Politico: GOP seizes on women's sports as unlikely wedge issue

[AZProgressive]

38. This article is from months before the election

Former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign has received some scathing reviews from Latino political experts.

Biden's primary campaign had a distant, if not "tense," relationship with Latino voters as he not only neglected to reach out to them but never quite rectified "his connection to the Obama administration's aggressive deportation policy," Politico reports. Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee "in spite of, not because of" his Latino outreach, Politico writes, but more than 20 Latino political operatives say his luck may not hold in the general election.

Around 32 million Latinos are expected to be eligible to vote in the U.S. this fall, making them the largest nonwhite voting bloc in the country. Their votes are especially valuable to Biden in potentially flippable states such as Arizona and Texas. But the Biden team doesn't seem to be acknowledging this fact. "I do not think that the Biden campaign thinks that Latinos are part of their path to victory," Jess Morales Rocketto, the former digital organizing director for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, told Politico.

(Snip)

"Right now I can't tell what their strategy is with the Latino community. I just don't see it," an anonymous Latino lawmaker told Politico. "They have a lot of people out there willing to help, but they're not engaging" those potential recruits. Read more about Biden's fraught Latino outreach at Politico.

https://news.yahoo.com/biden-campaign-doesnt-consider-latinos-143056489.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAABh2uZM2DLV1fcJuS_Z0jOrRqNTbWk8IlOXH8YwAbpyyp_9eBhiHc9chngORFXAbZq1_dVFghfjDNofwvKw70pfd1j3gNo4563oGP7BB1ghgogqnzJVLWab6uqHsTpCIY7AqFm1t3RKhP1XeQlJWJ26KlVirXqP8jE8fNbXc2B1N

On November 3rd, Donald Trump carried Florida by nearly four hundred thousand votes, more than twice the margin that he received in 2016. Four years after Clinton won Miami-Dade by thirty percentage points, Biden performed dismally—beating Trump by only seven per cent. Democrats lost two House seats, along with key races at the county and state levels. To the shock of many Democrats, Trump improved his standing in Miami-Dade in majority Latino, Black, and white precincts alike. Exit polls showed that he won roughly fifty-five per cent of the Cuban-American vote, thirty per cent of the Puerto Rican vote, and forty-eight per cent among myriad other Latino diasporas. Wills was shattered by the results but not surprised. For months, he had been pleading for help. Wills and his fiancée, Daniela Ferrera, a campaign volunteer, have blamed the campaign’s state leadership for contributing to Biden’s disastrous performance in Florida.

Wills and Ferrera, who are both Cuban-Americans, had supported the Republican Party until Trump became the Party’s nominee, in 2015. Ferrera, who is twenty-two, fled Cuba with her family seventeen years ago. “I know what an authoritarian looks like,” she said, noting also that she was repulsed by Trump’s bigotry toward Latinos. Wills, who is thirty-eight, shared Ferrera’s opposition to Trump’s divisiveness and was keen to help Democrats make inroads with the state’s young Cuban voters, who were seen as being more liberal than their parents. A Florida political operative, he believed that the former Vice-President could turn Florida blue. But, after three months working on Biden’s campaign, he grew disenchanted with the state leadership’s field operation and its apparent disregard for the Latino electorate. “It was clear that the resources for the Hispanic team were an afterthought,” Wills told me. “They spat on us, trampled on us, and ran over us.”

A spokesperson for Biden’s state campaign said that it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a wide-ranging effort across the state to convince Latinos to back Biden. “Just in the last weeks, we announced a separate six-figure get-out-the-vote investment for Hispanic outreach, which included direct voter contact, paid media for smaller, micro-targeted outlets, and other outreach and events for the Hispanic program,” the spokesperson said. “This funding always emphasized voter-contact efforts.”

But e-mails and documents obtained by The New Yorker show that the campaign’s state leadership did not respond to dozens of requests and warnings raised over the final three months of the race by members of its Latino-outreach team. In interviews, three members of the team said that they were never allocated a fixed budget, were not provided access to a Spanish-language auto-dialer until late September, and did not receive bilingual campaign literature in Miami-Dade until three days before the election.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/campaign-chronicles/as-trump-gained-latino-support-in-florida-bidens-campaign-ignored-warnings

It is frustrating knowing the Biden campaign did a poor job of reaching out but after the election they realize they didn't do as well so they come up with narratives. Also Trump was campaigning during his entire term especially in Florida.

Biden still did well with 65% of the Latino/hispanic vote and they carried him in this state. There are conservatives in all identities but that doesn't mean we should do what they want.

Trump claimed the Democrats are anti-woman during his CPAC speech so they are certainly going to run on these wedge issues even though there aren't that many trans athletes.