The same corporate media machine that guaranteed a Hillary Clinton landslide is pushing another poll claiming Latino voters have turned on Trump by a 24-point margin — just two years after exit polls showed him capturing 46% of the Latino vote.
An NBC/Telemundo poll released Sunday claims Latino voters prefer Democratic control of Congress, 59% to 35%. Just 27% approve of Trump's job performance, and only 20% approve of his handling of the cost of living. The survey was conducted September 21-28 among 800 Latino registered voters using a mix of live phone interviews and online surveys, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
That's 800 people — surveyed by the outlet that commissioned the poll, through its own Spanish-language subsidiary — supposedly representing 36 million Latino voters. NBC owns Telemundo. Comcast owns NBCUniversal. The network polls its own demographic audience through a subsidiary it controls, and the results happen to break hard toward the party aligned with the network's corporate priorities on immigration and cultural issues.
ABC17News, running CNN's wire copy, framed the results as Latino voters "deeply souring" on Trump. Neither outlet disclosed the inherent conflict of a news organization polling its own target audience through a subsidiary.
The track record matters. These same outlets and their preferred pollsters predicted a Clinton blowout in 2016. They missed the Latino shift toward Trump in 2024, when exit polls showed him pulling 46% of the Latino vote against Kamala Harris's 51%. Now we're asked to believe the margin has swung to a 24-point Democratic edge.
A CBS/YouGov poll released the same day shows similar numbers — Latino likely voters favoring Democrats 60% to 39%. YouGov is an online panel pollster, conducted entirely online September 30 to October 2 among 2,166 adults. Online panels carry selection biases that consistently skew left.
Notably, the NBC/Telemundo poll surveyed registered voters, not likely voters — a method that overstates Democratic support by counting people who never turn out. The CBS poll at least filtered for likely voters on the head-to-head question.
Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment is already spending the majority these polls say is coming. Former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told NBC's "Meet the Press" that Democrats should skip impeachment and pass an ethics reform package instead. "You're never going to get an impeachment," Emanuel said. "Then if you do that, you just basically prove all Washington is what the American people think. It's Disneyland on the Potomac." Emanuel, widely speculated to be mulling a 2028 presidential run, has been a behind-the-scenes player in Democratic midterm recruiting. Representative Jamie Raskin still calls impeachment "a critical tool in the toolbox for constitutional self-defense," and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries refuses to rule it out.
The open question isn't whether the polls are right. It's whether both parties will keep arguing about impeachment and ethics packages while 80% of Latino voters in this survey say Trump isn't handling the cost of living — and every American is paying more for groceries.
