support of white voters.

Unlike Rubio, Trump has terrible Hispanic support numbers that make his path to a Florida win much harder.

Hispanics account for almost 16 percent of Florida’s 12.9 million active registered voters. In 2012, they were about 14 percent of the registered voters. At the same time, white voters have decreased 2 percentage points to 64 percent of the voter rolls.

If the poll is right and if Hispanics cast 16 percent of the ballots in an election with 72 percent overall turnout, Clinton would build a margin of 437,000 more votes than Trump.

So far, Florida Hispanics have cast about 14 percent of the nearly 4.9 million early and absentee votes as of Thursday morning — far outpacing their 2012 share of the vote five days before Election Day.

Black voters, who account for 13 percent of the rolls and who back Clinton by even larger margins, have cast 12 percent of the pre-Election Day ballots.

Whites, who account for 69 percent of the total early and absentee vote, are overperforming their registration numbers.

Clinton’s 30-point margin in the poll mirrors the same level of support among Florida Hispanics she received in the last Univision survey in which she topped Trump 58 percent to 28 percent.

In 2012, President Obama beat Republican Mitt Romney among Florida Hispanics by 60 percent to 39 percent. Obama carried Florida by less than a point.

Trump’s poor standing among Latinos stems in part from his incendiary comments about undocumented immigrants and his call for mass deportations.

Trump at various points also sought to do business with Cuba’s government and may even have underwritten a consulting trip that violated the embargo. Amandi said that could have cost Trump some support among Cuba-embargo hard-liners, however Trump went on to receive the endorsement of a Miami-based group of Bay of Pigs veterans.

Univision surveyed two other Hispanic-heavy states that don’t have a sizable Cuban-American population. As a result, she’s beating Trump by even bigger margins, 49 points in Arizona and 53 points in Nevada.

Florida’s Hispanic population has become more Democratic-leaning over the years as Puerto Ricans flock to the state fleeing the decade-long financial crisis on the island and as older Cuban-Americans die out. Second-generation Cuban-Americans and new arrivals are more likely to vote Democratic.

Republican politicians from Miami-Dade County — Florida’s most-populous county with the largest share of Hispanics — are keeping their distance from Trump.

Rubio and Miami-Dade’s three Cuban-American U.S. House members won’t campaign with him. Miami-Dade’s mayor, a Cuban-American Republican, said he’d vote for Clinton.

The takeaway, Amandi said, is that Trump’s poor standing with Latinos underscores a broader problem with the Republican Party, which has blocked immigration reform and has done little to court the Hispanic vote.

“The Republican Party has an unwillingness to learn the lessons of 2008 and 2012,” Amandi said. “Donald Trump is a symptom of the Republican Party’s problem. He’s not the cause.”