In Miami-Dade County, at the start of a presidential contest in which Hispanic voters stand to sway the election in some of the most pivotal swing states, Hillary Clinton has opened with an apparent 2-1 advantage over Donald Trump.
This includes an even split among predominantly Spanish-speaking voters in a county that’s two-thirds Hispanic.
A rising generation of Cuban-American voters in South Florida shedding the unwavering Republican allegiance of their elders, together with a fast-growing and solidly Democratic-voting bloc of Puerto Ricans in Central Florida, helped propel President Barack Obama to two narrow victories in the biggest swing state of all.
And, as heated campaign rhetoric about undocumented immigrants in 2016 alienates many Hispanic voters, Miami-area surveys point to a potential repeat of Obama’s record-setting 48-percent share of the Cuban-American vote for a Democrat. In a state essential to her own electoral victory formula, Clinton holds an average four-point advantage statewide in the latest Florida opinion polls.
Among Hispanic voters nationally, Trump’s immigration talk “is ratifying the suspicion and the mistrust that they had for the Republican Party,” says Fernand Amandi, principal in a Miami polling firm, Bendixen and Amandi International, which ran the survey for the Miami Herald, NPR, and Univision, as well as previously making Spanish-language ads for Obama and Clinton in the past. “What Donald Trump is doing, he is singeing any hope or opportunity for a generation of Hispanics to even consider the Republican Party again — that’s the Trump effect.”
“I’ve asked the question,” Amandi says of his national Hispanic polling, “if the Republicans were to change their nominee in Cleveland, a majority are still saying, ‘I will never vote Republican in my life.’ It’s compounding and permanently altering the behavior of an entire electorate.”
In the sprawling 27th Congressional District, Miami-based home of longtime Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, another May survey found Clinton holding a 23-percentage point advantage over Trump in a district 76-percent Hispanic. And countywide, Amandi’s survey found Trump lacking a majority of Republicans.
“We definitely do have our work cut out for us,’’ says Helen Aguirre Ferre, Director of Hispanic Communications for the Republican National Committee. “Talking about the Hispanic community, people say it’s a vote that belongs to the Democrats. But Democrats have not done much for the Hispanic community, and they take the vote for granted. Both parties should work very hard for the Hispanic vote, and the idea that any one party can take it for granted is an absolute mistake.”
Ferre herself, a veteran Miami TV and radio host who worked for Jeb Bush’s campaign, was critical of Trump’s talk about Hispanics during the party’s primaries and said then that Trump would have “a hard time” in a general election.
“The party comes together,” she explains now. “I look at this in the way that House Speaker Paul Ryan and other leaders do, and that is that Donald Trump is infinitely better than Hillary Clinton would be, by leaps and bounds.”
Nationwide, Democratic-leaning Hispanic Americans account for the fastest-growing political constituency. Since 1970, the Latino population has grown sixfold, largely because of new arrivals from Latin America, according to the Pew Research Center. The Census Bureau projects a near-doubling from 2015 to 2050, with Hispanics and other minorities accounting for a majority of the population by 2044. Hispanics delivered 10 percent of the vote in the last presidential contest — the Pew Hispanic Center projects 29 percent by 2050.
The GOP faces a growing deficit.
“The nation’s demographic changes add to the urgency of recognizing how precarious our position has become,” a party team reported for the RNC after Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 — the GOP losing the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections and winning a dwindling share of Latino voters.
“If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence,” the report warned.
Then came Trump, the party’s presumptive nominee, calling for a wall along the Mexican border and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
This marks a sharp turn since 2000, when George W. Bush campaigned with a pledge for immigration reform. “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande,” said Bush, who supported a bill offering the undocumented a path to citizenship. Bush won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, a modern-day Republican record.
Romney, who introduced the term “self-deportation” during a 2012 debate in Florida, won just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Now Trump proposes a deportation “force” to relocate the undocumented to the other side of a wall, vowing Mexico will pay for it. The latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows Trump attracting 22 percent of Hispanic voters.
At the same time, while “many say immigration is the most important aspect for them, it’s not true of all Hispanics,” says Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew’s Director of Hispanic Research. “Other issues are just as important, partly because we’re still recovering from the recession — economics and jobs tend to be the most important issues. The economic downturn had a big impact on the Latino community, and Latinos still haven’t recovered.”
A Pew survey of Hispanic registered voters in 2014 asked if immigration is a “deal-breaker” — 54 percent said they could vote for candidates even if they disagreed on immigration, and 36 percent said they couldn’t.
The contest is most critical in Florida, where 23 percent of the population is Hispanic, and other potential swing states with large Latino bases — 21 percent in Colorado, 27 in Nevada, 30 in Arizona, 47 in New Mexico. Obama twice carried Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada — states Bush mostly won twice. Obama lost in Arizona, which some view in play now because of Trump.
The RNC has stationed four Republican Puerto Ricans in field offices in Central Florida, part of a national operation built for the 2014 midterm elections in battleground states — and recently held a national volunteers’ day training thousands of door-knockers and phone-bankers, including Hispanics.
“We have a substantially greater infrastructure than we did in 2012,” Ferre says.
“Florida is definitely a battleground,” she says, and Arizona is sharply divided. She also sees a chance to reclaim Colorado, where Republicans won seven of the last 10 presidential elections: “We’ve got a good team there.”
To be sure, as InsideSources has reported, there are conservative Latino leaders who, while wary of Trump, will rally for the nominee. Manny Rosales, former deputy director of coalitions for the RNC, told IS’s Graham Vyse: “I think we can make a deal with the man if he wants to win.” Meanwhile, other conservative Latino leaders have said the RNC has not been active enough in reaching out to voters.
Asked about overcoming hurdles that Trump’s talk creates, Ferre says the party will emphasize a need for better legal immigration.
“Donald Trump talks about making legal immigration smarter,” she says. “The Hispanics who are supporting Donald Trump don’t see his words as jarring. What they are interested in is national security, in economic security.”
“The country is at a crossroads, and there is a real interest in defining leadership and finding that voice,” Ferre says. “We’re at this place where people are looking for something new and unique… I think that’s the charm that a candidate like Donald Trump presents to these voters.”
