Joe Biden has a Latino voter problem, but not in Florida
Florida may just cure Joe Biden’s woes with Hispanic voters. At least for a moment.
Biden, who has struggled to win over Latinos in primary losses to Bernie Sanders in California and Nevada — and even in victory in Texas — is up double-digits with Hispanic Democrats in Florida, according to a new poll commissioned by Telemundo and conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy.
The poll of 400 likely Hispanic voters in Florida’s March 17 primary, conducted March 4 through 7, found Biden ahead of Sanders by a 48 to 37 margin. That’s just outside the 5point margin of error.
A parallel general election poll of 600 Democratic, Republican and independent Hispanic voters found Biden up 20 points on President Donald Trump. That’s a healthy but not dominant number for the former vice president in a state where conservative-minded Cuban-Americans create a unique dynamic amid a largely left-leaning voting bloc. Sanders was down 1 point to the president among Hispanic voters, according to the general election poll, which had a 4-point margin of error.
The numbers are a reversal of the results seen through most the Democratic primary, in which Sanders’ biggest victories have drawn on his strength with Latinos. But they likely have more to do with Florida’s unique demographics than anything the Sanders or Biden campaigns are doing.
“The reason Biden is doing better than Sanders with Hispanic voters in Florida largely has to do with the diversity of the Latino community,”
said Brad Coker, CEO of Mason-Dixon. “Hispanic voters in general in Florida are very different from Hispanic voters in the west. An establishment Democrat like Biden is probably a little more appealing than the revolutionary Bernie Sanders.”
Sanders crushed a multi-way field among Latinos in the February Nevada caucuses, and clobbered Biden in that demographic in Texas and California on Super Tuesday. The Latino population in those states is driven by immigration through the southern border, as it is in Arizona, where another Mason-Dixon poll found Sanders ahead of Biden by 7 points.
“Nothing out west has worked out with Biden and Hispanics,” Coker said.
But Biden won Hispanic voters in the Super Tuesday states of Virginia and North Carolina. And in Florida, where Biden is widely expected to beat Sanders next week, he could do even better. Another recent survey by St. Pete Polls found an even wider advantage for Biden among Florida Hispanics, who comprise about 17% of the voting population.
Sanders’ campaign has sought to win over Hispanic voters in Florida much the way it has in western states: by organizing in overlooked minority communities, hiring bilingual staffers and producing bilingual campaign material. His campaign cochairwoman, Carmen Yulín Cruz, gives him a prominent Puerto Rican surrogate in a state with more than 1 million Puerto Ricans.
Florida’s Hispanic community, with hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and other Southand Central-American immigrants, is less monolithic and tends to be more welcoming to centrist candidates. Coker’s general election poll, for instance, found that nearly twothirds of Cuban voters support President Donald Trump’s immigration policies deterring asylum requests by Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants.
Biden has countered with endorsements from prominent Hispanic elected officials and has aggressively attacked Sanders’ past praise for aspects of socialist governments in Cuba and Nicaragua, and his recent reticence to call Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro a dictator. The Mason-Dixon poll found that 70% of Florida Hispanics would not vote for a self-avowed socialist.
“Bernie thinks by putting the word “democratic” in front of socialist, he can deal with the challenge of being a socialist,” former secretary of state and presidential candidate John Kerry said Monday during a campaign stop in Doral on behalf of Biden. “He wasn’t a democratic socialist most of his life. He was just a socialist.”
Biden isn’t the only candidate who can find optimism in the results of the Mason-Dixon poll.
In that election, exit polls show that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton beat Trump by 27 points with Hispanic voters in Florida. Trump won the state — seen as a must-win for him in 2020 — by more than 100,000 votes.