Kirby Lee via AP
Biden isn’t just losing Latinos to low enthusiasm or nonvoting; in states like Florida, he’s actively ceding them to Trump and the GOP.
For all the uncertainty about how Election Day will proceed, the 2020 presidential election has been remarkably stable. Joe Biden, as he has for several months now, is holding onto a measurable but not commanding lead over Donald Trump that really hasn’t budged. But when you dig into the numbers, you find uncertainty in areas that were previously among the most axiomatic in modern politics.
The one thing that Democrats could hang their hat on come November, it seemed, was the composition of the voting coalitions behind the two candidates. Young people and people of color, Black and Latino voters in particular, whom Trump had spent the last four years openly denigrating and antagonizing, would back the Democratic candidate; white voters, especially older whites, most animated by the Republican Party’s racial-grievance machine, would back Trump. Come pandemic or high water, neither base would be moved.
But with the election now just eight weeks away, a surprising amount of fluidity has emerged with these groups. According to recent polling, Joe Biden is underperforming substantially with Latinos, especially in crucial swing states. Biden isn’t just losing Latinos to low enthusiasm or nonvoting; in states like Florida, he’s actively ceding them to Trump and the GOP.
While the Latino vote in Florida is very particular thanks to the large presence of longtime conservative anti-Castro Cubans, the numbers show a marked discrepancy since Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance. According to polling released Tuesday, Joe Biden is up 55-38 in Miami-Dade County. That 17-point advantage may not seem troubling, but Democrats typically have to bank huge margins in Miami-Dade to overcome their weakness in the rest of the state. Hillary Clinton won the county by 30 points, and still went on to lose statewide. Recent polling shows Florida as a dead heat between Trump and Biden.
In fact, Biden is underperforming Hillary Clinton with Latinos nationwide, earning between 45 percent and 64 percent of the Latino vote across numerous polls. Clinton carried roughly 70 percent of Hispanic and Latino voters on Election Day, after polling as high as 79 percent with Latino support. Republicans were thought to be trapped at a 30 percent ceiling with Latinos, the figure that backed Mitt Romney in 2012, which Trump went on to underperform slightly. His border wall theatrics, and racist and incendiary comments, were expected to make that number sag even further.
Former Bernie Sanders organizer Chuck Rocha, seen as the architect of the Sanders campaign’s deep support among Latino voters in the primary, has expressed loud concern that Biden’s team came late to court Latino support, and about the almost nonexistent outreach. “If my PAC is the biggest and has spent the most money talking to Latinos all summer, and I’ve only raised and spent $4 million, it shows you the disparity,” Rocha told Vox.
While Trump seems to be chipping into Democratic Latino support in parts of the country, Biden is leaning on a surprisingly highly number of seniors, thought to be the core constituency of the Trump campaign. Biden’s superior performance to Clinton in Florida can be almost entirely chalked up to this.
There are plausible stories to tell about this trade-off. The role of the evangelical movement in bringing in and shifting opinions of Latino voters suggests potentially more long-term parity between the parties. In this election, seniors are most at risk of death from the coronavirus, and Trump’s miserable performance managing the crisis has seemingly turned them away. Biden has also stressed in commercials that Trump’s executive action deferring the payroll tax, and his vow to cut it permanently, would cripple the Social Security trust fund.
The senior bloc is larger and more important in key states than Latinos at this time, so this trade-off may not sink Biden’s chances at all. But a short-term gain in seniors, offset by a long-term realignment of Latinos away from the Democratic Party, is not a break-even proposition, and could spell doom in the not-too-distant future. This election, meanwhile, was supposed to be the one that finally debuted Democrats’ powerful demographic majority, where the overwhelming advantage of young people and people of color coming of voting age would usher in an era of lasting victories for the party. The Sanders campaign was predicated on this, particularly through Rocha’s formidable Latino outreach program.
While Trump seems to be chipping into Democratic Latino support in parts of the country, Biden is leaning on a surprisingly highly number of seniors, thought to be the core constituency of the Trump campaign.
While Biden won the primary—with older voters providing much of the muscle—he knew that his deficit among voters under 45 needed to be fixed, as well as his Latino support. But instead of courting the Sanders Latino outreach team and incorporating their winning strategy, he hired Ana Navarro, CNN commentator and lifelong Republican, to head up the effort. That has done little to distance Biden from his close proximity to the Obama deportation machine, or make sense of his somewhat vague commitments to curtailing the excesses of the militarized immigration enforcement apparatus. It’s unclear whether Biden even intends to uphold his campaign pledge to bring a moratorium on deportations.
Biden’s unique weakness with Florida Latinos in particular is also a cruel addendum to what was an essential turning point in the primary. Mainstream Democratic political strategists and MSNBC talking heads wailed that nominating an avowed democratic socialist like Sanders was too big a risk, given the electoral presence of anti-communist Cubans. An entire news cycle lit up with past comments from Sanders where he complimented Cuba’s objectively impressive literacy and education programs under Castro. To lose Florida’s conservative Latinos was to lose Florida, which made the general election near impossible. For that very reason, Joe Biden was the sensible choice, who had to be elevated over his rival from Vermont.
Yet, just a few months later, it is Biden who is slipping among Latinos in Florida, a failure that’s rippling down the ballot. Two Democratic House reps in South Florida, who earned seats in the restoration midterm of 2018, also look to be in peril, as Latino voters are being drawn across the aisle. Internal polling from Republican challenger Maria Elvira Salazar—to be taken with a grain of salt—shows her leading incumbent Democrat Donna Shalala 45.5 to 42.8 in Florida’s 27th District in the south of Miami, with Latino support tipping the scales in Salazar’s favor. Miami-based freshman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, in the neighboring 26th District, is rumored to be in trouble as well.
Of course, the Latino community is far from monolithic. Cubans and Venezuelans in Florida have a different political sensibility than, say, Salvadorans in Virginia. And Biden isn’t losing Latinos everywhere. In rapidly left-swinging New Mexico, he’s actually outperforming Clinton. But it’s clearly one of the campaign’s major weaknesses, and a major liability for the party moving forward.
Earlier this month, Janet Murguia, president and CEO of UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy group, told The Arizona Republic “we have not seen that meaningful engagement” from the Biden campaign in the Arizona Latino community, This is a state where, again, Biden’s strength is being built on the backs of seniors. Even his Democratic convention featured shockingly few Latino speakers, perceived by some as another show of disinterest toward the community. It’s possible, if not likely, that Arizona, Texas, Virginia, and North Carolina could all be decided by their Latino populations. Even Pennsylvania has half a million Latino voters, with decent-sized populations in Michigan and Wisconsin as well.
For all the talk of reproducing the mythical Obama coalition, Biden looks well on his way to doing the exact opposite, cobbling together an array of suburban whites and retirees, the same fast-shrinking demographic that has Republicans so worried about their long-term viability. But even if it’s a winning one, the Biden coalition, as it currently seems, may be a pyrrhic victory for the Democratic Party. It may be enough to take 2020, but at the cost of breaking down their long-sought coalition in the years to come.
