By Suzanne Gamboa - NBC News
President Donald Trump is doing well with Latino voters in Florida, prompting the Democratic nominee Joe Biden's campaign to beef up its polls of Hispanics and try to
get closer to them than any recent presidential campaign.
Biden's campaign just surveyed 1,800 Florida Latinos, compared with just 600 Hispanics who were surveyed for the 2016 campaign, Matt Barreto, part of Latino Decisions firm who temporarily withdrew from, told NBC News. your position to work on the former vice president team.
Asking more people “allows us to
study Latino voters in the same way that we have studied white voters
over several years, so that we can better focus on them, review the different groups - who are college graduates, which ones? they are married - and have the same level of sophistication in getting to know the Latino community, ”said Barreto.
This also makes it possible to better target digital and mailed announcements to each subgroup of Latino voters, so that the issues that are most important to them are discussed in a more engaging way.
The strategy is part of the
battle to get the support of those who live in one of the "pendulum" states
, key by the number of votes in the Electoral College and whose party preferences are not defined.
In this fight, Hispanic Florida voters are being segmented to seek to attract them also according to their cultural differences.
[President Trump and Joe Biden are tied in Florida, according to poll]
Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, campaigned on September 10 in Doral, an area of Florida with a large Venezuelan population.
Although he did not disclose the results of the poll, the fact that it was conducted is proof of how focused Biden's campaign is on Florida.
In the last week, there has been panic among Democrats, as electoral preference polls show that Trump has more support from Hispanics in the state than he did in 2016, even though Biden is the candidate with the most general support at the state level.
The surge in support for Trump is due to his popularity among Cuban-Americans and Venezuelan-Americans
, according to experts.
Out of 500 voters in Miami-Dade, where the majority of the state's voters of Cuban descent live, 38% more Cuban-Americans support Trump than Biden, according to the poll, conducted by Bendixen & Amadi with the Miami Herald.
Candidates are tied for the voting preference of Hispanic Floridians overall.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton obtained 62% of the Latino vote, although more than half of Cuban-Americans voted for Trump, 54%.
The combat of messages
Florida Democrats began to warn for months that the party was not responding strongly enough to
attacks by Republicans on how Democratic proposals are supposedly "socialist,"
which Trump's party says to appeal primarily to voters of descent. Cuban and Venezuelan.
(In those countries, supposedly socialist governments have rigid state control that has contributed to famine; some Democrats rather promote public intervention on issues such as universal health care.)
Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have made several visits to South Florida and there boasted their hard line towards the Venezuelan and Cuban regimes.
Donald Trump supporters during the 2016 Republican National ConventionReuters
[Plan your vote: everything you need to know to cast your vote this 2020]
On the first weekend of September, Biden stressed that Trump's policies towards Venezuela and Cuba have been "resounding failures" in an interview with WTVJ, NBC's Miami television station.
Biden indicated that those Latin American countries have ended up in worse circumstances during Trump's term.
Democrats have also been painting Trump as a caudillo who contravenes government institutions in a similar way to Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro.
“
We
all
knew Florida was going to be tight.
We know that Cuban voters, but also Venezuelans and others, tend to be conservative.
That is why it is so important that there is investment and strategy from the beginning, ”said Vanessa Cárdenas, a Democratic political strategist who was part of Biden's campaign in the primaries.
"By now,
less than 50 days before the election, it is the moment when everyone should get down to work,
" added Cárdenas.
Stephanie Valencia, co-founder and president of EquisLabs, noted that while Trump has increased his support among Cuban-Americans, a recent poll by Equis suggests that he has reached a peak among that demographic.
53% of Latino voters overall say they would vote for Biden and 37% that they would vote for Trump in that poll
, conducted of 1,081 Hispanics in Florida between August 20 and 25.
[How important is the Latino vote in the November elections]
Almost a third of the people surveyed are of Cuban descent;
24% are Puerto Rican;
18% are from South American nations, and 16% are Spanish.
The other groups of Latino descent had less than 10% representation in the survey.
"What is really important for the Democrats and for Joe Biden is to reach out to those Cuban-Americans who are still undecided and who could still support Biden," added Valencia, as well as attracting Puerto Ricans and people of Colombian, Mexican, Guatemalan, Costa Rican descent. , Dominican, Spanish and more that were polled.
Promote the Puerto Rican vote
About 3.1 million Latinos in the United States have the right to vote in Florida.
In 2018, the increase in voters compared to 2016 had been especially pronounced in counties with Puerto Rican populations.
Bernard Fraga, associate professor of political science at Emory University, said the expanded polls and more announcements from Biden's campaign are key because
the coronavirus has had an impact on people registering to vote and mobilizing people to vote. go to the polls
.
There is said to be little electoral enthusiasm in reaction to Biden, but Fraga said it could be that the COVID-19 pandemic has made the process of contacting voters difficult.
“Trump may do well with Cuban-Americans or South Americans, but Biden is expected to do much better with Puerto Ricans.
And that is a population that is difficult to survey, considering that many barely arrived, ”said Fraga.
[Trump thought about swapping Puerto Rico, which he called a "dirty" and "poor" country, for Greenland, says former official]
In an attempt to appeal to Puerto Ricans, a recent Biden ad was released with music by Bad Bunny.
The ad, titled "But No Longer," shows shots of Trump mixed with images of families being separated at the border or of migrants in cages, as well as video of protests for police reform and with the recording of Trump throwing them paper towels to Puerto Ricans affected by the passage of Hurricane Maria in 2017.
The campaign also created another version of the digital ad designed for more Latino groups, with the song “Decepciones”, by the Mexican Alejandro Fernández.
In keeping with his outreach to Puerto Ricans, Biden recently retweeted a report on the Trump Administration's efforts to deprive the Puerto Rican population of Supplemental Security Income disability benefits.
The Democrat's campaign also published a document to commemorate the Cuban patron saint, Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, and statements denouncing the deportation of Nicaraguan asylum seekers.
In the ranks of Biden's aides,
Julie Chávez Rodríguez, granddaughter of civil rights activist Cesar Chavez, was promoted as deputy campaign manager;
In addition, Adrian Saenz, formerly director for the Latino vote with Obama, was tasked with coordinating the mailings of campaign messages, and Jorge Neri, a veteran of the Obama campaign, was appointed as a senior advisor.
For its part, Trump's team did not say if it is reaching out to each group that makes up the Hispanic voting bloc.
In an e-mail statement, the campaign said:
"We understand that Hispanics are not a monolith that decides on a single issue."
He added that Biden and the Democrats "have leaned too far to the left and are not in line with Hispanic American voters."
[Florida's Lt. Governor, Cuban-American Jeanette Núñez, advocates for Trump]
The fight for Florida voters was also seen throughout this week: Trump campaigned in the south of the state on Tuesday while Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris was in the state where she visited on Thursday without prior announcement. Doral, main home of the Venezuelan community of Florida.
The
Venezuelans are Latino subgroup that is growing fastest in the
United States.
Barreto, the pollster, said the broader polls and contacts with Latinos are not just taking place in Florida.
Latino voter polls have also been conducted in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, where there were no Hispanic polls in 2016.
