The president wallops Romney 66-31 percent overall across the U.S., according to the poll’s national survey of 1,000 likely Hispanic voters. It was taken Oct. 10-11 along with the 720-voter poll in Florida.

The difference here: Cuban-American voters, who are overwhelmingly Republican and who appear to be increasingly excited about Romney’s campaign.

“What’s remarkable is the demographic split in Florida: Puerto Rican and Dominican and other Hispanic voters trust Obama. Cubans just don’t,” said Eduardo Gamarra, an FIU professor of Latin American studies who conducted the poll with his political research firm, the Newlink Group.

In the national and Florida surveys, Cuban voters consistently gave Obama low marks on handling the economy, immigration and foreign policy. Puerto Rican and Dominican voters said the opposite.

Momentum from Cuban voters could help other Republican candidates on the Florida ballot, particularly in South Florida.

Take out Cuban voters, and Obama wins Florida Hispanics 64 percent to Romney’s 33 percent, according to the poll, which has a 3.6 percent error margin.

Overall, 54 percent of Florida Hispanics said they were not better off than four years ago, compared to 46 percent who said they were. That’s not just a reflection of Cuban sentiment; it’s an indication of Florida’s unemployment rate, which is higher than the nation’s. And Hispanic unemployment is higher still. The number of Hispanic children living in poverty now exceeds the number of non-Hispanic white children, even though Hispanics are a minority.

Nevertheless, Obama edges Romney 51-48 percent over who would better at fixing the economy. He also pulls ahead of Romney 53-47 percent over handling foreign policy and 55-44 percent concerning immigration.

Asked if Obama had “fulfilled his promises to the U.S. Hispanic community,” 51 percent said no.

That could be a legacy of Obama’s 2008 pledge to pass the pro-immigrant DREAM Act in his first term. It failed in the U.S. Senate thanks to a Republican filibuster.

The nation’s most-influential Spanish-language TV personality, Univision’s Jorge Ramos, made Obama’s failure a major issue last month during a nationally-televised forum at the University of Miami.

“A promise is a promise, and with all due respect,” Ramos said, “you didn’t keep that promise.”

Obama seemed to agree later when asked what his biggest failure was: “Well, Jorge as you remind me, my biggest failure has been comprehensive immigration reform.”

The Obama lead is far bigger in the national poll of Hispanic voters — and would be bigger in Florida were it not for Cuban voters like Lázaro Sierra, a 73-year-old Republican who came to the U.S. four decades ago.

“I’m going to vote for the Republican Party: Mitt Romney,” said Sierra, who lives in Miami’s Shenandoah neighborhood. “I like his career path, and what he’s proposing is better than Obama. In four years he hasn’t done anything. On the contrary, there are more people without work, we’re still in debt. To me, he hasn’t done anything worthwhile.”

Another poll respondent, Marcelino Gracia, who fled Cuba 48 years ago, is a Democrat backing Obama.

Gracia, of Coral Gables, said he has always favored Democrats’ economic policies and particularly agrees with Obama’s plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 2014.

“They’ll save $800 billion a year that we could use here,” he said. Otherwise, Gracia said, “they’ll be killing Americans for no reason.”

The poll found nearly 5 percent of Florida Hispanic voters are undecided. Candidate Gary Johnson, a Libertarian, received less than 1 percent of respondents’ support.

Most polls of Floridians are showing a dwindling number of undecided voters as the Oct. 27 early voting date draws near.

Cubans account for a little more than a third of registered Florida Hispanic voters, but can account to 40 to nearly 50 percent of the actual Hispanic vote, pollsters say. About 47 percent of respondents in this poll were Cuban.

Gamarra, a registered Democrat of Bolivian descent, said he didn’t want to adjust — or “weight” — the sample to bring down the number of Cuban voters. He points out that there is no concrete data available that definitively shows how many Hispanic voters are, say, Cuban or Puerto Rican.

However, there is clear data showing the breakdown of overall Hispanic voters by party in Florida. Hispanics account for about 14 percent of the active registered voters in the state, 38 percent are Democrat, 30 percent are Republican and 32 percent are independent — mainly no-party-affiliation voters.

If the poll were weighted to purely reflect registration only Obama would lead Romney by 10 points, 53-43 percent.

The Newlink poll is the first-ever attempt to survey Florida’s diverse population of Hispanic voters by using Interactive Voice Response technology — known as “robo-polling” — in which people essentially cast their vote by using their telephone keypads in response to pre-recorded questions.

Newlink and Gamarra have used the technology to poll throughout Latin America since 2004.

Robo-polling has become relatively common in Florida and the nation overall, used by firms like SurveyUSA, Rasmussen Reports and Public Policy Polling. Many of them do not poll in Spanish. This survey gave respondents the option, and surveyed 80 percent of Florida respondents in Spanish.

Because robo-polling does not include cell phones, critics say, it can miss younger and more liberal-leaning voters.

Polling Florida Hispanics is a particular challenge, Gamarra said, because of its dynamic population: Republican-leaning Cubans in South Florida, Democratic-leaning Puerto Ricans in Central Florida and a mishmash of South and Central Americans throughout the state.

Nationwide, voters of Mexican descent dominate the Hispanic electorate.

This poll of likely voters — those who say they’re sure to cast a ballot — differs sharply from a poll two weeks ago of registered Hispanic voters that was sponsored by America’s Voice, a liberal-leaning immigration advocacy group. That survey showed Obama leading in Florida by 30 points.

In addition to surveying registered voters only, the America’s Voice survey conducted by Latino Decisions used live callers instead of robo-polling technology.

However, a poll conducted last week for The Miami Herald/El Nuevo Herald and The Tampa Bay Times by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research showed Romney and Obama virtually tied among likely Hispanic voters in Florida. That survey used live callers, but it had such a small sample size of Hispanics that the error margin is large enough to render the exact head-to-head numbers statistically insignificant.

Still, the Herald/Times poll of all likely Florida voters showed an 8-point shift in Romney’s favor in a month, thanks largely to his strong debate performance against Obama. Hispanic voters shifted 11 points.

Non-Hispanic white voters favor Romney by double-digits, which is particularly troubling for Obama because they comprise more than two-thirds of the state’s electorate.

Despite the poor poll numbers, though, the Obama campaign insisted it’s doing well and said that polls of likely voters fail to adequately survey infrequent and young voters — keys to Obama’s victory in 2008. Election Day exit polls showed Obama won 57 percent of the Hispanic vote in Florida; John McCain garnered 42 percent.

But Republican pollsters say that number underestimated the sizable number of Hispanic Republicans who voted early by absentee ballot, particularly in Miami-Dade — the state’s largest county, where 72 percent of the GOP is Hispanic.

As the country’s largest battleground state, Florida’s Hispanics play an outsized role in picking the president.

“The Hispanic vote in Florida is powerful. We can decide elections,” said Sierra, the Cuban-American voter from Shenandoah, who noted the influx of candidates who pour through the state.

“Everyone comes here, says ‘ Viva Cuba libre,’ eats a croqueta, a guava pastry and drinks coffee.”

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Speaking in Charlotte on Sunday, Louis Farrakhan had this advice for President Barack Obama: Fight.“Mr. President, you’ve got to realize you’re fighting for your presidential life,” the leader of the Nation of Islam told an estimated crowd of 6,000 at Bojangles Coliseum. “You’re fighting for your vision of the Democratic Party and the country.”

In marking the 17th anniversary of his 1995 “Million Man March” on Washington, D.C., Farrakhan was scheduled to talk about the economy and a Muslim “blueprint for ending need and want.”

But with Nov. 6 election three weeks away, the 79-year-old Muslim leader changed his mind, instead offering advice to the president and country, describing a United States still ruptured by race.

Then Farrakhan spent two hours hammering at racial – some critics will call them racist – themes.

For the outset, the highly controversial Farrakhan accused Republicans of having “overt” racist motives in their opposition to Obama, the country’s first black president. He attacked a political process that he says is controlled by monied interests and wants “to keep America white.”

And while he claimed Romney had lied about his real positions on most major issues throughout the first presidential debate, he criticized Obama’s low-energy response.

He asked his listeners if they were disappointed in Obama’s performance, and hundreds of hands rose throughout the coliseum.

“Feels like your champion didn’t show up for the fight,” Farrakhan said. “If you lose the first round or two, you go to your corner. It’s called ‘adjustment time.’ Every good fighter knows how to make an adjustment. You don’t get lost.”

He said he thinks Obama and his advisers worried about the president appearing like “an angry black man.” The reasoning: “You can’t go out there and beat up on a white man. You’re going to lose the white vote.”

He then turned his comments back to the president. “You aren’t going to win any more white votes by being kind and gracious,” he said. “Be a little black.”

Farrakhan’s injection of race into the presidential campaign comes as both parties trade accusations, direct and implied, of racist intent. Obama received 95 percent of the black vote in 2008, and more than 2 million blacks voted for the first time.

Democrats say Republican-led Voter ID moves in several key states are aimed at holding down the black vote. Some conservatives say support for Obama by many African-American voters starts and ends with color. They say they oppose the president on philosophical grounds, not racial ones.

Ron Christie, a black conservative who worked for President George W. Bush, told the Huffington Post that black people support Obama out of “a straitjacket solidarity.”

Farrakhan did nothing to dissuade that support, accusing the Republicans of using a strategy to defeat Obama “so overtly hateful and racist in nature that it has polarized America on the basis of race.”

The Nation of Islam leader has made a career out of such harsh rhetoric. He has been accused of fueling dissent among the races, anti-Semitism and homophobia. He denied the accusations Sunday, saying he speaks truth as he sees it.

While saying that he “loves my homosexual brothers and sisters,” he said they are disobeying prohibitions set out in the Bible and Koran. “Now you want to change God’s ways so God doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

He also addressed an audience largely absent from the room: white America.

“What have I done that you could hate me so?” he said.

He then answered his own question with harsh words that had the arena on its feet: “You can’t buy me, and you can’t make me into your n—–.”

Farrakhan’s audience was largely local but drew African-Americans from across the country – old and young, Muslim and Christian, dark suits and elegant dresses, sweatshirts and jeans. Ticket prices ranged from $20 to $100. Security was tight, with male reporters being vigorously frisked.

He was backed on stage by members of his family, out-of-town African-American Muslim leaders and several of Charlotte’s prominent black religious and political figures, from the city’s NAACP President Kojo Nantambu to the Rev. Dwayne Walker, pastor of Little Rock AME Zion Church, and Mecklenburg County Commissioner Vilma Leake.

During his weekend visit, he spoke to students at Johnson C. Smith University and taught a leadership seminar at Walker’s church. He said he had been treated well by the city, and “Charlotte could be our second home.”

Farrakhan, wearing a deep tan suit, showed no signs of his age (he turns 80 next May). His voice ranged from a rasp to a roar. He frequently pounded his podium, and while his topics veered from politics to race to international affairs, his words at times brought thunderous responses.

He said the U.S. “War on Terrorism” had morphed into a “War on Islam” that had left the Middle East more unstable than ever. He also criticized Muslims who would subjugate women. “Educate your women,” he said. “Allah is not pleased.”

He spoke of rising tide of diversity that America must embrace or “you will die.

“But you won’t take us down with you.”