The Latino Vote
Biden Needs a Big Win in This Key Demographic
The Democratic nominee rides Discontent with Donald Trump to lead in national polls, drawing support from two-thirds of Latino voters.
That’s the story of Hillary Clinton, who looked set to win four years ago—until she didn’t.
To the mounting terror of Democrats, it’s also the situation Joe Biden finds himself in as polls tighten in the sprint to November 3. The Biden campaign—looking to upend the electoral map by winning states like Arizona, Georgia or Texas—publicly waved away concern about the state of the Latino vote for months. But on September 13th, senior advisor Symone Sanders acknowledged the campaign “has work to do” with the community.
That work accelerated at the end of August and into September, with efforts that are now partially fueled by its $365 million August fundraising windfall, Newsweek has learned. During one meeting on September 1, the campaign’s senior Latino staff—including deputy campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, senior advisor Cristobal Alex, pollster Matt Barreto, and consultant Adrian Saenz—met with the analytics team to discuss expanding the universe of Latino voters being targeted by the campaign, according to sources with knowledge of the meetings.
The campaign has been dogged by concerns that it wasn’t prioritizing Latino voters or doing enough to court them, fears centering on the perennial battleground state of Florida. The issue is not whether Biden will win the Latino vote—democrats always have in modern presidential elections—but whether his campaign will perform well enough to win critical states like Florida and Arizona or crushingly fall short yet again.
Biden has faced subpar polling compared to Clinton with Latino voters in Florida, notably in Miami-dade, where Democrats often look to run up the score. He also faces charges, aided by disinformation campaigns on social networks and messaging apps, that he is a socialist: anathema to many Latinos who came from socialist Latin American countries.
These voters could decide who will be the next president. Latinos are set to become the largest racial or ethnic group in the 2020 electorate, with a record 32 million eligible voters comprising 13.3 percent of the electorate, according to Pew Research Center. Since 2000, the share of Latino eligible voters has increased 80 percent—and this cycle, their outsized presence is felt most in battlegrounds like Florida, Arizona, Nevada and Texas (only one
of which, Nevada, went for Clinton four years ago). An August poll by Latino Decisions of 1,842 Hispanic adults found that nearly two-thirds, 64 percent, of registered Latino voters said they had not heard from either campaign or party.
Coming off a bruising primary season, Biden was slow to ramp up his paid media investment in Latinos before doing so this summer in seven states: Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina, Minnesota and Texas, as part of what his campaign calls an “eight figure” Latino voter program. After being outspent on Spanish-language television and radio into the early summer, the Biden campaign outspent Trump $3,523,985 to 2,032,405 from June 23 to September 7, according to a media tracking report used by Democrats. The messaging of those ads, targeted to Latinos, has been that Trump has botched the coronovirus response and has both targeted and failed the Latino community, and that Biden is a trustworthy man of faith.
The campaign says Biden’s financial investment in reaching Latinos is “historic” but declines to provide specific dollar figures. The campaign has hired and elevated Latino staffers, including a slate of Obama alums, into key leadership roles. Rodriguez, the newly promoted deputy campaign manager and granddaughter of civil rights icon Cesar Chavez, was brought on this spring to grow the ranks of senior Latino staffers within the campaign, like senior advisor Cristobal Alex, an early campaign hire and liaison to many of the Latino leaders reaching out to the campaign.
“The Latino vote is core to our path to victory, which is why we are focused on mobilizing Latino voters and showing them Joe Biden’s solutions for our community,” Rodriguez told
Newsweek. “We have hired directors focusing on turning out the Latino vote in every major battleground state and expanded our Latino paid media program to include North Carolina, Minnesota and Nevada.”
Donald Trump doesn’t need to win the Latino vote—he needs only to expand his support marginally. Trump campaign senior advisor Jason Miller predicted on a call with reporters on September 1 that the president will garner 40 percent of Hispanic support, which itself would be a figure not seen by a Republican presidential nominee since George W. Bush ran for the office in 2004.
The softness of Biden’s support among Latinos worries Democrats. An NBC News/wall Street Journal/ Telemundo poll conducted September 13 to 16 showed Biden at 62 percent Latino support, with Trump at 26 percent. Biden is up by only 28 points in an average of live interview polls, a September 15 analysis by CNN shows, while Clinton was up 37 percent in an average of final pre-election polls.
Pew Research Center has found in the past that about three in 10 Latino voters are conservative, so Trump’s 28 percent support in 2016 was not terribly shocking—but election day support in the mid-thirties, as his campaign believes he can attain, would be unexpected for a president who has been described as
Latinos are set to become the largest racial or ethnic group in the 2020 electorate, with a record 32 million eligible voters.
anti-immigrant and anti-latino by his opponents. Bush, widely considered the gold standard for “compassionate conservative” outreach to Hispanics, attained 35 percent support in 2000 and 40 percent in 2004.
In addition to being battered economically, Latinos have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic in terms of infections and death rates. A Pew Research Center survey in September found that the number of Latino registered voters who cited the virus as a “very important” election issue was 10 percentage points higher than U.S. adults overall. But the outbreak has not created a mass movement of Latinos away from the president. Polls don’t show the big margins that Obama won in 2012 when he received 71 percent of Latino support versus 27 percent for Mitt Romney. Biden’s numbers also haven’t shown the support his party garnered from Latino voters in 2018, when they backed Democratic candidates over Republicans, 69 percent to 29 percent.
So why isn’t Biden’s support among Latinos higher?
“I think the Latino community has been so devastated economically, and in terms of their health, that there hasn’t been much else on people’s minds in the immediate moment,” Representative Joaquin Castro told Newsweek. “I’m confident that Latino voter turnout will break records in 2020 and that Joe Biden will do very well with the Latino community.”
Says Kristian Ramos, a Latino vote expert in Washington: “It’s simply not true to say Latinos don’t support Joe Biden… there is wide support. But the bigger question is, are they being reached out to? They have to be wooed and they have to be turned out.”
Biden has been warned about the campaign’s failure to connect with Latino voters. This spring former
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada reached out to the former veep, says a source with knowledge of the call, and several Nevada elected officials, including Senator Catherine Cortez-masto, the first Latina to serve in the U.S. Senate, expressed concern about Latino outreach, two sources close to her team said.
The Latino community is a diverse one, encompassing voters of different ethnicities, immigration background and language preference. Biden may garner more support from Latinos in the southwest, where they are predominantly Mexican-american, but still needs to improve his support among other ethnicities. While Cuban-americans are a small portion of the Latino electorate nationally, the traditionally conservative bloc plays an outsized role in Florida—a key swing state. Puerto Ricans, long seen as Democratic stalwarts, turned out at a lower rate than Cubans in 2016 and 2018, and their propensity to register with no party affiliation makes the outlook in the state murky.
The Latino community comprises 20 percent of the Florida electorate. Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has pledged $100 million to support Biden in Florida with Latinos as the “centerpiece,” after recent polls showed the former vice president underperforming compared to Clinton in populous Miami-dade county and among Hispanics. A September Bendixen & Amandi/miami Herald poll showed that while Obama beat Romney by 24 points in Miami-dade county in 2012, and Clinton beat Trump 63 percent to 34 percent, Biden was beating Trump by only 17 points, 55 percent to 38 percent. Lackluster performance in the county with the most Democratic voters in the state is an ominous sign.
Latino Biden supporters in Florida have an additional challenge apart from traditional get-out-the-vote tasks: countering disinformation on the airwaves and social media. “Our challenge continues to be a lot of disinformation that is happening in Florida targeting the Latino community,” says Maria Teresa Kumar, the founder of Voto Latino. She told Newsweek that she’s seen interviews over the last year of Latinos in Florida who are “parroting” Trump ads. “They have to figure out how to disarm that disinformation,” she said of the Biden team.
“I’m worried about it in Florida,” says Jose Parra, a former senior advisor to Harry Reid, of Latino investment. “I’ve heard that we’re bleeding voters in Miami-dade and we’re getting hammered on the airwaves in Hispanic media.”
That disinformation comes on traditional media like Spanish-language radio stations and also on Whatsapp, Facebook and Youtube, where Latino voters whose families came from Cuba and Venezuela have been repeatedly told that Biden is a socialist in the mold of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez. “If you don’t believe that the socialism attacks against Democrats work in places like Florida, just ask Governor
Andrew Gillum and Senator Bill Nelson,” says Florida pollster Fernand Amandi about the two Democrats at the top of the ticket in 2018.
Amandi, who was the top consultant for Obama’s Latino voter polling during both campaigns, and whose firm conducted the Miami Herald poll, said Democrats dismiss the potency of the word “socialism” at their peril. “Those candidacies should have been successful in a massive blue wave year for Democrats, but were tripped up by overperformance by the Republicans with Hispanic voters that used the ‘socialism’ attack as one of the centerpieces of opposition.”
While the Trump campaign doesn’t need to prioritize Hispanics in the same way Biden does, the president’s team is not ceding the voting bloc. The campaign says it held 45,000 grassroots events in English and Spanish, as well as a “Day of Action Against Socialism” MAGA meet-up “to discuss horrors of socialism and phone bank into Latino communities.” It also has 16 field offices targeting Latinos in Arizona, Florida, Nevada and Texas.
The campaign said it has held dozens of Zoom MAGA meet-ups to discuss the July White House Executive Order on the Hispanic Prosperity Initiative in states like Florida, Nevada and Texas. The goal of Trump’s executive order, unveiled at the White House with fanfare among Hispanic Republican Leaders, is to “improve access by Hispanic-americans to educational and economic opportunities.”
The Trump campaign offers digital events such as a weekly Latinos for Trump women’s meeting every Wednesday, which includes attendees watching The Right View, a Youtube show with Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Mercedes Schlapp. And the campaign says it registered dozens of voters at events in Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, while collecting items to be donated to food banks—evidence that the Trump campaign recognizes the ways the community has suffered this year. On September 14, Trump sat in on a Latinos for Trump roundtable in Phoenix, Arizona, of nearly a dozen community members talking about their American dream.
Steve Cortes, a Trump campaign senior advisor, told Newsweek that even if Latino voters don’t support Trump, they can still be persuaded not to go to the polls for Biden. “I don’t know that we can win over a lot of those Hispanic Bernie [Sanders] supporters but we can convince them not to vote for Biden,” Cortes said. “They’re not enthusiastic and Biden’s not winning them over. I would rather win them over, but we’ll take the half-win of them not voting for Biden.”
The Biden campaign has tried outlining Latino-specific policy plans. A 2018 report by Stanford University revealed that the number of Hispanic small businesses grew 34 percent over the last decade, and the Biden campaign has included in its plans an injection of capital to small businesses of more than $50 billion “in additional public-private venture capital to Latino entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurs of color.” It also highlighted its support of a $15 minimum wage, a push for a Smithsonian National American Latino Museum and appointments of Latinos in a future Biden administration.
But the Clinton campaign surpassed the Biden Latino operation in how much it used Latino and Spanish-language media to spread the message. A source close to the Biden campaign said staffers have tried to get Biden on Spanish-language television like Univision and Telemundo more often, only to have the idea nixed by other staffers. The campaign may fear having Biden get boxed in by questions on immigration, where he is quick to defend Obama’s aggressive deportation policies.
Biden did not grant an interview to influential Univision host Jorge Ramos until a week before the Nevada caucuses. He did sit down with Telemundo’s Jose Diaz-balart, a veteran Cuban-american anchor from Florida, on September 15. Biden used the opportunity to say Trump is treating Puerto Ricans like “second-class citizens,” and the University of Puerto Rico “should get the same kind of assistance that historically black colleges and minority universities get.”
Representative Ruben Gallego, a Biden surrogate, said Hispanics, including young Latinos, are activated like never before. “There was apprehension at the beginning, as the primary wrapped up, because the Biden campaign hadn’t ramped up yet,” he said. “But there’s no way you can say they’re not investing enough money in Arizona and Florida now.”
The Biden campaign is appealing directly to young Latinos, using a song from gender-bending, reggaeton and Latin trap superstar Bad Bunny in an anti-trump ad. The song, which translates to “But Not Anymore,” gives voice to Latinos who may have supported Trump in the past.
The Trump campaign followed with its own Bad Bunny ad, but fans of the artist know he has blasted Trump.
“His voice is very supportive of causes I support like LGBTQ rights and fighting political corruption in Puerto Rico,” Joel Maysonet, director of Latino paid media for the Biden campaign, told Newsweek. “That’s why
Democrats dismiss the potency of the word “socialism” at their own peril.
I thought it made sense even though it looked unconventional to have Joe Biden and Bad Bunny.”
While pollsters this cycle say there are fewer undecided voters than in 2016, the campaign believes undecided Latino voters will break for the former vice president in November. “It’s a culture—whether campaign culture or the culture of Latino voters—that they’re generally responsive later in the cycle,” a source close to the campaign said.
One addition the Biden campaign made at the end of July was bringing on Saenz to coordinate direct mail campaigns. Equislabs’ Stephanie Valencia, who worked with Saenz, said that in addition to his work for Obama, he has run campaigns in New Mexico, Texas and Florida and “understands the diversity and nuance of the Latino electorate.” Saenz is said to be working on a massive direct mail campaign now.
In this final phase, the effort to reach Latino voters is being fueled by a newly cash-flush operation. While the campaign won’t release specific budgets, the “spending numbers would blow people away—how much we’re spending on TV, radio, and digital,” a source close to the campaign said. The spending leads to more data, which unlocks the ability to do micro-targeted digital outreach, like pieces targeting men, immigrants or people under the age of 30, a source close to the campaign said.
“You want to hit people when they’re paying attention,” a campaign source said. “It’s like showing a trailer two years before the movie. Instead, you want to ramp up before the premiere day.”