Donald Trump’s outlandish comments about Mexican immigrants are undermining Latinos’ view of the Republican Party, according to a poll by NBC News, The Wall Street Journal and Telemundo released Monday.
The real estate mogul and Republican presidential hopeful may be polling well in a more general sense, but his insistence that Mexico sends rapists and other criminals to the United States is hurting the GOP brand among Hispanics, said 69 percent of Latino adults in the 250-person survey. Only 12 percent said that Trump's comments were helping the party.
Some 75 percent of Latinos have a negative view of Trump, according to the poll.
Trump has basked in media attention since June, when in a televised speech he baselessly described Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime” into the United States, though he added that “some are good people.”
The candidate's hard-line stance on immigration and his negative view of Mexicans appear to resonate with a significant chunk of Republican voters. Trump currently leads the GOP presidential primary field with 23.7 percent, according to the HuffPost Pollster National chart, which aggregates all publicly available opinion polls. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush trails far behind with 13.1 percent.
Hispanic voters, however, largely recoil at the possibility of a Trump presidency. Just 16 percent of Latino voters say they would cast a ballot for Trump, according to a July 16 poll by Bendixen & Amandi and the Tarrance Group on behalf of Univision.
The Republican Party has long struggled to appeal to Hispanic voters, who overwhelmingly favor immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship -- a view at odds with those held by many GOP base voters, who tend to take a much more hard-line stance that emphasizes border security and the expulsion of undocumented immigrants.