The mainstream media have been promoting the truism that California's embattled Gov. Gavin Newsom will win his voter recall referendum.  It's in the bag.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has been saying since at least 2008 that it has the Hispanic vote locked up.  Another "certainty."

Here comes a poll, though, reported by the Daily Caller, showing that both are deluding themselves:

More than half of Hispanics in California say they would vote to recall Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, according to an Inside California Politics/Emerson College poll published Tuesday.

The poll of 1,000 registered voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3%, showed Californians are split on the issue with 46% in favor of recalling Newsom and 48% are against it. Among Hispanics, 54% said they would vote to recall.

This is a startling counter-indicator, given that not only is it unfavorable to Newsom, but it's also not consistent with the views of other demographic groups, such as blacks, who support Newsom; Asians, who support Newsom; and whites, who are almost evenly divided about him.

Here's the big kicker: Hispanics form 39% of the population and 35% of the voter base, making them California's biggest and most important constituency.

The bad news gets worse, according to reporting from the California Globe:

The Globe spoke with Mark Meuser and compared notes on the latest poll and the data.

"First, looking at the data, we see that the hispanic community is 54.4% planning on voting for the recall," Meuser said. The state of California has approximately 35% registered Hispanic voters. But this poll only made up of 24.2% hispanic voters, Meuser noted. "It appears that this Emerson poll has under sampled hispanic voters." This is also posted on his Senate campaign Facebook page.

Meuser continued: "Second, the Emerson poll sampled 46.4% democrats, 23.1% republicans, and 30.5% other parties, which may be close to actual party affiliation breakdowns." However, Meuser said they do not track with typical turnout in California for special elections. "During special elections, Californian republicans tend to turn out in much higher numbers," he said.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, using data from 2019 to 2020, 31% of Hispanics identify as conservative, and 16% are registered Republicans.  Hispanics are less likely to vote than other demographic groups.  However, their poll data shows that other factors suggest they may be more energized to vote than commonly supposed.

To look at that, consider the typical reasons the recall effort has taken off with voters: number one, Newsom's COVID handling, and COVID lockdowns.

Those hit Hispanics very hard.  According to this New York Times report from June:

Hispanic American communities have been pummeled by a higher rate of infections than any other racial or ethnic group and have experienced hospitalizations and deaths at rates exceeded only by those among Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

But new research shows the coronavirus has also attacked Hispanic Americans in an especially insidious way: They were younger when they died.

They are much more likely than white Americans to have died of Covid-19 before age 65, often in the prime of life and at the height of their productive years. Indeed, a recent study of California deaths found that Hispanic Americans between the ages of 20 and 54 were 8.5 times more likely than white Americans in that age range to die of Covid-19.

"It matters how old you are when you die, because your role in society differs," said Dr. Mary Bassett, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

It's natural to wonder why the wokester Democrats running the state have this particular record, which speaks very ill of them, as they virtue-signal all over the place about their love for Hispanics.

Here may be an even bigger one: the state's extended COVID lockdowns, which exceeded those of other states, hit small businesses exceptionally hard.  And here's some Census data on how many Hispanic small businesses there are that got knocked flat, thanks to Newsom and his fancy French Laundry dinners eaten without masks:

That's deadly.

Now let's look at another reason: crime.

Here are the findings from the state of California's first-ever survey of victims of violent crime:

Two in three of these crime victims acknowledge having been victims of multiple crimes in the past five years. African Americans and Latinos are more likely to have been victims of three or more crimes in the past five years.

The PPIC survey, cited above, notes that 54% of Hispanic voters are homeowners, having a stake in the system.  Also, 30% are recent immigrants, meaning they may well have fled countries with considerable crime to start with.  To find it here is pretty baleful.  Also, the largest percentage of Hispanics, 39%, live in Los Angeles County, home of let-'em-all-out-of-jail district attorney George Gascón.  So much for defunding the police, a huge percentage of whom are Hispanic, too, especially in Los Angeles County, where 49% of the force is Hispanic.

Homelessness, too, is an issue that affects property values and standards of living, and is a top voter issue overall, so it's likely that the concern among Hispanics is multiplied.

Other factors figure in as well — they don't like the bad public schools they are forced to send their kids to; they don't like wokester Critical Race Theory, "which teaches my kids to hate other people," as one Hispanic told me; and they don't like illegal immigration, many of whom have gone to great ends to accomplish their American Dream by immigrating here legally, and who see the crime, drugs, and social disintegration firsthand that comes of mass uncontrolled illegal immigration.  Just go to the San Fernando Valley for a glimpse at that.  I suspect that the PRI-style corruption of California's one-party state disgusts a certain percentage, too, particularly since California's Hispanic population is overwhelmingly Mexican-derived.

It all points to bad news for Newsom, who has patronized and acted weird around Hispanics already.  Remember this?

One can only hope that Democrats and the press keep deluding themselves about having the Hispanic vote in the bag and Newsom's recall referendum win all but assured.  The Emerson poll, cited above, shows that the voters are moving toward Elder and away from Newsom.  The trend is the friend.  And Democrats?  California's Hispanics may well have a big surprise for them.

Image: U.S. Bureau of the Census, government work.

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