The Fight for the Latino Vote
THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE RIDES DISCONTENT with Donald Trump to lead in national polls, drawing support from two-thirds of Latino voters.
That’s the story of Hillary Clinton, who looked set to win four years ago—until she didn’t.
To the mounting terror of Democrats, it’s also the situation Joe Biden finds himself in as polls tighten in the sprint to November 3. The Biden campaign—looking to upend the electoral map by winning states like Arizona, Georgia or Texas—publicly waved away concern about the state of the Latino vote for months. But on September 13th, senior advisor Symone Sanders acknowledged the campaign “has work to do” with the community.
That work accelerated at the end of August and into September, with efforts that are now partially fueled by its $365 million August fundraising windfall, Newsweek has learned. During one meeting on September 1, the campaign’s senior Latino staff—including deputy campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, senior advisor Cristobal Alex, pollster Matt Barreto, and consultant Adrian Saenz—met with the analytics team to discuss expanding the universe of Latino voters being targeted by the campaign, according to sources with knowledge of the meetings.
The campaign has been dogged by concerns that it wasn’t prioritizing Latino voters or doing enough to court them, fears centering on the perennial battleground state of Florida. The issue is not whether Biden will win the Latino vote—Democrats always have in modern presidential elections—but whether his campaign will perform well enough to win critical states like Florida and Arizona or crushingly fall short yet again.
Biden has faced subpar polling compared to Clinton with Latino voters
