“To the Hispanic voters who have been absolutely treated terribly, I say: What do you have to lose? I will fix it,” he promised Hispanic voters at a Florida rally on Wednesday.

Sam Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference says with the right message, Trump can draw the Latino vote in droves. He suggests the GOP presidential candidate “speak about entrepreneurship and … about the power of limited government and how many Hispanics came from countries with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.” He suggests Venezuela as an example.

Rodriguez

“Latinos know better than others,” Rodriguez adds. “They’ve lived it out and they don’t want to go back to that.”

He also advises Trump not to back down on building the wall. “We have narco-traffickers coming in from Mexico. You have potential terrorists. There’s a drug war going on in Mexico,” he lists. “So we want to stop all illegal immigration. We are opposed to illegal immigration.”

Rodriguez says there’s no way to deport 11 million illegal immigrants – so he advocates giving them a path to being in the U.S. legally, even if it’s a lengthy one.

“Pay fines, learn English, go to the back, back, back, back, back, back, back of the line – it may take you 15, 20, 25 years, [but] apply for citizenship,” says the NHCLC leader.

Gaining support among blacks

While Trump makes his pitch for the Hispanic vote, a recent poll shows him making some gains among black voters – a development that doesn’t surprise conservative black activist Jesse Lee Peterson.

According to Gallup, Republicans only received five percent of the black vote in 2012. That was up from four years earlier, during the first Obama campaign, when John McCain garnered a scant one percent. But on August 16, during a speech in West Bend, Wisconsin, Trump made a major appeal to black voters – and it seems to have worked.

A new LA Times/USC poll shows Trump with over 14 percent of the black vote – up from less than five percent just two weeks earlier (August 4).

Peterson

“Blacks know the impact that illegal aliens have on them and their communities,” says Peterson, founder and president of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND).

“… So when he spoke out the other day directly to black people, I knew then that his numbers would go up. And I believe they will go higher because we’ve never had a politician speak directly to the people.”

Peterson contends the Clinton campaign is also concerned about blacks who won’t vote for either of the major party candidates – something he calls “a nightmare” for Democrats.

“They’re very worried [that] they’re either going to vote for Green Party or something like that or not vote at all because they don’t trust Hillary Clinton,” he tells OneNewsNow.

In essence, he concludes, Democrats are worried about losing the black voters who will go for Trump – as well as the black voters who are not for Clinton.