A poll claiming that a quarter of Latino Trump voters have buyer's remorse made the rounds in every liberal newsroom last week, and wouldn't you know it — the whole thing was funded by UnidosUS, the left-wing advocacy group formerly known as La Raza. Axios ran with the headline "Buyer's remorse hits Trump's Latino voters" like it was gospel. Spoiler: it was bought and paid for by people who wanted exactly that result.
Shocking. Truly shocking.
The poll, conducted by Shaw & Company Research and BSP Research, surveyed 3,000 registered voters between April 27 and May 14. The topline finding — that "a quarter of the Latino respondents who voted for Trump would not support him again" — was catnip for a media desperate to prove that Trump's historic gains with Hispanic voters were a fluke. But as Breitbart's Nick Gilbertson reported, nobody in the breathless coverage bothered to mention who was writing the checks.
UnidosUS isn't some neutral polling outfit. This is the organization whose president, Janet Murguía, called Trump's 2017 DACA revocation an "attempt to appease the bigots in his base." These are the people who have advocated for DACA, DAPA, and the DREAM Act — essentially every policy that grants legal status to illegal immigrants. They didn't commission this poll to find out what Latinos think. They commissioned it to tell the media what Latinos should think.
And the money behind UnidosUS tells you everything you need to know about the operation.
During fiscal years 2021 and 2022 alone, the Biden administration awarded UnidosUS $35.9 million in federal contracts. Let that sink in — your tax dollars funded an organization that now produces polls designed to undermine the president you elected. On top of that, George Soros's Open Society Foundations contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the UnidosUS Action Fund between 2019 and 2021. So we've got Biden administration cash and Soros money flowing into a group that magically produces a poll showing Trump is losing Latino support. What a coincidence.
This is how the poll-industrial complex works, and we've seen it a hundred times. Step one: a left-wing advocacy group commissions a survey from a polling firm. Step two: the poll produces the result the advocacy group wanted. Step three: friendly media outlets like Axios run the findings as if they're independent, objective data. Step four: every cable news anchor and blue-check pundit repeats the narrative until it becomes conventional wisdom.
The actual facts on the ground tell a different story. Trump made historic inroads with Latino voters, and the left has been desperate to explain it away ever since. They can't accept that their stranglehold on minority voting blocs is crumbling, so they manufacture data to pretend it isn't happening.
Here's a free tip for Axios and every other outlet that ran this poll without disclosing the sponsor: when La Raza is paying for the research, maybe lead with that. Just a thought.
The next time you see a headline screaming that Trump is losing this group or that group, check who paid for the poll. Nine times out of ten, the answer tells you more than the data ever will.