Joe Biden won the presidency no thanks to Florida, where he lost big to President Trump in November. A key anxiety for Democrats was his underperformance with the state’s large cohort of Latino voters — and a new report out this week looks at why that happened and how to fix it.
President-elect Biden did win a majority of Latino votes in Florida. But it was still a relatively weak performance. The report by the polling firm LD Insights says Biden saw a net loss of 109,000 Latino votes in Miami-Dade County, for example, compared to Hillary Clinton’s take in 2016.
A big reason: Democrats have invested too little in Latino voter outreach in Florida, while Republicans are much better established with that demographic there.
Another: the Democrats’ response to GOP disinformation that Biden and his party were radical “socialistas” was too little and too late.
The report also says Democrats “failed to deliver a bold, clear message of what the party and [its] candidates stood for,” especially on economic issues most important to Latinos amid the anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report recommends the party build year-round instead of just election-season infrastructure and strategies to engage Florida Latinos.
And it needs to start recruiting Latino candidates in the state as widely and aggressively as the Republicans have.
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