Don’t blame Latino voters in Miami-Dade. Blame Democrats, who failed to court them
Miami-Dade County is getting a bad rep among some Democrats nationally. It’s not only unfair and based on inaccurate information, it’s also counterproductive.
Joe Biden’s seven-point margin over President Trump in Miami was underwhelming compared to Hillary Clinton’s 30-point lead in 2016. And yes, many Trump votes came from tens of thousands of Latino voters. But don’t be tempted to write off MiamiDade as a fluke within the U.S. Latino vote or to suggest it is the community’s fault. Rather, it’s the result of underinvestment by the Democrats.
It all started with another misleading media narrative that Latinos did not deliver for Democrats because of grim results in Miami and southern Texas. Fact: There is now a “brown wall” in the Southwest thanks to the multiyear organizing by grassroots groups and unions. Fact: In Arizona, Biden won by 14,000 votes with a Latino turnout of 700,000. Biden also won Wisconsin by 20,000 votes with a Latino voter turnout of 135,000.
Hispanics did deliver for Democrats and significantly so in places as pivotal and diverse such as Las Vegas and Philadelphia. Saying that Hispanics let down Democrats is patently false and insulting to both Latino voters and all those who have been working for years, organizing and mobilizing in our communities.
Now that we’ve gotten out of the way, let’s look at the counter narrative, which argues, inaccurately, that Miami-Dade County is an outlier that doesn’t reflect the Hispanic experience, and, by inference, Democrats can ignore it because Miami-Dade Latinos are
“only” 3.1 percent of the national Hispanic vote.
This is dismissive and strategically perilous. It is within the realm of possibility to win nationally without Florida as Biden did, but it is the political equivalent of riding a bicycle with no hands through a pothole-filled street. Florida is still the biggest swing state in the nation, and Miami-Dade is its most populous and a blue county, with 70 percent Latino residents — a cornerstone to winning the state. Dismissing 915,000 voters in Miami-Dade County is shortsighted and, for Democrats, unsustainable. It is casting the blame on voters, when it was Democrats who ran a belated campaign and allowed themselves to be defined as “socialists.”
The Biden campaign came into South Florida in earnest after the summer, at least where the Hispanic vote is concerned. The rationale is that they couldn’t afford to come in any earlier. But in the interim, the state party should have been at the wheel. In the period between the 2018 midterms (a cycle punctuated by campaigns that ignored the Latino vote) and September 2020, there was no coordinated effort to align messaging and deploy surrogates throughout the local Spanishmedia ecosystem to push back against the “socialist” label that Republicans wrongly, albeit successfully, pinned on Democrats. I can vouch for this as a frequent commentator in Spanish-language media.
However, instead of acknowledging our failings, the easiest thing to do is blame Cuban voters as they are “staunch Republicans who will never vote for us”— an anomaly compared to other Hispanics around the country, or so the reasoning goes.
This argument ignores that in 2012 Barack Obama got nearly half of the Cuban vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won half the vote in Hialeah, a very Cuban city in western MiamiDade. This year, however, 46 out of 48 precincts there went for Trump. What is most shocking is that recently arrived Cubans have been registering as Republicans at a furious clip, according to the Florida International
University Cuba Poll. The same people who line up at Miami International Airport in droves to travel to Cuba and visit their relatives voted against Democrats. Why? Because we were simply not talking to them while Republicans were.
The dismiss-Miami narrative also ignores the fact that Cubans are not the only Hispanics in Miami-Dade County. Non-Cuban Latinos represent about 44 percent of the Latino voting population here. All indications are that Democrats also bled voters among that segment according to The Miami Herald. Colombian-heavy areas within Miami-Dade, such as the Hammocks, gave Trump thousands of votes. His campaign made the difference by actually asking Colombian Americans for their votes. During Trump’s last Miami rally, the campaign played Colombian music and made sure to prominently place local community leaders near him.
On the Democratic side the micro-targeting didn’t go that deep. The work there stopped at Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Mexicans.
In sum, both running narratives of the Latino vote — particularly Florida’s Latino vote— are unhelpful and do not support what should be the Democrats’ mission of building and growing the diverse coalition of voters that we call the “Latino electorate.” We have been leaving votes on the table for several cycles, and there is no one to blame but ourselves — not the county or the state, much less the voters.
Miami-Dade County might be a fraction of the national Hispanic electorate, but it is a pivotal fraction in winning national elections.
Continuing these narratives of exclusion into 2022 and beyond will not help us win as a party or achieve progress as a country.