Trump widens Latino vote push in Miami with Colombians, Cubans, Hondurans, Nicaraguans

President Donald Trump surrounded himself Friday at his Doral golf resort with entrepreneurs from Nicaragua, Colombia, Puerto Rico and Honduras while delivering a message of economic prosperity he hopes will lead a broader cross-section of Florida’s diverse Hispanic population to embrace him over Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

“Hispanic Americans enrich our nation beyond measure,” Trump said from the Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom at the Trump National Doral Miami, sounding little like the candidate who four years ago launched his campaign using nationalist rhetoric. “They champion our shared values.”

With polls showing a tight race in the nation’s largest swing state, Trump came to Miami Friday to woo the tens of thousands of Hispanic voters in Florida who are believed to remain undecided. From a banquet table shared with immigrant business owners and set in front of the flags of Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia and Nicaragua, he pitched voters on a choice “between the American Dream and chaos.”

“Joe Biden will lay waste to Florida’s economy,” Trump said during the late-morning event, timed to the release of millions of mail ballots in Florida.

Despite Trump’s America First branding, his ability to win his newly adopted home state could hinge on his support among Florida’s 2.4 million Hispanic voters. And crucial to that effort is his standing in left-leaning Miami-Dade County, a majority-Hispanic community where Trump is performing far better than he did in 2016 thanks to the consolidation of Cuban-Americans behind the president.

But while conservative-leaning Cuban-Americans comprise somewhere around a third of the state’s Hispanic voters, a majority hail from Puerto Rico, Colombia and other parts of the Americas. Many identify with neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party, making them a crucial portion of Florida’s independent swing voters.

“I’m seeing surveys where President Trump is getting 99% of Cuban Republicans,” said Rob Schmidt, a Miami-based pollster for McLaughlin & Associates. “But that cohort alone isn’t going to get that victory for you.”

From left, sisters Lilibeth and Liliana Rodriguez Morillo, daughters of Venezuelan music icon Jose Luis Rodriguez, or “El Puma,” at the Latinos for Trump event. President Donald Trump met members of the community for a roundtable at the Trump National Doral in Doral, Florida, on Friday, September 25th, 2020.
From left, sisters Lilibeth and Liliana Rodriguez Morillo, daughters of Venezuelan music icon Jose Luis Rodriguez, or “El Puma,” at the Latinos for Trump event. President Donald Trump met members of the community for a roundtable at the Trump National Doral in Doral, Florida, on Friday, September 25th, 2020.

Both campaigns are going hard after Florida’s Hispanic communities. Earlier this month, Biden’s running mate, U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, visited an arepa restaurant in Doral, a Miami suburb that is home not just to the president’s resort but also to the country’s largest concentration of Venezuelan exiles. A few days later, Biden traveled to Kissimmee to demonstrate he’s been listening to Central Florida’s large Puerto Rican community.

Biden, who enjoys more support from non-Cuban Hispanic voters than Trump, has sought to push Latinos away from the president by hammering Trump’s hard-line immigration rhetoric and blasting his administration’s push to overturn Obamacare during the coronavirus pandemic. With Trump in Miami-Dade — the county with the most Obamacare marketplace enrollees in the country — Biden said in a campaign statement that “fighting to rip away healthcare during a pandemic isn’t leadership. It’s weak and it’s cruel.”

“My promise to you is simple: healthcare is a right, not a privilege, and a Biden-Harris administration will work every day to expand access to quality healthcare for all Americans,” Biden said.

In Miami, Democrat state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, who is Cuban-American, said many of his constituents are at risk if Trump voids the Affordable Care Act and removes protections for pre-existing conditions, especially if they’ve contracted COVID-19.

“Coming here with the record he has, particularly on the pandemic and on healthcare, is shameful,” Rodriguez said.

But Trump’s campaign believes a message focused on the economy and jobs will succeed in a community filled with small business owners. And his campaign doesn’t believe his push to crack down on undocumented immigrants will doom him with voters who, regardless of party affiliation, sometimes complain they are treated by campaigns as if they care only about immigration.

“We throw thousands and thousands of people out of the country every year,” Trump said Friday. “The people that understand the border better than anybody are the Hispanics. They don’t want bad people coming into the country.”

President Donald Trump poses for a picture with, from left, Nicaraguan Karla Salvatierra, Puerto Rican Hiram Turrull, Colombian Fabio Andrade and Cuban Carolina Ferreiro, as he meets with a group of South Florida community members during the Latinos for Trump roundtable at the Trump National Doral in Doral, Florida, on Friday, September 25, 2020.
President Donald Trump poses for a picture with, from left, Nicaraguan Karla Salvatierra, Puerto Rican Hiram Turrull, Colombian Fabio Andrade and Cuban Carolina Ferreiro, as he meets with a group of South Florida community members during the Latinos for Trump roundtable at the Trump National Doral in Doral, Florida, on Friday, September 25, 2020.

There are signs that Trump’s repeated overtures to Miami’s Hispanic communities — including shortlisting Cuban-American Hialeah native Barbara Lagoa as a potential Supreme Court nominee — are working.

Four years after then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton beat Trump in Miami-Dade County by nearly 300,000 votes, a recent Bendixen & Amandi International poll found the president performing far better among the county’s 1.5 million voters and splitting the Hispanic vote. Republican sources say other polls show Trump beating Biden with Miami’s Latinos following years of efforts to brand Democrats as socialists and sanction Latin America’s authoritarian regimes in places like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

Trump visited the Miami area often before the pandemic struck. His visit to Doral on Friday came after a rally the previous night in Jacksonville, where thousands of people joined him at an airport to kick off the start of mail voting in the state. The crowd of about 150 people at Friday’s event — including professional fighter Jorge Masvidal — gathered, using masks sporadically and mostly ignoring social distancing to hear the president speak.

At the Doral event, Liliana Rodriguez Morilla told reporters that she sees in Democrats what she saw in the Venezuelan governments of Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro.

“We know what it is to be persecuted with guns. We know what it is to run from gas, to run for our lives. It’s not a joke. Communism is not a joke,” said the Caracas-born singer. “The real thing right now that’s going to define this election is how much — Cuanto Americano eres? How American are you? I am not Venezuelan American. I am American. I am a United States citizen with a right to vote. And I’m going to use it to defend the nation.”

Fabio Andrade, a Colombian-American airline executive among the seven people invited to speak with Trump Friday about their experiences in business, encouraged Trump to expand his messaging about authoritarianism beyond Venezuela and Cuba, which receive most of the president’s attention. He said the majority of Colombians in Florida “are U.S. citizens and issue-based voters who do not want a leftist, socialist government in the United States.”

Andrade warned Trump that Colombia could turn into the next Cuba or Venezuela. He then presented the president with a Colombian-made hat with the slogan “Trump 2020” affixed to it, as a symbol of the Colombian community’s work for Trump’s campaign.

“We are going to get you elected for four more years, no doubt,” Andrade said.

Others at the event focused more on what they see as the important up side, that Trump will bring an economic resurgence, despite the collapse created by his administration’s inability to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

“In the United States, I find windows, a better life for me. This is the opportunity,” said Arlette Sosa, who came to the U.S. with her son from Venezuela in 2002. “I right now am thinking President Trump is the best opportunity and the best person for this country and Latinos.”

For about an hour, Trump talked about his “love” for American Latinos. He praised himself for belatedly releasing $13 billion in disaster aid last week to Puerto Rico and promised to revitalize the island’s pharmaceutical industry. He talked up the historically low unemployment among Latinos in the U.S. prior to the pandemic. And he reminded the audience that, just a few days earlier, he’d invited veterans of the 1961 CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to the White House, though he said nothing of an el Nuevo Herald report this week that he’d applied to register his trademark in Cuba in 2008 to potentially do business on the island.

“I will never forget our Hispanic American community,” Trump said. “Even four years ago we did very well with the Cubans ... Now I think, I don’t know, is it possible to be at 100%? We’ve always done well but now we’ve reached a new level.”

Miami Herald staff writer Karina Elwood contributed to this report.