Will Trump’s improving poll numbers be enough to neutralize Biden’s natural advantage?
President Trump has said he will nominate a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg later this week, and it’s no surprise that Judge Barbara Lagoa is high on his short list.
Judge Lagoa was nominated in 2019 to serve on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and confirmed by the Senate with bipartisan support. Moreover, she’s Cuban-American, a Florida native and the first Hispanic woman to sit on the Florida Supreme Court. If the president doesn’t win Florida, he almost certainly doesn’t win a second term. And without Cuban-American support, he doesn’t win Florida.
The Trump campaign got some good news earlier this month when a poll showed Joe Biden significantly underperforming in Florida’s most populous county, Miami-Dade, compared with Hillary Clinton four years ago. According to the poll, Mr. Biden has a 17-point lead, while Mrs. Clinton won the county by 30 points in 2016. Mr. Biden is expected to win the Hispanic vote statewide, and nationwide, but his campaign is worried because it knows how much the margin matters.
In the midterm elections two years ago, much of the country experienced a blue wave, but Florida stayed relatively dry. Republicans there won the governorship and flipped a U.S. Senate seat. Both races were decided by less than half a percentage point and largely on the strength of the GOP’s ability to pick off Hispanic votes. Four years ago, Mrs. Clinton’s 30-point victory in Miami-Dade County, which put her nearly 300,000 votes ahead, was not enough to offset what Mr. Trump pulled off in the northern parts of the state and among non-Hispanic white voters. The good news for Mr. Biden is that he’s polling better than Mrs. Clinton in central Florida and the panhandle, as well as among older voters and suburbanites. The bad news for Mr. Trump is that Florida’s Hispanic electorate looks almost nothing like the rest of the country’s.
Not only do a sizable number of Cuban-Americans live in the Sunshine State, but so do an increasing number of people from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Colombia. These are the groups in 2018 who helped put Republican Ron DeSantis in the governor’s mansion and Republican Rick Scott in the U.S. Senate. The dilemma for Mr. Trump, and for the GOP generally in national elections, is that the Hispanic voters most open to the Republican message are concentrated in one state.
It wasn’t ever thus. In 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush won Arizona, Nevada and Colorado, all states with large and growing populations of Mexican-Americans. In 2004 Mr. Bush won more than 40% of the Hispanic vote nationwide, according to exit polls. By 2008 Colorado and Nevada had turned blue, and Arizona is headed in the same direction. Mr. Bush won the state by more than 10 points in 2004. Mr. Trump carried it by just 3.5 points in 2016, and Mr. Biden has been leading there in nearly every survey taken since January.
Much of the media discussion about Latino voters is centered on immigration, which makes it easy to forget that they care about other things. Most Hispanics aren’t even immigrants; two-thirds of them were born here. The economy, health care and education tend to rank highest on their list of priorities, just as they do for other voters. In recent years Hispanics have overtaken blacks to become the largest group of minority undergraduates at four-year colleges, which suggests that many of them care far more about student-loan debt than they do about walling off the southern border or amnesty for Dreamers.
Immigration remains a symbolic issue for many Hispanics, so how a candidate talks about it matters. And overly harsh rhetoric can also be a turnoff for other swing voting blocs, like suburban women, if it’s perceived as xenophobic. If Mr. Trump wants Hispanics to give him credit for the working-class wage gains and record low unemployment and poverty rates we saw before the pandemic, he might keep all this in mind. Even Democratic strategists acknowledge that the Trump campaign’s Hispanic outreach in Florida has been outstanding. The idea of expanding it to other parts of the country terrifies liberals, who understand that the difference between a 65-35 Democratic advantage among Latinos and 55-45 advantage would be a game-changer.
Washington pundits spend a lot of time these days trying to figure out how badly Mr. Trump can lose the popular vote again and still prevail in the Electoral College. But the distribution of those votes will matter more than the number. Mr. Trump received just 46.1% of the popular vote in 2016 and still won the Electoral College. Four years earlier, Mitt Romney won 47.2% of the popular vote—a full percentage point more—and lost the Electoral College in a landslide. The margins in Florida and other battleground states are what counts, and Hispanic voters have the potential to make a big difference on the margins.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal