Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is gaining ground with Latino voters, which could prove troublesome for President Joe Biden as he tries to rebuild his 2020 coalition.

Voto Latino, an election advocacy group, polled 2,000 Latino voters in five critical states — Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Texas, and Pennsylvania — and found around one-fifth of voters preferred a third-party candidate. While the poll shows Latino voters are pulling support from both Biden and former President Donald Trump, the trend might be felt harder by the Biden campaign as Latinos view the Democratic Party more favorably than the Republican Party.

“One of the reasons Voto Latino went into the field to conduct this extensive poll of over 2,000 Latino voters in key battleground states was that we kept hearing the narrative Latinos were leaving the Democratic Party and going to Trump,” Voto Latino President Maria Teresa Kumar told the New York Times. “And that just didn’t make any sense, so we dug in deeper.”

“And what we found was that while they are in support of Biden’s policies, they are not in support of his perceived handling of the economy. As a result, we find that not only were people defecting and going to a third party, RFK being the principal one, but it was women/Latinas that were doing so,” she continued.

In a two-way matchup between Biden and Trump, Biden soared, capturing 59% of the vote, with Trump receiving 39%. Support for Biden fell by 12 points when Kennedy and two other third-party candidates were included in the mix.

With five candidates on the ballot, Latino support for Biden fell to 47%, support for Trump fell to 34%, and Kennedy took 12%. Jill Stein got 2% and Cornel West got 3%, with approximately 1% remaining “undecided.”

“For folks between the ages of 18 to 49, of those who said they support a third party, 62% were women. And that just speaks to not only the opportunity that both Biden and Harris have to talk about the issues that are bread and butter to the Latino community they care about,” Kumar said. “But also demonstrates the real frustration that the economy while for many people is doing well, for folks at the bottom, it is not.”

Enthusiasm surrounding the 2024 general election has been dampened this year as compared to 2020 when voters overall were much more enthusiastic about voting.

Other polls conducted by the New York Times/Siena College and the Philadelphia Inquirer in April and May also found Kennedy pulled support from Latino voters in key battleground states. In those polls, he received about 14% of the support. 

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Still, according to Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who coordinated Latino outreach for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Latino voters who flirt with third-party candidates usually “come home” to mainstream candidates.

As of now, Kennedy is only on the ballot in California, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Utah, but his campaign has vowed to get on the ballot in all 50 states.