It was hard to find a Trump supporter in Miami-Dade County in 2016. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won the county handily, beating Trump by 30 points. And yet, a new poll from Bendixen & Amandi International and the Miami Herald finds that the president has made up some ground in the state he now calls home.
No, Trump isn't exactly winning the county. In fact, he's trailing his opponent Joe Biden by 17 points - Trump with 38 percent and Biden with 55 percent of the vote. But as the Miami Herald notes, his improvement maybe all he needs to secure re-election.
"Trump doesn’t need to win Miami-Dade," they explain. "He just needs to do better in the Democratic-leaning county to offset possible losses in other parts of Florida."
Biden, the editors warn, should be worried.
“If you’re the Biden campaign, looking at these numbers, I think there’s reason for pause,” said Fernand Amandi, the Miami-based pollster and Democratic strategist behind the poll. “If Biden under-performs in what should be one of his strongest counties — and is certainly the largest county for Democratic votes in the state of Florida — it might imperil his chances of winning Florida unless there is a massive white voter exodus from Trump in other parts of the state.”
Trump beat Biden by one point among Hispanic voters. And a small detail in the piece notes that two-thirds of all respondents who chose to conduct their interviews in Spanish supported Trump.
Quinnipiac found similar results.
FLORIDA
— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) September 4, 2020
Among Hispanic Voters:
Trump 45% (+2)
Biden 43%@QuinnipiacPoll, LV, 8/28-9/1https://t.co/brfASi8LKJ
Trump leading FL Hispanic likely voters 45%-43%, per @QuinnipiacPoll. Small sample, etc. but that would be a big change from ‘16, when Clinton pretty clearly won FL Hispanics by double digits.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) September 3, 2020
And it doesn't sound like Biden is doing much to gain ground. Dozens of field organizers for the Biden campaign recently accused the campaign of “suppressing the Hispanic vote."
The Trump campaign credits his success with the demographic to his frequent trips to Florida to pledge to Cuban Americans that his second-term agenda will be strictly anti-socialism.
Mercedes Schlapp, a senior adviser for Trump's re-election campaign, isn't surprised by the numbers. As a Cuban American herself whose own father was imprisoned in Cuba for his “political beliefs,” she knows that Cuban-Americans are going to run from the Democrats' socialist-like message. Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), who no doubt had a role in the Democratic Party's 2020 platform, has even maintained that it's "unfair" to say that everything dictator Fidel Castro did was "bad."
“From one moment, he saw the change of what was a democracy into a socialist and communist regime," Schlapp said of her dad. "That is how fragile this democracy is and that is why this election is critical and that is why President Trump has made it very clear that America will never be a socialist country."
Biden's "leftist" agenda, she predicted, will likewise be "rejected."