A newly released New York Times/Siena poll shows a wholesale reversal from its previous February poll that suggested President Joe Biden was bleeding support among Latino voters. 

The Times/Siena poll released Saturday showed Biden gaining significant ground with minority voters, including opening up a 9-point lead over Trump with Latinos, 50% - 41%. That's a 15-point turnaround since February, when the Times/Siena survey gave Trump a 6-point advantage among Latino voters, winning 46% of the group to Biden's 40%.

Biden's growth among nonwhite voters—including a net 10-point gain with Black voters—has effectively erased Trump's lead among registered voters overall in the latest Times/Siena survey, with Biden at 45% to Trump's 46%. The Times' February poll gave Trump a 5-point advantage overall, at 43% Biden - 48% Trump.

Taking the poll at face value, Trump's Latino support is still historically high at 41%, while Biden's is historically low at 50%. The high-water mark for any Republican presidential candidate is President George W. Bush's 40% share of the Latino vote in 2004. 

In 2020, Biden won Latino voters 59% - 38%, so the incumbent still has considerable room to grow support among the group while Trump may already be close to hitting his ceiling.

Last week, we covered polling from the Pew Research Center that draws into question whether Trump—as many outlets including the Times have reported—has really made significant inroads with Latino voters and, if so, whether those gains would be enough to swing an election given Biden's relative strength thus far with white voters.

Biden's continued strength with white voters puts the onus on Trump to win over a historically high share of voting groups that don't typically lean Republican...

The conventional wisdom over the past few months has been that Biden is in trouble because he's bleeding support among Latinos (and potentially Black voters, too).

But with current polling showing Biden and Trump relatively evenly matched at this stage of the contest, it's entirely plausible for the Biden campaign to woo back some voters who are more naturally predisposed to voting for Democrats.

Biden now appears to be doing exactly that: consolidating support among Latino and Black voters as he gains ground on Trump. 

And as we noted in Friday's piece, the same Pew Research Center polling suggests Democrats haven't suffered a significant falloff in support among Black and Latino voters during the Trump era. In fact, Pew's data called into question the entire premise that some sort of racial realignment has taken place among voters over the past several years. 

The Times/Siena poll isn't the only survey showing Biden cutting into Trump's lead since the State of the Union address in early March. In The Tilt newsletter Saturday, the Times' Nate Cohn found Biden gaining an average of +1.4 points on Trump in 16 polls taken before and after the fiery speech.

While none of these revelations feel like tectonic shifts in the presidential contest, they do appear to reflect the Biden campaign's increasing advantages over Trump when it comes to electoral fundamentals such as fundraising, time spent campaigning, and investments in advertising and organizing.

An old adage comes to mind: The only nonrenewable resource in a campaign is time. And while Biden continues to campaign across the country, Trump will be spending the lion's share of his time in a courtroom over the next half-dozen weeks.

Republished with permission from Daily Kos.