Demographics, demographics, demographics. You’ll be sick of hearing about them by the time we reach November’s election. But the primaries tomorrow are going to be a key test of the candidates’ appeal to the Latino population.
Jonathan Cooper at the Associated Press has been looking at how this is a real chance for Joe Biden. He’s run repeatedly into a wall in western states, reports Cooper, where Bernie Sanders’ strength among Latinos propelled his campaign even as he struggled with other groups.
Arizona and Florida offer Biden a chance to show he can make up ground with Latinos, a crucial group of voters he’ll need in his corner to defeat Trump. Sanders’ strength with them helped him to an overwhelming victory in the Nevada caucuses and contributed to his Super Tuesday wins in California and Colorado.
Biden is playing catch-up when it comes to engaging Latino voters and is weighed down by anger over the high rate of deportations during the Obama administration, which left scars for many immigrants and their families.
“We need more. And we need commitments as we move into the general,” said Regina Romero, a Democrat who recently took office as Tucson’s first Latina mayor. Biden can win over reluctant Latinos with a bold and progressive stance on immigration, she said.
“I hope that he doesn’t eat up the lie that he has to be more conservative on the immigration issue,” said Romero, who hasn’t endorsed Biden or Sanders since her favoured candidate, Elizabeth Warren, dropped out. “We shouldn’t be afraid of an issue that is so important for Latino voters, water it down and not have policies that Latinos can get excited about.”
Arizona and Florida are both likely to be battlegrounds in the November election. In Arizona, one in three residents is Latino; in Florida, it’s one in four.
Early in his administration, Obama aggressively increased efforts to deport immigrants living in the country illegally. He’d hoped to convince members of Congress and the public that he was serious about border security in order to secure a comprehensive immigration reform bill that would extend legal status to millions of people living in the US without authorization. The reform bill never passed, but the deportations disrupted families, drove fear in immigrant communities and left deep wounds.
Any Democrat’s immigration policies would be superior to Trump’s, but that won’t be enough to excite Latinos, said Tomas Robles, co-director of Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA, a Latino organizing group that has endorsed Sanders.
“You cannot depend on people’s hatred or fear of Trump to inspire them to turn out in droves for Vice President Biden,” Robles said to the AP. “Bernie has worked hard to motivate Latinos as a base. But the entire establishment part has failed at doing the same.”
