WALL STREET JOURNAL
Article by Neil King, Jr.
June 27, 2012
Americans by a wide margin favor President Barack Obama's new policy halting deportations of many young illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, a new poll shows.
The move could pay big political dividends for the president in November among Hispanic voters in pivotal battleground states. The share of Hispanics saying they now have "very positive" views of Mr. Obama jumped by 10 percentage points since May, to 41%.
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%.
A larger poll sample of 300 Hispanics, done along with the Spanish-language broadcaster Telemundo, found Mr. Obama widening his lead among Latinos over his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, 66% to 26%, up six percentage points over last month.
The polls underscored the myriad ways in which the immigration move—and the issue itself—appears to rebound both to Mr. Obama's and the Democrats' favor.
In the larger WSJ/NBC News poll, nearly every segment of the population—whites, male voters, suburbanites, rural voters, even union members—supported the move to cease 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 that view in 2007.
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, Mr. Obama 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.
The polls come during a time in which immigration has dominated the 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 larger Hispanic poll 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, mainly by highlighting 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 WSJ/NBC News survey, conducted by the polling organizations of Democrat Peter D. Hart and Republican Bill McInturff from June 20 to June 24, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The smaller sample of Hispanic voters, conducted by the same pollsters, has a margin of error of 5.7 percentage points.
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