2020
ELECTIONS
Biden makes sharp pivot toward Latino vote
The former veep is addressing some longstanding
criticisms of his outreach efforts.
By MARC
CAPUTO
07/13/2020
07:09 PM EDT
Updated:
07/13/2020 10:33 PM EDT
Dogged over
his relatively weak support among Latinos in both the primary and general
elections, Joe Biden is conducting a massive turnaround campaign, hiring a rash
of Hispanic operatives, spending $1 million in Spanish-language outreach and,
this week, signing one of the nation’s top pollsters in the field, Latino
Decisions.
A raft of
recent general election polls shows Biden with a solid lead nationwide and in
many battleground states. He’s already leading among Hispanic voters. But if
Biden can get the same level of support and turnout as Hillary Clinton did in
2016 — while continuing to do better than she did among black and white voters
— he’s all but guaranteed to win the crucial battlegrounds of Florida and
Arizona, which would effectively deny President Trump a second term.
“There’s a
huge opportunity,” said Matt Barreto, Latino Decisions co-founder and pollster
who also worked for Clinton’s campaign, adding it “did an okay job” with Latino
turnout and support levels.
Now,
though, Trump has a record on immigration, Puerto Rico, healthcare, coronavirus
response and foreign policy — and Democrats learned from Florida’s last
election that failing to aggressively reach out to Latino voters cost them the
governor’s office and the retention of a U.S. Senate seat.
“In 2018,
some of the statewide campaigns in Florida did not have robust Latino
engagement,” Barreto said. “Puerto Rican turnout in Central Florida was not
robust.”
Biden’s
campaign plans to harness the “incredible anger” among Puerto Rican voters in
Florida over Trump’s handling of Hurricane Maria in 2017, Barreto says. And it
sees an opening to increase support levels in border-state Arizona, where
Latinos have “been deeply influenced by the immigrant rights movement, especially
younger Latinos, and that is very bad news for Donald Trump. Already, 2018
demonstrated that heightened Latino turnout can flip the state, and with
continued investment in Latino outreach, 2020 could follow the same path as
2018.”
The
campaign, he said, is ready to “pivot in South Florida and have different
messages on the diversity of the community there, whether you’re talking to the
Cubans who were born in Cuba or born in the United States, South Americans ...
and engaging Latinos where they are and the issues that matters to them.”
The Biden
campaign already began doing that in its Spanish-language TV ads that started
running last month in Florida and Arizona.
In Tucson
and Phoenix, the ads were narrated by a Mexican-accented Spanish-speaker. In
Miami, the narrator spoke in a Cuban accent. And in Orlando and Tampa, the
narrator‘s voice was Puerto Rican.
“We’re not
taking anything for granted in this election,” said Jennifer Molina, Biden’s
Latino Media. “The Latino vote is critically important, which is why we’re
bringing on Latino Decisions to help us with our messaging and outreach in
order to engage with Latino voters on why Joe Biden is the best choice for
President.”
Molina
joined the campaign this month along with Pili Tobar, communications director
for voter coalitions, and Juan Penalosa, a senior adviser in Florida. They join
Julie Chavez Rodriguez, hired in May as a senior adviser, and the campaign’s
national Latino engagement director, Laura Jimenez, and a handful of other
operatives with specialties in persuading and turning out Hispanic voters.
In a
written statement, the Trump campaign said the president‘s values are shared by
Hispanic voters who “are motivated by jobs, education, family, faith and
community values. Those are core values for President Donald Trump and
Republicans and leave little room for wondering why we continue to win in
Florida.”
Biden
advisers and campaign insiders, who acknowledge Biden has ground to make up
with Hispanic voters if he wants to put Trump away, say the heightened focus on
Latinos is driven by common-sense campaign strategy. But it’s also a reflection
of the greatly improved finances of the once cash-strapped campaign.
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Trump has a
cash advantage and he has been using it on TV — the president’s reelection
campaign has spent nearly $1.2 million on Spanish-language TV ads in Arizona
and Florida in the past three weeks, according to the Advertising Analytics
tracking firm, which found that Biden’s campaign has spent less than $100,000
on TV in that time. Including Spanish-language radio spots and digital ads, the
Biden campaign said it is on pace to spend $1 million in five weeks. An outside
group, Nuestro PAC, is also giving Biden Spanish-language air-support.
With the
extra spending and new hires, Biden has made a sharp pivot toward addressing
the longstanding criticisms of his Latino outreach from fellow Democrats, who
have grown increasingly bullish on his chances of winning in November.
The Biden
campaign’s continuing embrace of digital campaigning amid the pandemic could
have a beneficial effect when it comes to outreach because Latino voters are
disproportionately young and digitally connected.
Still, the
most recent Trump ad focusing on crime and underfunded police departments made
an impression on Spanish-speaking voters in South Florida who were part of a
focus group conducted by Democrats, according to a source familiar with them.
“We’ve got
some problem areas we need to fix, especially down in Miami,” said one Democrat
familiar with the Biden campaign’s research that shows him lagging Clinton’s
2016 totals in Florida’s biggest county, Miami-Dade, which also has the largest
proportion of Hispanic voters.
The
campaign’s Latino outreach will extend to other battlegrounds, where a Latino
Decisions poll released Friday shows problems for Trump, Barreto said.
“Beyond
Arizona and Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania have large and growing
Latino populations that could ultimately decide a very close election,” he
said. “Our research in these two states suggest over 70% of Latinos oppose
Trump's divisive rhetoric and see Biden as fighting for Latinos.”
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