Several Undecided Latino Voters say Debate Shifted them to Biden

Several undecided Latino voters said they would vote for President Joe Biden after watching his Thursday night debate with former President Donald Trump, according to a video posted online.

Headlines about Biden stumbling over his words and being difficult to hear have not stopped since he and Trump went head-to-head in the first 2024 presidential debate in Atlanta.

Even some Democrats have called for the party to reconsider its options. Those calling for a different candidate include Andrew Yang, who ran against Biden for the nomination in 2020.

"What's Joe Biden's superpower? That he's a good guy who will do the right thing for the country," Yang wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "In this case, that's stepping aside and letting the DNC choose another nominee."

But some Latino voters said otherwise when they told American Spanish-language TV network Univision they would support Biden.

Out of a group of 14 previously undecided voters questioned by the network, five said they would vote for Biden, one chose Trump and eight said they were still undecided.

When asked to vote for who won the debate, seven said undecided, six said Biden and one said Trump.

One of the men told a journalist he had chosen Biden because "Trump sounded like a crazy liar," according to Matt A. Barreto, professor of Political Science and Chicana/o & Central American Studies at UCLA.

The man being interviewed said Trump "said the same thing time after time" and was not answering questions or "saying how he would fix things," according to a Newsweek translation.

He went on to say that "Biden was indeed a bit slow in talking," saying the president "has a stutter" but believes Biden explained "what he has done and what he is still doing while president.

"After being undecided for a little while, I think today, I switched to Biden," he added.

In the most recent Times/Siena poll, carried out by The New York Times and the Siena College Research Institute, 45 percent of Hispanic people said they would vote for Biden and 44 percent said Trump.

The people surveyed included "leaners," which refer to people who have a preference for a candidate but are open to changing their minds.

In the 2020 election, Trump received 32 percent of the Latino vote, up from the 28 percent he received in 2016.

His growing popularity among Latinos, as well as with other minority groups like Black Americans, is often cast as a surprise by his critics given his past rhetoric about Mexican migrants. He infamously used the words "rapists" and "criminals" to describe people illegally coming into the U.S. through its southern border in 2015.

When it came to the topic of immigration in Thursday's debate, Trump said, among other things: "There have been many young women murdered by the same people he allows to come across our border.

"We have a border that's the most dangerous place anywhere in the world—considered the most dangerous place anywhere in the world. And he opened it up, and these killers are coming into our country. And they are raping and killing women, and it's a terrible thing."

Trump and Biden made reference to a recent headline-making case in which two Venezuelan men, who entered the U.S. illegally, were arrested on suspicion of killing a 12-year-old Houston girl whose body was found in a creek after she disappeared while walking to a shop.

A recent Northwestern University study, which looked at incarceration rates over a 150-year period, found that immigrants are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born citizens.

Researcher economist Elisa Jácome concluded that "immigrants with lower levels of education today are significantly less likely to commit crimes than their U.S.-born counterparts."

Correction on 06/29/2024 at 4.16 p.m. ET. Corrects to clarify details and sourcing and to edit headline to reflect these changes

Update on 07/01/2024 at 11.48 a.m. ET. Adds further details of figures