Obama Gains Among Latinos

By NEIL KING JR.

The Dallas Morning News/Associated Press

Ramiro Luna of Texas wept as the president announced on June 15 that he would let hundreds of thousands of young immigrants stay in the U.S.

Americans by a wide margin favor President Barack Obama's new policy of halting deportations of many young illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, a new poll shows.

In all, nearly seven in 10 Americans said they favor the administration's new immigration policy, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. Hispanic support approached 90%.

By a large margin, Americans favor President Obama's new policy halting deportations of many young illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, a just-released poll by the Journal, NBC News and Telemundo shows. Neil King has the exclusive details on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

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The move could pay big political dividends for the president if it boosts Hispanic support for him in pivotal battleground states in November. Over the past month, the share of Hispanics nationwide saying they now have "very positive" views of Mr. Obama jumped by 10 percentage points to 41%.

In addition to the general sampling of Americans in the WSJ/NBC News poll, a sample of 300 Hispanics, done along with the Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo and broken out as a separate poll, found Mr. Obama widening his lead among Latinos over GOP rival Mitt Romney to 66% to 26%, up six percentage points over last month.

The polls underscored the many ways in which the immigration policy change—and the issue itself—appears to redound both to Mr. Obama's and his party's favor.

In the WSJ/NBC News poll, nearly every segment of the population—whites, male voters, suburbanites, rural voters, even union members—supported the move to stop the deportations. But those identifying themselves as Republicans narrowly opposed the move, 48% to 47%.

Nearly half of all Americans now think immigration helps the U.S. more than it hurts, while 39% said its hurts more than helps, down from 52% who held the negative view in 2007.

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President Barack Obama announced earlier this month that his administration would stop deporting some young people who came to the U.S. as children of illegal immigrants.

Mr. Obama relied heavily on strong support among Hispanics to pull off wins in 2008 in states such as Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, North Carolina, Florida and Virginia. With his support eroding among many other segments of the electorate, his campaign says he will need to boost his Hispanic-vote tallies in many of these states to win there again.

In all, he got about two-thirds of the Hispanic vote in 2008, according to exit polls.

A separate poll released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University showed Mr. Obama's support in Florida up sharply among Hispanics from just last week.

Mr. Obama's challenge, though, may lie in getting many of those Hispanics to turn out. Just 57% of those polled in the Hispanic sample said they voted in the 2010 midterm election. Hispanics overall are also showing sharply less interest in the presidential campaign than they were four years ago, the WSJ/NBC News poll found.

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The polls come during a time in which immigration has loomed large in the national news. Mr. Obama announced his new immigration position on June 15. On Monday, the Supreme Court struck down key portions of Arizona's tough immigration law, while preserving one of its most contested provisions.

But amid a revived national debate on the issue, Mr. Romney and his campaign have done little to clarify his own immigration policies.

The poll with Telemundo found 41% of Latinos now view Mr. Romney negatively, up from 35% last month. Just 21% view him positively.

The Romney campaign has pushed aggressively over the last month to boost its support among Hispanics. It announced a large team of prominent Hispanics who are advising his campaign. In ads, it has highlighted Mr. Obama's economic record and the markedly higher unemployment rate among Hispanics, which now sits at 11%, compared to the 8.2% national jobless rate.

But the Hispanic poll finds Latinos to be more optimistic than the whole of the population about the direction of the country and the state of the economy.

The poll also found far stronger support among Hispanics for Obama initiatives, particularly the 2010 health-care overhaul. With the Supreme Court set to rule on the law Thursday, nearly half the Hispanics polled said they believed the law was a good idea, compared to 35% among Americans over all.

"Among Hispanics, Obama appears as strong as ever," said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducted the WSJ/NBC News polls along with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "The question is whether they will turn out. Hispanics right now remain a low-turnout group."

The WSJ/NBC News poll has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points, and the survey of Hispanics has a 5.7 percentage point margin of error.

Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared June 28, 2012, on page A6 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Obama Gains Among Latinos.