Former Vice President Joe Biden’s path back to the White House ran into a serious road bump in the latest poll.
Biden is in a deadlock tie with President Donald Trump in six key battleground states according to a CNBC/Change Research poll released Wednesday.
Among likely voters, Biden and Trump are reportedly tied in the states of Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Considering Trump’s tendency to outperform polling data — remember that left-leaning pollsters predicted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a 95 percent chance to beat Trump heading into the 2016 election — a neck-and-neck tie is bad news for Biden’s campaign.
That’s not the only bad news.
Data shows Biden is underperforming among minority voters compared to Hillary and former President Barack Obama.
Democratic Latinos, a vital part of Obama’s winning coalition in the 2008 election, aren’t rallying behind Biden — they’re backing Trump.
Obama became known in the Latino community as the “Deporter-in-Chief” during his presidency — one of the reasons Latinos overwhelmingly backed Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary over Biden.
“The ‘Let’s go back to how things were’ for people who feel like they have a boot on their neck, it’s not always that compelling,” said Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of the Latino activist group Mijente, which made its first-ever endorsement when it backed Sanders for president.
Biden long defended the administration’s illegal immigration policy, even telling one activist in South Carolina who decried deportations, “You should vote for Trump.”
But just before losing the caucuses in heavily Hispanic Nevada in February, Biden tried to reverse course.
“We took far too long to get it right,” Biden said. “I think it was a big mistake.”
The Trump administration deported about 267,260 people in fiscal year 2019, well below the single-year record of nearly 410,000 the Obama administration set in 2012.
About 32 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote in November, accounting for 13.3% of the electorate, outpacing African-Americans to become the largest minority voting bloc for the first time, according to the Pew Research Center.
Trump’s campaign sees the potential in the Latino voting block. According to a report taken in Oct. 2019, 1-in-4 Latino-Americans planned to vote to re-elect the president. In the 2016 election, Trump outperformed both Sen. Mitt Romney and Sen. Bob Dole among the Latino-American community.
“I’ve always resented the hell out of liberals, in the press and out of the press, who have said that I, because of my Latino surname, have anything in common with someone who is breaking into my country without our permission,” Chris Salcedo, a conservative Latino-American, told USA Today at the time.
“When the president cracks down on illegal border crossings and human trafficking, I do not believe he’s attacking me — because I also want to stop those same things.”
That could spell big trouble for Biden in November.
The Associated Press contributed to this article