I<\/b><\/p>\n
It\u2019s almost commonplace to affirm that Hispanics\/Latinos will become the largest minority voting group in the United States during this year\u2019s election. Indeed, this is a record 32 million people eligible to go to the polls, representing 13.3% of all voters. This figure includes a large number of voters in swing states like Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and Florida. In the latter, Hispanics\/Latinos make up nearly a quarter of voters.<\/span><\/p>\n Well-known actress and presenter <\/span>Eva Longoria<\/span><\/a> repeated it to those attending a Democratic rally in Kissimmee, Florida, when Biden was campaigning on the important I-94 corridor, which connects Tampa with Orlando and Daytona Beach. \u201cThis year, for the first time in history, Hispanics will be the largest minority group of potential voters in the United States, Latino voters will decide the 2020 elections, that is a fact. Not only do I want Trump to be removed from office, I want the Latino community to be the decisive group to remove him.\u201d Biden, for his part, said: \u201cMore than any other time, the Hispanic community, Latino community holds in the palm of their hand the destiny of this country. You can decide the direction of this country.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It is, by definition, one of the sociodemographic groups on which many of the anti-immigrant constructs of the present time have fallen and still fall, endorsed on various occasions and in different settings by the figure of Donald Trump since his 2016 electoral campaign. As is known, one of the most vociferous consists in spreading the idea that Mexicans who cross the border illegally\u2014actually an old rhetorical figure that does the whole thing\u2014are, overwhelmingly, criminals, murderers and rapists. The feedback of that discourse is the actions of the executive branch such as trying to dismount\/deport the young dreamers, a result of immigration policies of the Obama administration that have been and still are the subject of many times controversial decisions of the judicial system.<\/span><\/p>\n Other racist constructs also hang over the Latino vote, such as those related by Michael Cohen, Trump\u2019s former personal lawyer, in his book <\/span>Disloyal<\/span><\/i><\/a>, according to which the president would have snapped at him that he wouldl never get the Hispanic vote, adding that like blacks, they are too stupid to vote for Trump and that they weren\u2019t his people. And that they have a multilateral impact on that community, beyond their immigration status.<\/span><\/p>\n However, it would be wrong to conclude that Hispanics\/Latinos constitute a monolithic bloc. <\/span>Viktor Reklatis<\/span><\/a> has written that people assume that being Republican and Latino is a contradiction in terms\u2026. That there have always been Latinos attracted by Republican values \u200b\u200band policies\u2026. And that he didn\u2019t think it\u2019s exciting to say, but Latino voters are in many ways like everyone else: very diverse, and their vote is based on a combination of their own interests, aspirations, political opinions, religion, and notions of belonging and identity. The expression \u201cLatino Republican,\u201d one scholar rightly says, is not, of course, an oxymoron.<\/span><\/p>\n The Latino vote in Florida<\/b><\/p>\n In the 2016 presidential election, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the state of <\/span>Florida<\/span><\/a> by a narrow margin (49% vs. 47.8%). Several analysts of this year\u2019s elections anticipate that it could again be crucial in the final results, depending on how the process behaves at the national level and especially in the rest of the swings states. Florida, as it is known, contributes 29 electoral votes. Traditionally, Latinos\/Hispanics have been Democratic voters, minus Cubans, especially those living in South Florida.<\/span><\/p>\n For Democrats, the problematic data is that Joe Biden has the weakest Latino support of all their recent presidential candidates. An <\/span>NBC News\/Marist<\/span><\/a> poll of Latino voters in Florida from eight weeks before the election found that Trump was four points ahead (50% vs. 46%). And that among all Florida voters the Democratic challenger and the Republican incumbent were tied with 48% support. In an average of RealClearPolitics polls, Biden was slightly higher at 48.7% versus Trump\u2019s 47.1%.<\/span><\/p>\n The presence of Biden in the aforementioned corridor, which is characterized by its high concentration of Hispanic\/Latino population, and especially Puerto Ricans, then responded to the fact that at that point his performance among Hispanics\/Latinos was quite poor compared with that of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, which sparked alarm among members of the Democratic leadership and officials of his campaign.<\/span><\/p>\n