Before the backlash at the Madison Square Garden rally, Trump was doing historically well with Hispanic voters

CNN
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Donald Trump's Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City featured numerous speakers who made racist or bigoted statements. Perhaps none are as infamous as comedian Tony Hinchcliffe's offensive comments about Puerto Rico.

What makes these comments — which the former president's campaign has tried to distance itself from — so notable is that they come at a time when Trump appears to be on the rise among Hispanic voters. In fact, he appears to be on track to do better with this group than any Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush in 2004.

Consider an average of recent polling data on Hispanic voters: Kamala Harris is only 13 points ahead of Trump. That's well above the average of post-election and exit poll data from 2020, when Joe Biden led Hispanic voters by 26 points.

What's notable is that this 26-point deficit was already an improvement for Trump compared to 2016. Trump lost Hispanic voters to Hillary Clinton by 39 points, an average of exit polls and post-election data shows.

The 2020 polling data and results are a big reason the Trump campaign has made a concerted effort to attract more Hispanic voters. This helps explain why the former president held a large rally in the heavily Hispanic Bronx earlier this year and visited a hair salon in the same New York City borough this month.

Trump's gains with Hispanic voters also help explain the current electoral map. Harris' best path to securing the 270 electoral votes needed to win appears to be through the Great Lakes battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In the polls for these states, she was essentially tied with Trump, if not slightly ahead.

Meanwhile, Trump is doing well in Arizona and Nevada, two Southwest battlegrounds with larger Hispanic populations.

He always had a margin of error advantage in Arizona polls. In fact, it was Trump's best electoral state of all that Biden won in 2020. Nevada's poll numbers have been limited, but they, too, have trended more toward the former president than polling averages in the battleground Great Lakes states suggest.

Both Arizona and Nevada have more Hispanic voters than any of the other five battleground states, which also include Georgia and North Carolina.

Trump performs particularly well with Hispanic men and Hispanic voters without a college degree.

Will a rally like Sunday's make a difference in that support? It's unclear.

What's notable, however, is that such rallies tend to harken back to the Trump campaign's rhetoric in the 2016 campaign cycle, when he performed far worse with Hispanic voters.

Still, I wouldn't think too much will change after Sunday.

For one thing, most Hispanic voters are not from Puerto Rico, especially not from the battleground states. Second, Hispanics are not single-issue voters.

According to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, the economy was the most important issue for Hispanic voters (29%). That's in line with the 27% of all likely voters who said the economy was their top issue in deciding their vote this year.

Among all likely voters, the immigration issue was third at 12%, again reflecting the 15% of likely Hispanic voters who felt the same way.

Of course, one could argue that Sunday's rally could have turned off non-Hispanic voters. We already know that Harris historically performs well as a Democrat among college-educated white voters. They are the ones who have moved the most to the left since Trump entered the political scene, not least because of his rhetoric.

College-educated white voters are most important to Harris in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Detroit, as well as the Madison, Wisconsin, area. Considering how close the competitions are in these states, any move could make a big difference in the world.

If nothing else, the Madison Square Garden rally seems to have drawn people's attention to Trump (see Google searches), but for a negative reason.

I doubt the Trump campaign likes this.