Tipsheet

About That Trump and Latino Vote Thing

The Trump campaign boasted that he "won" the Latino vote in the state of Nevada on Tuesday night. Trump himself said that he was "number one with Hispanics" in Nevada.

While it's technically true that he got a majority of the votes from Latinos last night, as Latino Decisions points out, the fact remains that the majority of Latinos in Nevada are not registered Republicans. To vote in yesterday's caucus, a person had to be a Nevada resident and be registered as a Republican by February 13.

We are only talking about the very small percent of Nevada Latinos who are Republican today. An overwhelming majority of Nevada Latinos are Democrats. In a recent poll asking about party identification, 55% of Latinos said they were Democrats, 29% said Independents and just 16% said they were Republicans. Assuming the entrance poll is correct (a very big assumption) and Trump won 44% of Latino Republicans, that means he was supported by about 7% of Latinos in Nevada (44% of 16 = 7.04). What that mean is that most likely, 93% of Latinos in Nevada did not vote for Trump.

Context is everything.