Florida Democrats face big hurdles in wooing Hispanic voters

Republicans have made major gains with Hispanic voters in Florida over the past two election cycles, leaving Democrats scrambling to find ways to reverse the trends with Puerto Rican, Cuban and Venezuelan voters.

But Gov. Ron DeSantis’ controversial move on Wednesday to fly Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard might help Democrats this November.

“Certainly one group that it might actually influence are Venezuelan voters in Florida, who may look at this as demeaning and shocking to their community,” said Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. “[DeSantis] is basically saying that these Venezuelans aren’t welcome and should just be shipped off somewhere else. ... It’s certainly an opening for Democrats.”

If Democrats don’t stop the bleeding of Hispanic votes, however, it’s not just the next election they have to worry about.

“This election coming up will answer that question once and for all, at least for the short term future of Florida’s political prospects,” said Fernand Amandi, an instructor of political science at the University of Miami. “If the Democrats aren’t able to make inroads in this environment, then one would be hard pressed to see how they compete earnestly in 2024, and perhaps maybe even beyond.”

The Venezuelan vote has been a key battle between Republicans and Democrats for years. Republicans zeroed in on Venezuelans as being similar to Cubans, in that their anger towards a socialist regime back home could help spur more GOP votes.

GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel published a Univision op-ed in 2019 entitled, “Venezuela, Republicans are with you.” She also criticized Democrats for opposing military intervention against socialist strongman Nicolas Maduro.

But the Trump administration held off on creating a Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Venezuelan refugees coming to the U.S., straining alliances with the Venezuelan community. President Biden then did so in 2021.

Now, scenes of Venezuelan refugees stranded in Massachusetts following a flight funded by Florida has angered Venezuelans and other Hispanics alike.

“We’re not your enemies,” Agustin Quiles of the Florida Fellowship of Hispanic Councils and Evangelical Christians at a news conference Friday in Orlando, said of DeSantis. “You find a lot of support in our community. But we are extremely disappointed. And we’ll remember it, and we’ll remember in six weeks [on Election Day]. ... We will definitely not allow you to continue to humiliate us. Our community has been good to you, and to receive this treatment in return?”

William Diaz, founder of Casa de Venezuela in Orlando, expressed his frustration with Republicans over the TPS issue, calling U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio “the silent guy, the guy that for several years is telling us, the Venezuelan people, ‘We are with you, we’re going to help you and don’t worry about it. We’ll work it out.’ And he never did. We don’t need words. We [need] actions.”

GOP makes big gains

Democrats and liberal groups have been saying for years that the Hispanic vote in Florida is a wellspring of potential votes that they just need to activate.

But Democrats now have a much clearer-eyed picture of the Hispanic vote than they did in 2018, when it was assumed the influx of Puerto Ricans from the island following the devastation of Hurricane Maria would stay and vote Democratic.

In that year’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Gov. Rick Scott continuously reminded Puerto Rican voters of his trips to the island, while Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson was criticized for what many critics called a lackluster Puerto Rican outreach.

The result was that while 2012 GOP Senate candidate Connie Mack got just 31% of the vote in Osceola County, six years later Scott got almost 42% of the vote in the heart of the Puerto Rican community in Florida. He defeated Bill Nelson by only about 10,000 votes statewide, and his strong showing there helped make the difference.

Osceola also saw a 10-point boost for Trump in 2020 compared with 2016, one of the largest swings in the country. The Cuban vote in South Florida, already Republican-leaning, also overwhelmingly swung toward Trump in 2020. Trump did 22 percentage points better in Miami-Dade County, and 5 points better even in the Democratic stronghold of Broward County.

“What I saw was a pretty uniform swing of 15 to 20 points in Hispanic precincts, regardless of national origin,” said Matt Isbell, a Democratic analyst who runs the MCIMaps website. “Cuban voters were kind of becoming a swing group, and then they swung 20 points to the right. Puerto Ricans and Venezuelans were much more Democratic and still swung about 15 or so points to the right. They’re still Democratic, but the different groups started at different starting lines.”

Isbell said Republicans were able to effectively target Hispanic voters on issues ranging from the economy to COVID-19 lockdowns to crime.

“The Republicans just did a good job of doing outreach into these communities,” Isbell said. “And much more so than the Democrats, who took a lot of things for granted. Especially as Democrats debated how much they were actually going to do with canvassing.”

Hitting the streets

Wes Hodge, the Orange County Democratic chair, said campaigns were hamstrung in 2020 because of the relative lack of door-to-door canvassing because of the pandemic.

“That had a very dramatic impact in 2020,” Hodge said. “From the Biden campaign, the directive was to not do anything [in the field]. So we did do some locally with those people who were willing to go out and knock on doors. … But we do have a more robust field program this time, with a coordinated campaign.”

Jared Nordland, a senior strategist for the Hispanic organization UnidosUS, said his group has registered 27,000 people across the state this year after returning to old-fashioned canvassing.

“We’re back to pre-COVID days, where we’re out in the community, both here in Orlando, and also down in Miami,” Nordland said. “We’re doing stuff at shopping malls, restaurants, going to people where they’re at. Getting back to kind of normal has been a big thing for us this year.”

UnidosUS is also following up with newly registered voters to help them navigate the post-redistricting landscape.

In addition, Nordland said, “A lot of people actually don’t know that you can vote by mail. Because of the pandemic, because it became like a much more common thing. Now we’re making sure people realize that wasn’t a one-time thing, you’ve been able to do that here for years.”

But the controversial election laws passed by the GOP-led Legislature and signed by DeSantis have also made things harder.

Groups such as UnidosUS had previously been able to drop off registration forms at the local elections office to be entered in the state system, no matter where the registrant lived. But the new laws require them to register people in their home county’s elections offices, making it difficult to register students, workers and others.

Groups can be fined $500 to $1,000 for each application not submitted to the right place.

“We definitely have seen an increase in our cost of canvassing,” Nordland said, “because we’ve spent more time sorting through all the all the voters’ registrations and making sure that the county is on there, because nobody knows what county they live in. And it’s also not a required field on the form, so some people don’t put that on there.”

‘Absolutely crazy’

Another challenge Democrats face is that both Central and South Florida Hispanics have been inundated with misinformation on both Spanish language radio and social media.

One streaming radio show in Central Florida “called Democrats pedophiles and murderers and said we were in bed with the Communist Party of China,” Hodge said. “When it comes to messaging in Spanish media right now? … It’s absolutely crazy. And it was just accepted.”

Amandi said some of the Spanish language outlets, whether on radio, YouTube or even some television stations, “really have shown no limit to the type of information that they’re putting out, even when it’s knowingly false and it’s easily disproven.”

Part of the problem, he said, " is that there has yet to be any kind of punitive consequences, whether it’s financial or political … And until that happens, I fear that you’re going to not only see it continuing, you’re going to continue to see it mushroom as it has with the rise of new outlets.”

Hodge said the party has started to push back on those outlets.

“But it’s gonna take a lot of work,” he said.

In the end, Nordland said he believes Hispanic voters will play the decisive role in November.

“In polling for both the governor’s race and the U.S. Senate race, it seems to be very close,” Nordland said. “We know there’s a lot of independent, nonpartisan-affiliated Hispanics out there … and they’re not extreme. They want to have people want to work together on bipartisan solutions. How that community will break will ultimately determine the election.”

The Republican Party did not return requests for comment on this story.

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