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Tuesday, September 15, 2020
By Roland Peters
If Joe Biden wants to move into the White House, he has to convince Latinos. It is not so easy with your past. Also caught in the permanent attacks of US President Trump.
In just two weeks, the US election campaign will turn into an election. First, the documents will be sent to citizens abroad next weekend. But more importantly, vote by mail in Florida begins on September 24. Every television ad, every campaign appearance, every scandal will directly generate or cost votes. If Trump doesn’t win Florida, he will most likely lose the election as well. It has been that way for almost a century.
As elsewhere, the race in Florida is closed. Challenger Joe Biden entered the polls against Trump in late July with an increase of as much as 8.4 percent. It seemed that the state of the Mar-a-Lago golf course, where President Donald Trump loves to spend his free time, could be nearing the end of his term. But now it looks different again. The Democratic leadership in the polls has disappeared.
More than 20 percent of eligible voters in Florida are Latino. Biden isn’t doing well with them either, and she’s only on Trump’s level. At that time in 2016, Hillary Clinton reached 59 percent of Latinos in Florida, up from 36 percent for Trump. Still, Trump ended up winning the state by 1.2 percent. Why does Biden have such problems?
Proportionally fewer white voters
Florida is considered a key state that all Republican candidates have had to vote for since 1924 to become president. But the stakes are also high in other states with large Latino populations, such as Arizona or Nevada. Latino politicians simply say that Biden is doing little to convince voters. According to widespread criticism, he focused his election campaign too much on black and white. In short, while the fact that he was Barack Obama’s vice president helps him with African Americans, this past also makes Latinos skeptical.
In the 2020 presidential election, Latinos will constitute the largest group of voters after whites for the first time. The Democrats and Biden depend as much on them as on the African-American group. Together with Americans of Asian descent, they make up a third of the electorate, a higher proportion than ever. The other two thirds are considered white. Biden can be sure of the majority of the votes of non-white voters, but for a possible overall victory it is decisive with what advantage. Just a few percentage points could give Trump another four years in office.
Nationwide in August, Biden’s Pew research found 89 percent among African Americans, 67 percent among Asian Americans, but only 63 percent among Latinos. Latino politicians criticize that there is no detailed plan for immigration reform and that there are too few Latinos in Biden’s inner circle. Bernie Sanders, the party’s left-wing leader, who fared much better than Biden in the Latino primaries, also called for a more aggressive strategy to attract voters from this group.
Democrats now want to take countermeasures. Michael Bloomberg announced that he would spend $ 100 million on advertising in Florida to convince early voters of Biden. Due to the corona virus, around 80 million postal voters are expected nationwide, more than double the number in 2016. Biden’s election campaign team has already hired new Latino experts and produced television commercials in Spanish, according to the American media.
Additionally, Biden travels to Florida for the first time since the shutdown began in March, to an event that should emphasize the importance of Latinos to society. There, it will not be easy to address the diverse Latino electorate either: in Florida, these are Cubans in exile and their descendants born in the United States, Venezuelans in exile, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and Colombians, each with different interests.
Cubans in exile don’t want a “socialist”
Republicans and Trump have been attacking Democrats for months, claiming they belong to the “radical left” or are their puppets. These arguments are listened to with special attention in Florida: Cubans in exile and now Venezuelans in exile come from officially socialist countries, but they no longer want to have anything to do with it. First-generation Cubans in exile are mostly Republican supporters and advocate tough sanctions policies against the Cuban government.
The president’s argument that he has already led the economy to historically outstanding figures and can now do so again may also be successful. Latinos are particularly affected by the economic crisis: in June, reported unemployment in the United States was 11.2 percent, among Latinos it was 14.5 percent. In the case of Nevada, Latinos suffer particularly from the fact that many gaming tables and other facilities in Las Vegas are down.
Trump’s support for religious conservatives and his harsh crackdown on protests across the country also meet with approval, said the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the largest Latino civil rights organization in the United States. At the same time, Democrats lack a major bill that electrifies voters, such as health insurance for all, which Biden rejects, or clearly laid out immigration reform in the first 100 days of his term. In other words: Biden should move more to the left.
About four million Latinos received health insurance for the first time thanks to Obamacare, and people who were brought to the United States by their parents when they were minors and therefore did not have a residence permit were exempt from deportation. But in addition to the lack of enthusiasm for Biden, there is a good memory of his past: During the Obama presidency, more immigrants were deported than ever, a total of more than 2.5 million people. Almost all were Latino.
The majority of immigrants to the United States come from Latin America and represent two-thirds of those who come without a visa. At the same time, however, Obama had almost only deported Latinos, and especially from jails, they were sent back to their countries of origin. Latino civil rights activists gave Obama a bitter nickname: “Sportsman in Chief.” The “Supreme Deportation” of which Biden was an assistant.
