Vice President Kamala Harris is outperforming President Joe Biden by 12 percentage points among registered Hispanic voters in Nevada, but still lags behind his 2020 level of support with Hispanic voters, according to a new poll from the Democratic firm Equis Research. 

The firm’s report, released Wednesday, found that Harris has had the most success in pulling back support from Nevada Latinos who held an unfavorable view of both Biden and former President Donald Trump. The poll found Harris leading Trump by 19 percentage points among registered Hispanic voters in the seven battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — a 14 percentage point swing from Biden’s lead over Trump among those same voters in the firm’s last poll. 

“We found that the shift in support cuts across ideology,” Maria Di Franco Quinonez, a research director at Equis, said in an interview on Wednesday. “Liberal, moderate and conservative voters are supporting Harris at higher rates than they were previously supporting Biden.”

Making up roughly one in five of the state’s eligible voters, Latino voters are a crucial voting bloc in the state. But a memorandum accompanying the Equis poll found that even though Harris’ support among Latino voters is about 5 percentage points shy of 2020 levels in Nevada, she has “some wiggle room if non-Latino support levels remain relatively stable.”

Equis’ report, released Wednesday, is the first major poll of Latinos since Harris became the Democratic nominee. The poll was conducted July 22 and Aug. 4 via phones and web-to-text in English and Spanish with 2,183 registered voters who identify as Latino or Hispanic across 12 battleground states, including Nevada. The margin of error is 2.9 percent for the full, 12-state sample, and 3.7 percent for individual state results.

Harris has been aggressively campaigning in the Sun Belt, finishing off a tour of battleground states this weekend in Las Vegas. Her rally on Saturday attracted more than 12,000 attendees, making it one of the largest political rallies in modern Nevada political history

Up until now, Latino support for Democrats in Nevada has been less clear-cut, especially in comparison to other minority groups.

In June, 33 percent of registered Latino voters in Nevada “definitely” supported Biden and 30 percent definitely supported Trump, according to a poll from TelevisaUnivision. In 2020, exit polling indicated more than a third of Nevada Latinos voted for Trump, signaling that Republican support among the demographic group is growing. 

While Democrats have hoped that they could continue to rally Latino support with a more liberal immigration platform, multiple surveys signal that Latinos are warming to more stringent immigration measures and increasingly trust the GOP to handle the issue. 

The Trump campaign has made Harris’ role in investigating border crossings a focal point of his attacks by labeling her as the administration's “border czar,” and blaming her for a surge in border crossings.

But, Di Franco Quinonez says that such messaging falls “a bit flat.” Some of Equis’ latest polling shows that Trump’s more stringent immigration policies — in particular the idea of mass deportations —  are viewed very unfavorably among Latino voters, especially those that are undecided.

Updated on 8/14/24 at 5:41 p.m. to include quotes from an interview with a research director at Equis.