Trump and Biden court Colombian vote in Florida

Florida’s large Colombian community never got much attention from U.S. presidential candidates. Until now.

Colombians are the third largest Latino community in Florida, behind Cubans and

Puerto Ricans. Yet you don’t see

U.S. presidential candidates making pilgrimages to Kendall to eat Colombian buñuelos the way they trek to Little Havana to drink Cuban coffee.

That lack of attention to Colombians seemed to change a lot last week.

President Trump’s National Security Adviser, Robert O’Brien, traveled to Bogotá to meet with Colombian President Iván Duque and discuss Trump’s new multi-billion-dollar financing initiative to promote democracy and economic growth in Latin America — especially in Colombia. But politically, O’Brien’s more important stop was the day before — in West Palm Beach, where he unveiled the initiative to Colombian expats.

“We’re talking now about the power of the Colombian vote,” said Fabio Andrade, a Colombian-American Republican in Weston who heads the business nonprofit Americas Community Center that helped organize O’Brien’s visit to South Florida.

Andrade supports Trump; in his native Colombia, he supports conservative President Duque — who is popular with most Colombian expats. An estimated 150,000 of them are registered to vote in Florida. Andrade helped convince the White House that Trump could win more of that electorate if he helped out Duque — a prospect that matters in a state where just 100,000 votes tipped things for Trump four years ago.

“We have brought attention,” said Andrade, “to the fact that Colombia is in a very vulnerable position in regards to getting infiltrated by the leftist, socialist regimes around Colombia,” like Venezuela’s — which the Trump administration is trying to help overthrow.

Andrade said the increased attention from Trump is helping to rouse Colombians here as a more assertive voting bloc.

“We were the sleeping elephant,” he said. “Now, the elephant is awakening.”

But Democrats say Trump’s attention to Colombians is much less about genuinely helping Colombia and much more about cynically grabbing Florida votes.

“Eighty days before an election, to all of a sudden pretend like you care?” said Florida State Senator Annette Taddeo, a Colombian-American in Miami. “All we have to do is remember how badly Trump actually spoke about President Duque.”

Taddeo was referring to harsh and controversial remarks Trump made in Florida last year about the Colombian president, one of Washington’s most important allies in the hemisphere:

“More drugs are coming out of Colombia right now than before he was president,” Trump said of Duque. “So he has done nothing for us.”

Taddeo believes U.S. Colombia policy matters to Colombian expat voters, but not as much as U.S. domestic policy does — which is why, she said, Colombians register Democrat here more than Republican or independent, even though they take more conservative stands on politics back in Colombia.

The question — why the Colombians’ large population in Florida has never really translated into the sort of political clout they’ve watched Cubans and even Venezuelans carry — is being asked more earnestly now within the community.

Some explain that it’s taken more time for Colombians to feel comfortable about projecting themselves as a bloc in the U.S. because the term “Colombian” has for so long carried the stigmas of drug lords and Marxist guerrillas.

“That’s changed over the past decade and it’s giving us more of a voice here,” said Andres Ocampo, a Bogotá native who came here 20 years ago and is the CEO of a Latin American food importing firm in Fort Lauderdale.

Eduardo Gamarra, an expert on South American politics at Florida International University, also pointed out that unlike Cuban and Venezuelan expats — who are politically galvanized largely by their desire for regime change in their home countries — Colombians “have never really had the unifying factor of a Fidel Castro or a Hugo Chávez.”

To win Florida, Trump doesn’t have to secure as many Latino voters as Biden does, because Republicans typically have an advantage with so many other Florida voters. Andrade in Weston feels the president, whose pro-business policies he says are especially popular with expats, is doing enough to get the Colombian votes he’ll need. He pointed to enthusiasm for last week’s West Palm Beach event with O’Brien as an indication.

Trump and Biden have less than 10 weeks now to win over Florida’s “awakened elephant.”

Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for Miami NPR affiliate WLRN, covering Latin America and the Caribbean and their key links to South Florida.