Seventy-three percent of Latino voters say in weekly polling from the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund and Latino Decisions that they disapprove of impeached president Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic, with respondents naming COVID-19, a virus that has decimated their communities, as the issue most important to them this election.
"After seven weeks of tracking Latino sentiments leading up to the election, it is difficult to overstate the impact that COVID-19 has had on the Latino electorate," Latino Decisions director of communications and senior analyst Stephen Nuño-Perez said in a release. "This is an 'all hands on deck' issue that any candidate must address if they want to connect with Latino voters."
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The polling, which tracks respondents over a nine-week period, shows that Latino communities are continuing to face devastating losses as the administration has intentionally sabotaged pandemic response by not encouraging mask wearing or social distancing (“73 percent of survey respondents believe President Donald Trump contracted COVID-19 because he failed to take the proper precautions and was acting irresponsibly,” the survey noted).
“In addition to the 29 percent of this week’s survey respondents who say they know someone who has died from COVID-19,” polling said, “26 percent say they have had trouble getting access to food, medicine, or basic household needs, as a result of the pandemic, and 41 percent say they had to use savings or retirement money to pay for expenses. 29 percent (high point in the survey) of survey respondents have lost their job as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Data has shown that COVID-19 has in fact hit Latinos (as well as Black men and women) so hard, that one public health expert recently said it was causing a "historic decimation" of the community, NBC News reported this month.
“Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, spoke at a virtual Congressional Hispanic Caucus briefing Wednesday,” the report said, “when he read off descriptions of people who died on Aug. 13 in Houston alone. ‘Hispanic male, Hispanic male, Hispanic male, black male, Hispanic male, black male, Hispanic male, Hispanic female, black female, black male, Hispanic, Hispanic, Hispanic, Hispanic, Hispanic, Hispanic’ Hotez said, adding that many are people in their 40s, 50s and 60s.’”
A separate report from NBC News ties in the importance of the Affordable Care Act to Latinos amid this pandemic. Millions of Latino adults and children accessed coverage under the legislation, but are now facing the loss of these protections—during a pandemic—because the administration is seeking to kill the landmark law.
“A recent poll of Latinos for UnidosUS showed that almost 6 in 10 (59 percent) respondents were very concerned and another 39 percent were somewhat concerned that the Supreme Court would undo the Affordable Care Act,” the report said. Trump actually hopes to God that the Supreme Court does end it, and he’s hoping it ends with no replacement waiting in the wings, no matter what he claims.
“I hope that they end it,” he recently told Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes. “It will be so good if they end it.” But as my colleague Joan McCarter writes, “There is no plan. There never will be a plan. He never meant for there to be a plan.” The only plan was to kill it because it’s an achievement of the prior administration.
This is all weighing heavily on the minds of voters. “We are just two weeks out from Election Day,” NALEO Educational Fund chief executive officer Arturo Vargas said, “and Latino voters are casting ballots with COVID-19 as their driving issue.”