‘Republicans built the base’: how Joe Biden lost Florida’s Latino voters

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As the coronavirus raged across Florida this summer, and the Democratic party was concentrating on locking in the support of the state’s hordes of senior voters, Donald Trump’s campaign was focused in an entirely different direction.

In the streets of Miami’s Little Havana and Doral neighborhoods, the Puerto Rican communities of Orlando and Kissimmee, and Cuban-American areas of Tampa, activists from Latinos for Trump and other Republican groups were knocking on doors and talking to families and business owners. They delivered a simple message: “Joe Biden is a radical socialist. Donald Trump is your friend.”

And for some of Miami’s Cubans and Venezuelans in particular, familiar with communism and authoritarian rule in their homelands, despite “red baiting” not being a new tactic, it was “kryptonite”, Trump activists claimed.

Whatever their motivations, on Tuesday, across the state but mostly in Miami-Dade county, home to 2 million Latinos, voters turned out in droves to hand the president victory by a margin significantly larger than his 2016 success.

Trump’s victory cannot be attributed solely to south Florida’s Latino voters, of course. A Miami Herald analysis showed the president’s gains elsewhere would still have won him the state by some 170,000 votes, even without his supercharged performance in Florida’s most populous county.

But their support was a crucial building block, and part of a trend that appeared to be reflected nationwide as Trump made inroads with Latino and other minority voters. Many prominent Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have long been concerned about the party’s vulnerabilities with Latino voters; and in Florida, local workers were worried about the Republicans’ strong ground game while their own campaigning was almost entirely virtual because of the pandemic.

In Miami, Trump didn’t win the county, but restricted his opponent’s margin of victory to fewer than 85,000 votes. It denied Biden the valuable ballots he needed to counter a strong showing for the president in the mostly white rural counties in south-west Florida and the Panhandle.

As Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor and a staunch Trump ally put it: “When you lose Miami-Dade by only 10 points or thereabouts as a Republican, you’re going to win statewide.”

The Latino voter “bloodbath” in Miami, in the words of the Democratic activist Raul Martinez Jr, was not just limited to the presidential race. Two established US congresswomen, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala, were ousted by Republicans, and like Biden were falsely portrayed by their opponents as radicals with a socialist agenda.

Latinos offer lukewarm enthusiasm for Biden after Democrat fails to woo voters

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“Obviously anyone that has experienced socialism or communism, whether it be in Cuba or Venezuela, it’s basically just kryptonite when they hear those words,” said Katrina Campins, a Cuban-American real estate agent in Miami and an advisory board member of Latinos for Trump.

“So it was very important to them to go out and vote for President Trump because he stands for the same things that they stand up for, which is freedom first and foremost, and family. No one wants to be a socialist and communist and a lot of people, my parents included, were having and still have PTSD from what they went through, and the Castro regime.”

Campins, who was a contestant on Trump’s reality series The Apprentice in 2004, said any candidate seeking the support of Hispanic and Latino voters needed a deep understanding of their diversity. “What people don’t understand is that you can’t just box anybody into Latinos or Hispanics, you have to understand the culture. Everybody’s different, everybody has things that are important to them,” she said.

“Joe Biden really missed the mark on that. He thought that by playing the song Despacito he would get the Latino vote. It was embarrassing to watch him do that, you know?”

Other analysts agree that Biden was “out to lunch” when it came to courting Latino voters.

“For a state like this with a 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans, anybody who brings 150,000 votes to the party gets the girl,” said Guillermo Grenier, a Cuban-born professor of sociology at Florida International University and the co-author of the book This Land is Our Land: Immigrants and Power in Miami.

“From Reagan, through the 80s and 90s to the present, Republicans built a strong ground game, they are on the ground filling out the immigration papers for the people who can’t speak English, filling out Social Security paperwork, driving people to the polls. They actually built the base.

“Democrats need to establish a ground game. They can’t fly in Obama and talk about Cuba every four years. They need to develop a strategy that will deal with Cuban Hispanics as citizens not as exiles, not as folks that care more about foreign policy than they do about domestic policy.”

Democrats need to establish a ground game. They can’t fly in Obama and talk about Cuba every four years

Guillermo Grenier

Grenier also believes Trump’s “socialism” messaging over Biden, while effective, was not the central issue that drove Latino voters to the polls.

“I don’t know if people buy it,” he said. “It was not an issue during the Clinton-Trump campaign, that meme did not make it into the Republican narrative. Now the Democrats kind of call attention to themselves as being democratic socialists in a way, so it entered the Republican narrative as a national message. You have people in West Virginia saying we don’t want socialists right, like they’d know socialism.

“But it does resonate more in south Florida because it is shorthand for all of the things that the Democratic party can be slammed on. It resonates because the Republican party has done its work here for the last 40 years building a really strong echo chamber. The Cubans live in a kind of a Republican bubble here, and I think when the dust settles we’ll find Trump probably didn’t get a great amount of votes more than when he ran against Hillary Clinton. It’s just that Hillary Clinton turned out more people.”