Romney lags badly among Latinos as he addresses Latino biz group
As Mitt Romney speaks to a Latino business group Monday in Los Angeles, a new poll demonstrated the major gap he faces that could harm his chances of winning Southwestern states where Latinos make up a significant voting bloc.
The impreMedia-Latino Decisions weekly tracking poll showed 68% of Latinos were likely or leaning toward voting for President Obama, compared with 26% who said they expected to vote for Republican Romney in the Nov. 6 election.
The survey of 300 registered voters has a relatively large margin of error at 5.6%, according to impreMedia, parent of Spanish-language news outlets including La Opinion in Los Angeles and El Diario La Prensa in New York.
The 42-point margin for Obama is the largest (by 2 percentage points) in the four weeks that the organization has polled Latino voters.
There were other good signs for the president in the poll. It showed a plurality of Latino voters (40%) saying they were more enthusiastic about voting this year than they were four years ago. And the voters surveyed overwhelmingly (by 62% to 17%) blamed former President George W. Bush over Obama for the poor state of the economy.
Romney’s team could at least look to fractionally better results in how Latino voters view the candidate and his outreach to them. The poll found that 65% of those surveyed found that the candidate either didn’t care about Latinos or was hostile to them — a slight improvement from the 77% who called Romney disinterested or hostile four weeks ago.
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