New alliances, coalitions: Miami key to Trump’s bid
Heavy GOP vote buoys incumbent
Heading into the final days of the election, with polls and turnout trends portending another close Florida race, President Donald Trump’s hopes of winning another four years in the White House could very well depend on his ability to squeeze every last drop of red out of Miami-Dade County.
Trump, a Republican who rose to power four years ago on a hardline immigration platform, will touch down late Sunday to speak in the deep blue region of his must-win home state, where more than half the population was born in another country.
The president’s late-night rally — coming less than 48 hours before Election Day — reflects the possibility of a new-look Florida coalition for Trump. Four years after losing Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county, by nearly 300,000 votes, Trump is hoping Cuban-Americans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Colombians will help him survive in a battleground known for deciding elections by razor-thin margins.
“The president lost [Miami-Dade County] by 30
points and he still won the state” in 2016, Florida
Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday night on Fox News before launching into a Republican talking point about Democrats as communists. “He’s now in a situation, with the turnout we’re seeing, he may be able to cut that margin in half. In a county as big as Miami-Dade, that could be a 100,000-vote swing.
And I can tell you being down there, the CubanAmerican community is fired up. The Venezuelan Americans. All the Hispanics who understand the threat that Marxism poses, they are rallying to Donald Trump.”
Trump has a fight on his hands: U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, visited Florida International University in Miami-Dade Saturday to boost votes for Biden, who made campaign stops in Little Havana and Little Haiti this month. Last weekend, former President Barack Obama campaigned in North Miami for Biden, and Obama will be back in South Florida Monday. The Biden campaign has enlisted high-profile Hispanic surrogates, attacked Trump’s reluctance to award deportation protections to Venezuelans and his administration’s continuing deportation of Cuban-Americans, and received millions of dollars in assistance from allies for a final push on the ground to boost lagging turnout among Black and Latino Democrats.
But in a left-leaning county of 1.5 million voters, nearly 300,000 Republicans had already turned out to vote by Saturday morning, by far the most of any county in Florida. The Miami-Dade
GOP, which added 56,000 voters in the last four years, had nearly matched its entire output from 2016 while turning out at a rate 5.5 percentage points higher than the state average for Republicans. Twothirds of the party’s MiamiDade voters — many of them Cuban-American — had cast their ballots as of Saturday morning, at a turnout rate 7 percentage points higher than their Democratic counterparts in the county.
That turnout among Miami Republicans has helped Trump dig out from under a massive ballots-cast deficit in Florida created by a groundswell of Democratic mail ballots. Over the first 12 days of early voting, after Democrats built up a statewide lead of about 500,000 ballots cast, Florida Republicans had come within 117,000 votes of matching them as the election headed into the final weekend of early voting, when Democrats typically turn out in big numbers. More than 8.3 million votes had been cast statewide by Saturday morning.
In Miami-Dade, where there are 200,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans, Democrats had cast more ballots overall but trailed Republicans in votes cast at early voting centers by 5,000 votes and in overall turnout percentage. None of that takes into account the votes of independents, about a quarter-million of whom had voted in Miami-Dade County.
The rush to vote by Miami Republicans follows a series of massive car caravans with pots and pans and giant Trump flags, and boat floatillas that have crisscrossed the diverse patchwork of communities that make up the Miami metro area for months ahead of Tuesday’s election. A Miami salsa trio wrote a song and the president’s reelection campaign made an ad out of it after the group’s members went boating with the president’s son, Eric Trump.
The early voting center at the Westchester Regional Library, located in a largely Cuban-American suburb of Miami-Dade County, where poll workers nosh on free arroz con pollo and Cuban sandwiches, is the busiest in the state.
“What you’re seeing in [Miami-]Dade is that these caravans and everything else are manifesting themselves into votes” for Trump, said Florida Sen. Manny Diaz Jr., among Trump’s most ubiquitous surrogates in Northwest Miami-Dade, where Trump will speak to a crowd as large as 10,000 people Sunday night.
Trump won’t win MiamiDade County in 2020. A Bendixen & Amandi International poll for the Miami Herald in early October found him trailing the Democratic nominee by 20 percentage points, and Biden improving his numbers with CubanAmericans.
But a significantly smaller loss than in 2016 — when he lost the county by 30 points but when on to win the state — would cushion the president’s deficits elsewhere in Florida as polls show him slipping among seniors and suburban women. A narrower loss in Miami-Dade would also help counteract elevated Democratic turnout in adjacent Broward County, the most Democrat-heavy county in Florida, where Biden and Harris stumped Thursday and Saturday.
And few places have gone from cold to hot on Trump quicker than Miami.
Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez, the Miami-born Latinos for Trump cochairwoman, called Trump “the biggest conman there is” on Twitter in 2016 while supporting CubanAmerican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida during the Republican Party’s presidential primary race. The Cuban-American mayor of Miami-Dade County — a Trump-endorsed congressional candidate who may have to lift or exempt a midnight curfew to allow Trump’s Sunday night rally to go on trouble-free — called on Trump to drop out of the race in October 2016, after video emerged of him making lewd comments about women.
The city of Hialeah, which is 80% CubanAmerican, right-leaning and heavily enrolled in Obamacare, split its vote between Trump and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Trump, though, played the long game with his courtship of Miami’s CubaAmerican community, starting before his election in 2016 when he won the first endorsement by veterans of the U.S.-led 1961
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and continuing early in his first term with the rolling back of former President Barack Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba’s communist government during an event at Miami’s Manuel Artime Theater, where he sweated out the ceremony after the air conditioning failed.
As president, Trump has also held a small business roundtable in Hialeah and a White House rally against socialism at FIU, and sent Vice President Mike Pence multiple times to Doral, where Trump’s golf resort is located, to meet with Venezuelan exiles and talk about his administration’s efforts to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. Through it all, he has kept up a steady drumbeat against socialism.
The last time Trump gathered a large crowd in Miami for an in-person event, he spoke at a bilingual megachurch in suburban West Kendall, where a largely Hispanic congregation represents the diverse demographics of Miami’s mostly independent, non-Cuban Hispanic voters. On Wednesday, at the Kendale Lakes Library voting center about a five-mile drive from the El Rey de Jesus sanctuary where Trump appeared last spring, José Rodríguez cast his ballot for the president’s reelection.
“He talks too much,” said the 49-year-old computer technician, who voted alongside his son. “But it’s more of a vote against Democrats. I am really scared for our country and what it could become in the next four years.”
The Friday night hypothetical thrown out by Florida’s governor — that Trump could shave 150,000 or more votes off his 2016 losses in a majority-Hispanic area — would dramatically boost his chances of victory in a state he won by 113,000 votes four years ago. Unlike that election, when the Trump campaign’s understanding of Miami-Dade’s Hispanic community was questionable, Trump has spent millions of dollars this year on Spanish-language TV in Florida and crafted narrowly tailored digital ads to reach Colombians, Venezuelans, Puerto Ricans and Nicaraguans.
Last week, at his Doral resort, Trump gave an interview to Cuban-American social media influencer Alex Otaola, with the help of Cuban-American U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, who translated.
Entering the final weekend, those efforts had juiced turnout among Hispanic Republicans in Miami. But the Florida GOP is also watching the lack of turnout of Black and Hispanic Democrats, as compared to their Republican counterparts, believing the lower turnout for Democrats partly due to the connection Trump has made with Hispanic voters, and the decision by Trump’s campaign to return to in-person campaigning and voter registration amid the pandemic months before Democrats.
“Our permanent, datadriven ground game coupled with President Trump’s ‘promises made, promises kept’ agenda will deliver Florida again for the President on November 3,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez.
Whether that trend continues through the weekend matters to the outcome of the election. Much like Republicans preached patience in mid-October as Democrats banked huge vote-by-mail numbers, Democrats are now saying South Florida’s Black and Hispanic Democrats will catch up over the final weekend as Harris, Biden’s running mate, paid a visit to Miami and unions, churches and grassroots groups push people to the polls.
“We’ve activated community members and leaders to do what we call knock and drag,” said South Miami-Dade state Rep. Kionne McGhee, the outgoing Democratic leader of the Florida House, in a reference to dragging voters to the polls. “Our members will be out in full force through this knocking on doors and reminding people to vote. We expect a turnout that will provide us the necessary votes that would give us a fighting chance to change the current occupiers of 1600 Penn Avenue.”
McGhee, who raised alarms among Democrats Friday by posting video of mail ballots apparently backed up in a postal distribution center in a majority-Black area of MiamiDade, told the Miami Herald Saturday morning that he’s also heard of problems at mail centers in Homestead and Florida City.
Biden focused strongly in October on reaching South Florida’s Black and Hispanic voters with his stops in Little Haiti and Little Havana, along with Obama’s car rally in North Miami and Harris’ visits to Miami Gardens, both majority Black cities.That continues Monday with Obama’s final-hours visit to the area. Biden’s campaign is expecting the final weekend and Election Day to follow trends seen in the August primary, when turnout among Democrats and left-leaning independent voters rose over the final few days of in-person voting.
“Just as we saw in August, Democratic turnout will be strong over the weekend and heading into Election Day,” predicted Christian Ulvert, a senior adviser to the Biden campaign in Florida. “We have strong get-out-the-vote events across the state and in South Florida. We have dozens of regional efforts to drive out turnout.”
But the biggest wildcard in Miami-Dade County is the quarter-million independent voters who had voted through Saturday morning — and the remaining quarter-million who had yet to vote. How that group leans and turns out will influence the final margins in the county.
Four years ago, in Doral, the city rich with Venezuelan immigrants and independents, Trump was crushed by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton 68% to 28%. This year, Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chairman Steve Simeonidis told the Miami Herald that the party’s data suggests no-partyaffiliated voters, most of whom are Hispanic, are breaking two-to-one for Biden.
The more competitive nature of Miami-Dade County this time around has been evident in the frenetic pace of the campaign. The fight for votes has literally spilled into the streets, with rival caravans clashing. Arguments have broken out at the early voting center in Westchester. The tension has even spilled into Broward County, where one Trump supporter with a megaphone recently got into Biden supporters’ faces, shouting, “Socialista!”
“The public discourse is extremely aggressive,” said Roberto Rodriguez Tejera, a veteran Miami journalist and Spanish-language radio host on Actualidad 1040’s morning show.
“But that’s the narrative in every election.”