[ad_1]
LITTLE HAVANA, Florida (Reuters) – A wave of support from Hispanic voters gave President Donald Trump a narrow victory in Florida on Tuesday night, increasing his chances of re-election.
Trump, who won the state in 2016, topped his 2016 margins with Florida’s Hispanic voters, who made up 19% of all state voters. Much of the change occurred in Miami-Dade, the county that contains Florida’s largest Cuban and Venezuelan communities, many of which are strongly anti-leftist.
Trump and his allies have frequently painted opponent Joe Biden, a moderate Democrat, either as a socialist himself or as a supporter of the “radical left.” Some Miami voters told Reuters this caught their attention.
Trump also ate up Latino support for Democrats in Texas, the results showed. It was not yet clear how this will affect the overall race for the presidency, which may not be called for days.
Nationally, Trump garnered a higher proportion of non-white voter support, compared to 2016, according to Edison Research exit polls, offsetting a decline in support among whites compared to his successful run against Hillary Clinton. . Support for Trump this year increased by three points among all Latinos and by 15 points among the oldest; it jumped 11 points among black voters between the ages of 30 and 44.
The jump among Latinos comes despite Trump’s tough stance on immigration and his administration’s treatment of asylum seekers, a hallmark of his presidency.
“The increase in Latinos is real and it is happening across the country,” White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany tweeted Tuesday night.
Biden can still win the election with victories in other states. If he loses, part of the blame can be attributed to his lack of engagement with Latino voters, said Jaime Regalado, a political science professor at California State University, Los Angeles.
“It just wasn’t there,” Regalado said. “He didn’t spend a lot of time courting Latinos until the last two weeks of the season. It could turn out to be a big mistake.”
Biden’s campaign had no comment Tuesday night, but in recent weeks and months the campaign has challenged criticism from some Democrats that it did not focus enough on this demographic.
Unofficial results Tuesday night showed that Trump was winning about 47% of the Hispanic vote in Florida, increasing his vote share in the county during 2016 by about 12 percentage points.
That twist denied Biden the votes he needed from South Florida to balance Trump’s strength in the mostly rural Panhandle and win all 29 votes from the Florida Electoral College.
Starr County, Texas, which is 99% Latino, had an even more dramatic change: in 2016, fewer than 19% of the votes went to Trump; this year he won almost half the votes.
‘OPPORTUNITY, NOT BROCHURES’
Jose Cuevas, 62, the owner of a cabinet-making company, who was celebrating Trump’s victory at Versailles, a popular Cuban hangout in Little Havana on Tuesday night, said he arrived in the United States in 1968 when Cubans escaped communism.
“They took everything from us. We were adopted by the United States with open arms,” Cuevas said.
“We came here for opportunities, not handouts. I firmly believe that it is that mentality of well-being that the Democrats sell to create their base and that it goes completely against the Cubans.”
Biden, a three-decade senator who voted for free trade agreements and calls himself a capitalist, beat Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist senator from Vermont, in the Democratic Party nomination race with promises of more policy. moderate.
Still, Trump’s efforts to label Democrats socialists may have been crucial in Florida, said Sergio Garcia-Ríos, a professor of Latino and government studies at Cornell University. “That mobilized many Cuban Americans,” he said.
Florida Republican Party Chairman Joe Gruters said Trump’s message had resonated with many voters in South Florida. “People want safety and security in their communities. They want freedom and liberty. They don’t want to back down,” Gruters said. “They want to live in a capitalist society where anyone has the opportunity to move up and do things right themselves.”
The Trump campaign worked to erode Biden’s margins among voters of color, specifically targeting certain groups. Florida Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Núñez, a Cuban American from Miami, co-chaired the national group Latinos for Trump.
Trump also appealed to evangelical Hispanic voters, holding an event at the 7,000-capacity Rey Jesus International Ministry church in Miami in January, which is led by Pastor Guillermo Maldonado.
Latino Democratic activists complained that Biden was ignoring Hispanic voters and, in the weeks leading up to the election, opinion polls in key states showed that Biden was underperforming with Latinos.
Biden’s campaign chose to focus on Puerto Ricans in Florida because the former community has grown since Hurricane Maria in 2017, a person briefed on the campaign’s strategy said.
(Reporting by Simon Lewis in Clearwater, Florida, and Zachary Fagenson in Little Havana, Florida; Additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Timothy Reid; Editing by Heather Timmons and Frances Kerry)
[ad_2]
