After missteps with some Hispanic voters in 2020, Biden faces pressure to get 2024 outreach right

KISSIMMEE, Fla.—joe Biden vowed in 2020 to work “like the devil” to energize Hispanic voters, and flew to Florida seven weeks before Election Day to do just that. But as he stepped to the podium at a Hispanic Heritage Month event near Disney World, Biden declared, “I just have one thing to say” and used his phone to play part of “Despacito.”

It was meant as a salute to the singer of the reggaeton hit, Luis Fonsi, who had introduced Biden and cried, “Dance a little bit, Joe.” Still, the gesture triggered swift online backlash from some hispanics, who saw it as playing to belittling stereo types— proof that while outreach is important, failing to strike the right cultural tone can undermine such efforts.

“The details actually matter for people because it’s respecting their background, respecting their history, respecting their culture,” said Grecia Lima, national political director of Community Change Action. “It’s not an insignificant portion of what campaigns are going to have to wrestle with in the ‘24 cycle.”

Biden is hardly the first politician to strike a sour note trying to connect across cultural lines, but the blowback he encountered illustrates a bigger challenge facing the president and his party as he seeks a second term next year.

Hispanic voters, long a core constituency for Democrats, have reliably supported them based on substantive matters of policy, from health care to managing the economy, according to Pew Research Center surveys. But recent signs that Republicans have made inroads with those voters are adding to the sense that Democrats have work to do to maintain their advantage.

Democratic candidates won 57 percent of Hispanic voters during last year’s midterms, a smaller percentage than the 63 percent of Hispanic voters Biden won in 2020 and the 66 percent of Hispanic voters supporting the party in 2018, when Democrats took control of the House, according to AP Votecast, a sweeping survey of the national electorate.

Meanwhile, 39 percent of Hispanic voters backed Republicans last year, a tick up from the 35 percent who supported former President Donald Trump’s reelection bid.

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, a Republican considering a White House run, said Democrats have failed to connect with Hispanic voters and hurt themselves by adopting terms like Latinx, a gender-neutral alternative to “Latino” and “Latina.”

“They’ve created a tremendous opportunity for Republicans,” Suarez said. “A lot of the issues that Hispanics care about are issues that are being touted by the Republican Party.”

Democrats say they maintain the upper hand on policy, but party leaders had expected another boost in electoral support from recent demographic shifts in the Hispanic population. A growing share were English-speaking and US born, and they came from a wider array of backgrounds.

Many Democrats also believed harsh rhetoric from Republicans before, during and after the presidency of Trump—who famously used his campaign launch in 2015 to declare immigrants from Mexico to be rapists and criminals—would work in their favor.

Yet even modest swings toward Republicans could mean millions more 2024 GOP votes since Hispanics made up 62 percent of total growth in the nation’s eligible voters between 2018 and last year’s election, according to Pew. And that makes engaging in effective Hispanic outreach critical, activists say.

“Are they behind?” asked Javier Palomarez CEO of the United States Hispanic Business Council. “Yes.”

Hispanic support for Republicans has risen in places like New Mexico and New York, said Palomarez, who noted that such trends could continue—especially since word-of-mouth is crucial to influencing Hispanic voting—unless Democrats change the way they work to mobilize Hispanic voters.

“What they need to do immediately is really start talking to the Hispanic community in a genuine fashion,” said Palomarez, a fierce Trump critic who once joined the Trump administration’s council on diversity in hopes of finding consensus. “We’re no less important than any other community, but we’ve been left behind.”

Democratic strategist Maria Cardona countered that nearly every cycle features “activists with their hair on fire: ‘The campaign’s not doing enough, we’re not hearing from enough people.’”

She said Biden’s campaign is neutralizing those perceptions with “historic strides and investments” in Hispanic voter mobilization, especially important since a new Hispanic American turns 18 years old nationwide about every 30 seconds. That helps account for around 4 million more eligible Hispanic voters ahead of 2024 than there were in 2020.

Biden supporters also say incidents like playing “Despacito” don’t resonate with Hispanic voters who are more interested in concrete policy achievements, especially when leading Republican candidates feed racially charged fear-mongering about immigrants and the Us-mexico border.

“President Biden has spent his first two years in office focusing on the issues facing many Latino families— lowering health care costs, creating good-paying jobs, getting our small businesses and schools reopened, and fighting gun violence in our communities,” Kevin Munoz, a spokesperson for Biden’s reelection campaign, said in a statement.

Of course, cultural gaffes are bipartisan, going back to 1976, when President Gerald Ford bit into a Texas tamale without removing the corn husk. And Trump and other top Republicans have long used language such as “illegal alien,” regarded by many Latinos as dehumanizing.

In the long run, the anti-immigration policies enacted by the Trump administration, including separating children from their parents at the border with no plans to reunite them, could matter more than Hispanic voter outreach efforts. Still, Hispanic voter support for Republican candidates held steady between 2018 and 2020 at 35 percent nationally, according to Vote Cast.

And “Despacito” wasn’t the Biden camp’s only misstep since then.

During a visit to Puerto Rico last fall, the president sought help pronouncing Caño Martín Peña while promoting federal funding to improve that canal. First lady Jill Biden flubbed the pronunciation of “Si Se Puede,” the old farmworkers union slogan that later became an Obama-era rallying cry, during a speech in California last spring. Then, in Texas last summer, she said the Hispanic community was as “unique as breakfast tacos here in San Antonio.” “We are not tacos,” the National Association of Hispanic Journalists tweeted in response, prompting an apology from the first lady’s office.