Biden courts Latino voters in 1st trip to Florida as nominee
TAMPA, Fla. – Joe Biden made his first trip to Florida as the Democratic presidential nominee on Tuesday with an urgent mission to boost support among Latinos who could decide the election in one of the nation’s fiercest battleground states.
Biden opened the visit in Tampa holding a roundtable with veterans in which he tore into President Donald Trump for reported remarks criticizing the military. He is marking Hispanic Heritage Month later Tuesday in Kissimmee, near Orlando.
“Look, what I have to do is make the case why it will be so much better” for the Latino community “if in fact Trump is no longer president,” Biden told reporters after landing in Orlando on Tuesday evening.
A win for Biden in Florida would dramatically narrow Trump’s path to reelection. But in a state where elections are often decided by a percentage point, there are mounting concerns that Biden may be slipping, particularly with the state’s influential Latino voters.
An NBC-Marist poll released last week found Latinos in the state about evenly divided between Biden and Trump. Democrat Hillary Clinton led Trump by a 59% to 36% margin among Latinos in the same poll in 2016 – and Trump won Florida by about 1 percentage point.
Hispanic voters in Florida tend to be somewhat more Republican-leaning than Hispanic voters nationwide because of the state’s Cuban American population. Nationally, little public polling is available to measure the opinions of Latino voters this year and whether they differ from four years ago.
By spending his day along the Interstate 4 corridor, Biden is devoting time to one of the most critical regions of the state. While Republicans typically post big numbers in the northern and southwestern parts of the state and Democrats are strong in coastal cities, campaigns typically battle it out for every vote in central Florida.
The veterans event was aimed at pushing a potential opening with military voters, who broadly supported Trump in 2016 but are seen as potentially persuadable because of controversial remarks the president reportedly made mocking American war dead as “losers” and “suckers.” Trump has denied making the remarks, first reported through anonymous sources by The Atlantic, but many of the comments were later confirmed by The Associated Press.
“Nowhere are his faults more glaring and more offensive, to me at least, than when it comes to his denigration of our service members, veterans, wounded warriors who have fallen,” Biden said. Speaking of his late son Beau, who served overseas as a Delaware Army National Guard member, the former vice president said, “He’s gone now, but he’s no sucker.”
Biden spoke about his experience as vice president escorting military caskets home and working on military issues, and about his own commitments to strengthen the Department of Veterans Affairs and tackle the mental health crisis among veterans. And he attacked Trump for what he said were failed promises to veterans.
“President Trump likes to say he passed VA Choice, but just like everything else he seems to say, it’s a figment of his imagination or a flat-out lie,” he said, referencing a program passed under the Obama administration that steers more patients to the private sector.