“We have to engage all the time,” Torres said in an interview. Vic Torres, an Orlando Democrat of Puerto Rican descent, said early cycle trips are welcome because Democrats’ outreach efforts in the past have lagged Republicans’. He launched his Senate campaign in the Democratic stronghold of Orange County, and Luis Rivera-Marín, a former lieutenant governor and secretary of state for Puerto Rico, called Scott a “good friend.” Scott traveled to the island eight times and his campaign ran targeted ads telling Puerto Rican voters he would not be afraid to “Fight for You.”įlorida state Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) pushed hard to capture the Puerto Rican vote in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, when many fled the island and took up residence in Florida. “The Trump organization was paying canvassers $20 an hour to go door-to-door months before the election, a year before the election. He says recategorizing Hispanic voters as “persuadable,” and thereby changing how the party communicates to them, is a good start. But that’s not the way it works, and Republicans know that.” “The Democratic elite think that just because they are right on the issues, they will flock to them. “They want someone who says, '’I’ve got the balls to fight for you.’ That’s basically all Trump did, and it worked,” Grenier said. But Republicans focus their outreach on more visceral appeals. He said Democrats’ approach to Hispanic voters has been “wrought with entitlement,” and based on the outdated idea that, because the party generally opposes Republicans’ hard-line stance on issues such as immigration, Florida’s diverse bloc of Latino voters will support them. Even in Cuba, when I go to Cuba, I hear people talking about the Republican Party being the party for Cubans.” “A lot of people respond to that messaging. But it rings very true,” said Guillermo Grenier, a sociology professor at Florida International University who helps lead the university’s Cuba Poll, which since 1991 has tracked opinions of the Cuban American community in South Florida. “The Republicans are a one-trick pony, and that one trick is socialism. Republicans have increasingly swayed Latino voters by aggressively branding Democratic opponents as socialists or far-left extremists, an appeal that resonates with Florida’s influential cross section of Latino voters, many of whom fled or had family flee leftist Latin American regimes run by authoritarian strongman leaders. “We don’t need to focus on these useless culture wars.” “The economy, education, health care - those are things that the Democratic Party has focused on in the past year,” he added. For me, reversing the trend we saw with Hispanic voters in 2020 is reversing the brand that has caused us to suffer setbacks with working class voters.” “Those are Hispanics and Blacks and whites, and we are no different. “The party overall, there is a lot of attention on Hispanics, but if you look at the numbers across the country, the party in and of itself has lost ground with working class voters in America,” Diaz said in an interview. More recently, Democrats and Republicans - including DeSantis - hammered Biden over potential talks between the administration and Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro over oil exports.įlorida Democratic Party Chair Manny Diaz, a Cuban American former mayor of Miami, said that part of fixing Democrats’ relationship with Latinos is focusing on broader “pocketbook issues” like the economy and health care. The Biden administration has also made some early missteps that riled up Democrats in the state, including plans to remove a Colombian Marxist rebel group, the FARC, from a list of foreign terrorist groups, a move that was notably denounced by Taddeo, who is Colombian American. February polling from Suffolk University/USA Today shows that 39 percent of Florida voters approve of the job Biden is doing compared to 53 disapproving.
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