Trump Defies Demographics by Courting Cuba Hardliners in Florida

[left-of-center2012]

President Donald Trump’s clampdown on Cuba’s Communist government is part of an election-year strategy to keep Cuban-American voters in Florida in his column -- but it could backfire in the must-win state. In recent weeks the administration has issued new sanctions ... Those actions are part of a policy that comes from the typical playbook for a Republican president facing re-election: make an appeal to influential Cuban-Americans in South Florida who have supported the GOP for decades over their shared disdain for the island’s leaders.

But the older anti-Communist Cuban-Americans are dying off and a more moderate generation is taking their place, so the moves could seem out of step. Younger Cuban-Americans were excited by the short-lived detente achieved by President Barack Obama -- and Vice President Joe Biden, now Trump’s 2020 opponent. Biden said he would “in large part” restore the previous administration’s policies toward Cuba, which Trump rolled back during his first year in office.

While Trump has made gestures toward Cubans, their historic prominence among Florida’s Latino electorate is shrinking. Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans, who generally lean toward Democrats, fled to Florida after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, adding to an already burgeoning community in Central Florida. The number of island-born Puerto Ricans who are eligible to vote in Florida jumped 30% between 2016 and 2018, according to the Pew Research Center. Cuban-Americans made up 46% of Latino eligible voters in Florida in 1990, compared with 31% in 2018.

“The population in Miami, there are Cubans for Trump, but they’re not going to carry the day in the state of Florida,” said Guillermo Grenier, chairman of the department of global and sociocultural studies at Florida International University.
“That division within the Cuban vote, plus the other Latinos who have come into the state, makes the Cuban vote just not as powerful a voting bloc.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-30/trump-woos-cuba-hardliners-despite-their-waning-clout-in-florida

[PSPS]

1. There aren't many rabid Batistas left anymore. This demonstrates how trump's "base" is shrinking

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Yup-- new generations of Cubans, born here, can't keep up the hate for dead Castro...

and keep thinking how it doesn't make sense any more.

There's this big, beautiful island right next door, and it could use help more than hate.

[Chainfire]

8. I don't think that the Cubans hated Castro

as much as they hated Democrats that they hold responsible for botching the Bay of Pigs "invasion."

[TreasonousBastard]

9. Maybe, but that's a tough one to prove.

[soothsayer]

3. What would Nestor want?

[agingdem]

4. I knew Trump was a throw-back but I didn't think it was

to the 1950s...does that orange moron understand that the generation of Cubans he's appealing to are a dead and dying generation?...their children and grandchildren were born in the United States..they are first and foremost Americans...

[world wide wally]

5. Trump is just running as Nixon '20

[kimbutgar]

6. President Obama had opened up Cuba and reforms were happening and a Cubans went for

Visits there and Then MF45 closed it down again. MF45 doing this might have pissed off those Cubans he hopes to court.

[left-of-center2012]

7. It has long been my opinion ...

It has long been my opinion that the socialist dictatorship would fall faster
if we could flood Cuba with American tourists.
and a return of Obama (or Biden) to watch a baseball game with their leadership.

[RainCaster]

10. On the farm, we call that "pissing into the wind"

Nobody has ever accused him of being smart.