As Trump makes gains, Biden needs to step up Latino outreach
Joe Biden is likely to win Latino voters in Texas and across the country in this year’s presidential election. That shouldn’t come as a surprise.
But with the Nov. 3 election just weeks away, Biden isn’t walking away with the hugely important Latino vote. Polls show the former vice president is underperforming among these voters relative to Hillary Clinton in 2016 — while President Donald Trump has made some gains in recent months.
A new poll from the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation finds Biden winning 48 percent of Latino voters in Texas, compared to 38 percent who favor Trump. That’s a 10-point margin, which is anemic when you compare it with the 27-percent margin of victory that exit polls showed Clinton receiving among Latino Texans in 2016.
Recent polls in Florida have also shown Trump making inroads among Latino voters who were relatively skeptical of his candidacy in 2016.
Those polls have elicited plenty of consternation among Democrats, as well as glee among Republicans, in part because they subvert expectations.
Biden is a moderate and a Catholic from a working-class background, meaning he might be able to find some common ground with Latino voters in states like Texas and Florida, who tend to be more conservative than Latino voters in California and New York.
Trump, by contrast, hasn’t exactly made Latino outreach a priority until recently. He launched his bid for the Republican presidential nomination with a 2015 speech slurring Mexicans as “criminals” and “rapists” and then boasted he would build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it. As president, he has led an administration with a notoriously draconian approach to immigration across the southern border, including an overt policy of family separations. Moreover, Trump’s bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic, and the ensuing economic fallout, has
taken a particularly heavy toll on Latino families.
“No community has been more affected by COVID-19 than the Latino community,” said Rebecca Acuña, the Texas state director for Biden’s campaign, in a virtual news conference with several South Texas Democratic leaders last week.
Experts have long warned against making sweeping assumptions about Latino voters, a diverse subset of the electorate.
“First of all, let’s not forget that even though Latinos have historically been more Democratic than Republican, there’s still a chunk of Latinos that are Republican,” said Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, a professor at the University of Texas’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, in an interview this last week.
In Texas, it’s a relatively large chunk. Republicans running for statewide office since the mid-1990s have managed to win roughly a third of Latino voters, if not more, since George W. Bush — on the advice of political strategist Karl Rove — led the Texas GOP to recognize the importance of competing effectively in an increasingly diverse statewide electorate.
Even in the Trump era, Texas Republicans have managed to retain relatively high levels of Latino support. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who is of Cuban descent, won 35 percent of Latino voters on his way to squeaking out a reelection victory over then-U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke in 2018.
And Democrats who assumed that Trump would prove uniquely noxious to Latino voters shouldn’t have assumed that his Democratic challenger could afford to be complacent.
“Biden never really introduced himself to the Hispanic population, right?” DeFrancesco Soto said.
He’s starting to do that now — somewhat belatedly, she continued. Even at the Democratic National Convention, held virtually last month, there were relatively few Latino leaders on the primetime stage.
Meanwhile, DeFrancesco Soto added, Trump has been reaching out to Latino voters.
“Trump has been putting in the work, especially in Florida and a little bit here in Texas,” DeFrancesco Soto said. “He’s up with ads, he’s Facebook messaging — they may not be the most sophisticated ads, but he’s out there.”
(And this week, multiple news organizations reported that he was considering Judge Barbara Lagoa, a Cuban-American from Florida, for the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death Friday of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)
Former state Rep. Jason Villalba, president of the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation, said he would have expected polls to show Biden running closer to Clinton’s benchmark. But, like DeFrancesco Soto, he can make sense of the numbers as they are.
“Clinton had an institutional step up because of her relationship with her husband,” said Villalba, referring to former President Bill Clinton. Biden, he argues, is a lesser-known figure among Texas voters, even though he served for eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president. And prior to securing his party’s presidential nomination, Villalba added, Biden’s outreach to Latino voters was limited, compared to that of some of his rivals.
“During the primary, Bernie Sanders did so well with Latinos because he really committed significant time and resources and people to engagement,” Villalba observed. “He did a really good job cultivating that over the course of time.”
Trump’s brio, Villalba suggested, may help explain why his group’s poll found a significant gender gap among Latino voters, as well as improved overall support for Trump: “Someone with Trump’s machismo, and his populist message, that really resonates with Hispanic men.”
Bianca Garcia, the president of Latinos for Trump, told the Chronicle’s Alejandro Serrano that she agreed with Trump’s stance on strengthening the border and appreciated how he “tells it like it is.” She said he also understands the struggles of those running small businesses, like herself.
Experts agree there is the potential for massive turnout this year, which presumably would benefit Biden and downballot Democrats. The Texas Secretary of State this week reported that the state now has a record-high 16.6 million registered voters, an increase of more than 800,000 people since 2018.
And in Texas, at least, the Biden team is trying to make up for lost time. His statewide leadership team, announced last month, is led by Latinas from South Texas — Acuña and Jennifer Longoria — as state director and deputy state director respectively. The campaign has held numerous virtual events focused on Latino voters since then and conducted direct outreach in English and Spanish — in recognition, Democrats say, of the fact that Latino voters are core to any successful campaign strategy in Texas.
“Our campaign is mobilizing and engaging thousands of Latino voters a week,” Acuña told me.
Latino voters make up some 20 percent of the statewide electorate — so, if Biden can earn the same level of support among Latino voters that Clinton did, he’d likely carry the state.
While the poll results may be puzzling, the takeaway is clear: in the home stretch of this year’s fiercely fought and high-stakes campaign, Biden needs to make Latino voters a priority.