President Joe Biden is making overtures to minority voters this week in an apparent attempt to shore up support among several groups as campaigning for next year’s midterm elections draws closer, the Washington Examiner reported on Tuesday.
The meetings, with top Latinos and members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community, are two demographic groups the Democrats cannot take for granted in the upcoming elections, according to Aggressive Progressive podcast host and former Democratic consultant Christopher Hahn.
"I believe they did in 2020, and it almost cost [Biden] the election," Hahn said.
There is concern in Democratic circles about slipping support among some minority groups.
More than three-fifths of Latinos, for instance, voted for Biden in the presidential election, but former President Donald Trump was successful in attracting more Hispanic voters in both Florida and Texas, contributing to an 8 percentage point swing toward Republicans compared to four years ago, according to a study by Democratic data company Catalist.
Many strategists viewed Biden's tepid response to last month's pro-democracy demonstrations in Cuba as a missed opportunity to attract some of the Republican-leaning Florida diaspora.
"There was a significant effort by the Trump campaign to reach out to those voters, and they basically sold them a bill of goods that Biden was some sort of communist dictator akin to the ones their families have fled the past," Hahn told the Examiner. "Democrats, in general, need to combat that misinformation that the Republicans have been putting out there."
Hahn also suggested that Florida's more than one million new Puerto Rican residents must be a target for Biden and Democrats for both the midterms and the next presidential election.
"I, quite frankly, thought that they would have had a good chance of flipping Florida had they made proper outreach to those new Puerto Rican voters who emigrated there since Hurricane Maria and since the financial crisis in Puerto Rico over the last 10 years," he said. "They're already citizens. They're ready to vote."
Instead, Trump expanded his one percentage point margin of victory in Florida in 2016 to three percentage points last year.
Biden will speak with Latino advocates on Tuesday "to discuss his economic agenda, immigration reform, and the need to protect the sacred, Constitutional right to vote," according to the White House.
Those bullet points are basically repeated for his Thursday conversation with their Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander counterparts, with the addition of "his administration’s response to the rise in acts of anti-Asian bias and violence" after Trump emphasized the Chinese origins of COVID-19.
Hahn said that "Biden and the Democrats need to do everything they can to secure that vote, and listen to their concerns, and act on them. Good governing is good politics."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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