US Election: mission Latino strategy a game-changer
Donald Trump’s Florida victory was not declared officially until after midnight, but the outcome was clear hours earlier.
Donald Trump’s Florida victory was not declared officially until after midnight, but the outcome was clear hours earlier as he muscled through vote-rich Miami-Dade County with much higher support than he earned there four years ago.
Democrat Hillary Clinton won Miami-Dade by 30 percentage points in 2016, but Democrat Joe Biden’s advantage fell to seven points, severely hampering his chances of winning the state. He was undercut by relentless attacks by Republicans who claimed Democrats would bring about socialism, a campaign aimed at Latinos who make up two-thirds of the population of Florida’s most populous county.
“It’s a failure of epic proportions,” said Florida-based Democrat consultant Kevin Cate, who added that Democrats had been warning about Mr Biden’s weakness with Latinos for months.
Overall, Mr Trump won Florida — and its 29 electoral votes — by three points, up from his 1.2-percentage-point margin in 2016.
Miami-Dade was responsible for 75 per cent of Mr Trump’s gain in net votes.
Mr Trump won 45 per cent of Florida Latino voters, better than the 35 per cent he earned nationally with that group, according to the AP VoteCast survey.
He won 58 per cent of those of Cuban heritage, according to the survey, conducted October 28-November 3 by social research organisation NORC at the University of Chicago. It has a margin of error of plus or minus less than one point on the national sample and plus or minus two points in the Florida survey.
Miami’s Cuban-American population, the largest in the US, has always favoured Republicans, but younger generations had begun to shift toward Democrats. Mr Trump, though, focused on Florida Latinos from early in his re-election campaign, casting Democrats as the party of socialism in hopes of appealing to voters with ties to countries that have leftist governments. He kept up that message after Mr Biden, who campaigned in the primaries as a moderate, became the Democrat nominee, saying the former vice-president would be pushed to the left by others in his party.
Republicans said Mr Trump’s appeal for Latinos also crossed a number of other issues, including the economy. While minorities have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment levels had plummeted among Latinos before the new virus took hold. And some Latinos are socially conservative, and Mr Trump during the campaign here highlighted his outreach to faith groups and his efforts to curb abortions.
Maria Masis Tabango, a 47-year-old Republican from Nicaragua, said as she stood outside a polling station in Miami Lakes that she voted for Mr Trump on Tuesday, her first time casting a ballot in a US presidential election. She regarded him as a strong steward of the economy and liked his emphasis on religious issues and closeness to faith leaders.
“They are more inclined toward communism,” Ms Masis Tabango said of Democrats.
Cuban-American voters make up about 30 per cent of Florida’s 2.4 million registered Hispanic voters. Mr Trump’s message also was targeted to other Latinos in Miami-Dade, particularly a growing Venezuelan community whose homeland has been in turmoil, as well as Colombians and Nicaraguans. Throughout his presidency, Mr Trump has tailored Latin American policy towards these constituencies, reversing his predecessor’s thaw with Cuba and squeezing the Nicolas Maduro regime with sanctions.
“Virtually every Hispanic voter in South Florida is either directly themselves or indirectly through relatives a traumatised victim of a socialist or communist totalitarian government,” said Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democrat pollster.
Socialism, he said, was a trigger word that if left unchallenged “leaves the impression that maybe the Democrats aren’t responding because it’s true”.
Mr Amandi sounded alarms about the Latino vote before the 2018 mid-term election, when incumbent Democrat senator Bill Nelson was defeated by then- governor Rick Scott, who heavily courted Latinos, and Democrats lost a close race for governor.
Mr Trump made Florida a focus of his first campaign and never let up, Mr Amandi said, down to a big rally on Sunday night in Miami: “While Republicans were investing every hour and dollar in winning the state, the Democrats were whistling past the graveyard.”
Mr Biden also spent time in Florida, as did his running mate, Kamala Harris. His campaign ran Spanish-language ads in the state hitting Mr Trump for his handling of the pandemic, which has hit Latino communities and older voters, two big Florida constituencies.
Biden adviser Christian Ulvert said: “There was a concerted effort by the Trump campaign and their allies to misrepresent Joe Biden and his values because they knew they couldn’t win on Trump’s disastrous record.”
In a September television interview in Wisconsin, Mr Biden referred to his defeat of Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, in the Democrat primary. “I beat the socialist,” he said. “Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist.”
Some Democrats in Florida say he wasn’t aggressive enough and criticised the campaign for relying too much on gaining with other voters, including seniors, who polls showed were turned off by Mr Trump’s behaviour and handling of the new coronavirus.
Mr Trump’s campaign didn’t give up on door-to-door outreach amid the pandemic, as Democrats did for much of the year. Republicans say that was crucial to driving turnout on Election Day. The Trump campaign said it made more than 25 million voter contacts across the state and had 200 staffers devoted to Florida.
The damage in Miami-Dade extended beyond the presidential contest, as Democrats on Tuesday saw two congressional seats fall to Republicans.
Mr Trump also made gains in other areas with Latino concentrations, including Broward and Osceola counties, said Matthew Isbell, a Democratic elections analyst. Mr Biden did better than Mrs Clinton in many counties, he said, and flipped some, including Pinellas, Duval and Seminole.
Democrats enjoyed an advantage in the television ad wars. Since September 1, Mr Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee had spent $US79m in Florida, compared with $40m for the Trump campaign and the GOP, data from ad-tracking firm Kantar/CMAG showed. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg also poured money into digital and TV ads in Spanish and English to help Mr Biden in Florida.
Yet it wasn’t enough to counter the flood of votes for Mr Trump in Miami-Dade. “Hispanic Democrats were lagging Hispanic Republicans in turnout heading into election day, so the electorate was more GOP-heavy than it otherwise should have been,” Mr Isbell said.
The Wall Street Journal
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