Instead of the Hispanic community delivering Florida to Biden, it turned to Trump, who had used the Black Lives Matter and defund-the-police movements to paint his opponent as extreme.
“It’s proof positive Democrats couldn’t rebut the socialist attack and that the Biden campaign just didn’t know what it was doing,” said Alejandro Miyar, a Biden donor and Democratic strategist from Miami who was Barack Obama’s 2008 Hispanic and South Florida communications director.
Trump countered Biden’s slight gains with his showing among Hispanics and rural Florida residents, said Matthew Isbell, a Democratic data cruncher who had raised red flags about Biden’s chances in Miami.
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“We must have gotten obliterated by Hispanics,” said one Miami Democrat who was reeling from the party’s terrible showing in the county Tuesday night. “We came out strong for BLM and then saw the Hispanic push back and went lukewarm and got killed.”
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“This is Trump country,” said state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida. “It’s time to start thinking about taking Florida out of the toss-up column. We’re red.”
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But while Cuba-specific issues are tactically central to electoral battles in Florida, the fact is that even before all the results are in, it’s clear Biden’s weakness with Latino voters was broader than that. In South Florida, Biden lost ground with a diverse Hispanic population that includes many families from Puerto Rico, Venezuela, or Colombia, as well as Cuba broadly.
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More to the point, Democrats turned in extremely disappointing performances in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, even in the context of a large overall improvement in the state.
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Trump actually won Zapata County, for example, a small border jurisdiction that’s 84 percent Hispanic and which Hillary Clinton won by 30 points in 2016.
The more urban (and, in the case of Las Vegas casino workers, unionized) Latino populations of Arizona and Nevada do seem to have delivered for Biden, so one should not overstate the scope of the trend any more than one understates it.
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But there will no doubt be some broader rethinking prompted by the breadth of Trump’s improvements with segments of the Latino population that one might anticipate would be more open to a conservative message on either foreign policy or cultural issues.
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