For a week during which Donald Trump's vice presidential candidate Mike Pence was supposed to breathe new life into the GOP ticket, it's stunning what a massive hole the dynamic duo managed to dig for themselves. Not only did they not land any new votes, they likely irreversibly wrote off two essential voting groups where their campaign was already sucking wind: white college-educated women and Latino voters.
After Pence failed during Tuesday’s debate to give any reasonable explanation for why he doesn’t trust women to make their own health decisions on abortion, Trump rounded out the week with some pretty exciting tales about grabbing women "by the pussy." (Sorry, there’s no way to sugarcoat that.) You gotta hand it to Trump: He finally found an issue to champion that women can pretty much universally relate to—being groped by some lecher against their wishes.
Look, at this point, I'm gonna call it for college-educated women: It's over. They're voting Hillary Clinton or perhaps Bugs Bunny, but they ain't voting Trump/Pence. The Republican ticket is going to lose that key bloc by historic margins, something no serious GOP candidate can afford to do. It's exactly the reason a state like Colorado is likely completely out of reach for them now—too many college grads.
But Pence also dealt a death blow to perhaps their only chance to make inroads with Latino voters, who have largely been alienated by Trump's racist slurs against Mexican immigrants as "rapists" and "murderers." After Kaine repeatedly pounded Trump's characterizations home during the debate, the usually affable Pence admonished him for bringing up "that Mexican thing again." Within minutes, the hashtag #ThatMexicanThing swamped the Twitterverse and Democrats later promised that Pence would pay for his easy dismissal of comments that have deeply wounded the Latino community. As if Latino voters weren't already motivated enough.
But as gratifying as it was to see Pence's remark turned on its head, it's the fundamentals of the Latino electorate that are giving every indication Latino voters will tip the balance toward Democrats this year.
Broadly speaking, polling is moving in the right direction nationwide with Latino voters. Hillary was always going to win this demographic—it’s just a question of turnout and how much she can run up the numbers on Trump. A Florida International University tracking poll released this week put Hillary Clinton up over Trump, 83-11.
This is the first time since the summer that the weekly tracking poll, active since April, reported a number for Clinton greater than 80%. Before this week’s 83% result, Clinton’s highest number was 81% in July. Her lowest since July was 74%.
A Latino Decisions/NALEO/Telemundo tracking poll also showed positive movement toward Clinton, with 78 percent saying saying she won the first debate after just 63 percent predicted she would win it the week before. Once more, the debate coverage of Trump's degrading comments toward former Miss Universe Alicia Machado appeared to create a surge in Google searches about voter registration in Latino-heavy areas of the country.
But the specifics of two critical states, Florida and North Carolina, are particularly promising.
A new Univision poll of Florida released Friday showed Clinton routing Trump by historic margins among Latino voters, 58-28 percent, a 6-point bump for Clinton since last month's poll and a 30-point differential overall.
If those numbers look a little low to you, that's because Florida's traditionally dominant Latino cohort of Cuban Americans have typically leaned Republican. Obama won the state’s Latino voters by 21 points in 2012, 60-39 percent, whereas he won Latino voters nationwide 71-27 percent. But we are watching an evolution of that voting bloc transpire in real time, with Puerto Ricans accounting for nearly as big a share of the state's Latino electorate as Cuban Americans.
Hispanic voters are likely to make up about 15 percent of the electorate, with nearly 30 percent of those voters Puerto Rican and slightly more than 30 percent Cuban-Americans, who are increasingly shifting away from the GOP.
In a new Latino Decisions poll, Puerto Ricans in Florida overwhelmingly preferred Clinton to Trump, 74 to 17 percent.
Latino Decisions' Sylvia Manzano tells me she "absolutely" expects "Latino turnout will determine the winner in Florida." She notes that President Obama won the Sunshine State by less than 1 percent in 2012 and Latino registration is up significantly this year.
Since the 2012 presidential election, Florida’s voter rolls have grown by 436,000 — and only 24 percent of that increase is from non-Hispanic white voters while non-whites grew by 76 percent, according to new voter registration numbers released in advance of the Aug. 30 primary.
In fact, when Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook predicted this week that early voting might give Hillary an "insurmountable lead” in key states, he homed in specifically on Florida, noting that absentee ballot requests from Hispanic voters had jumped 77 percent since the same period in 2012.
North Carolina was another state Mook mentioned. While he didn't provide specific numbers there, early ballots in the Tar Heel State have been trending well for Democrats according to an AP report last week.
Democrats made up 40 percent of the ballots returned compared to 35 percent for Republicans. At this point in 2012, Republicans had opened a wide lead over Democrats in returned ballots, 49 percent to 32 percent, leading to Mitt Romney’s narrow win that state.
To win North Carolina, it's going to take an across-the-board effort from black Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and white liberals.
But Latino voters are poised to do their share, according to new registration numbers from the civic group Voto Latino.
The group's top four states for registrations were Texas (20,483 new voters), California (13,394), Florida (10,565) and North Carolina (6,297). Just 2 percent of the Tar Heel State's registered voters are Hispanic, roughly 135,000 out of more than 6.4 million as of February, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
Romney won North Carolina by a 2-percent margin in 2012.