Biden, Su Tiempo

A lot has been made of Biden's performance with Latino voters compared to Hillary Clinton four years ago, especially in Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and the biggest battleground prize, Florida. It's been a problem for Biden since the primaries, it remained a problem over the summer, Biden took steps to dramatically increase outreach in July and it hasn't gotten any better in the last three months.

The perception is that Biden is taking the Latino vote overall for granted. It's not true, but it's the perception.

Latinos are one of the largest growing demographics in the country, and their support is essential to ensuring a win that cannot be challenged or litigated – especially in key battleground states like Arizona, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

However, according to a new survey conducted by the Voter Participation Center in partnership with Voto Latino and Latino Decisions, less than 60 percent of eligible Latino voters say they definitely plan to cast a ballot in 2020 and demonstrate a low enthusiasm about the candidacy of Vice President Joe Biden.

Even though Donald Trump has no viable path to gain majority Latino support as he makes anti-immigration a foundation of his re-election, Biden’s approval among young Latinos is waning.

Today, Biden’s support is down seven points from 67 percent back in February. By comparison, during this time in 2016, Hillary Clinton enjoyed 73 percent support among Latinos.

A big issue is outreach. Most Latinos say they haven’t even heard from Joe Biden’s campaign nor the Democratic party. Just 32 percent of low-propensity Latino voters say the Democrats are doing a good job of outreach while only 27 percent of Latinos ages 18-29 agree.

On the contrary, Latino Republicans report higher levels of connectivity with their party than Democrats, with 53 percent of self-identified Republican respondents saying they were contacted by someone, compared to 43 percent of Democrats.

So why isn't Biden's Latino outreach working?

It's funny you should ask.

George Soros directs a “Deep State” global conspiracy network. A Joe Biden win would put America in control of “Jews and Blacks.” The Democratic nominee has a pedophilia problem.

Wild disinformation like this is inundating Spanish-speaking residents of South Florida ahead of Election Day, clogging their WhatsApp chats, Facebook feeds and even radio airwaves at a saturation level that threatens to shape the outcome in the nation’s biggest and most closely contested swing state.

The sheer volume of conspiracy theories — including QAnon — and deceptive claims is already playing a role in stunting Biden’s growth with Latino voters, who comprise about 17 percent of the state’s electorate.
“The onslaught has had an effect,” said Eduardo Gamarra, a pollster and director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University.

“It’s difficult to measure the effect exactly, but the polling sort of shows it and in focus groups it shows up, with people deeply questioning the Democrats, and referring to the ‘Deep State’ in particular — that there’s a real conspiracy against the president from the inside,” he said. “There’s a strain in our political culture that’s accustomed to conspiracy theories, a culture that’s accustomed to coup d'etats.”

Gamarra, a political science and international relations professor with extensive experience polling in Latin America and Hispanic voters in Florida, pointed to recent large-sample surveys of Latinos in the state and in the Latino-heavy county of Miami-Dade. They showed Biden underperforming with this crucial Democratic leaning segment of the electorate, though he’s still running ahead of President Trump by double digits. The race overall in the state is essentially tied.

Florida’s Latino community is a diverse mix of people with roots across Latin America. There’s a large population of Republican-leaning Cubans in Miami-Dade and a growing number of Democratic-leaning voters with Puerto Rican, Colombian, Nicaraguan, Dominican and Venezuelan heritage in Miami and elsewhere in the state. Many register as independents but typically vote Democratic. Those independents — especially recently arrived Spanish-speakers — are seen as more up for grabs because they’re less tied to U.S. political parties and are more likely than longtime voters to be influenced by mainstream news outlets and social media.

Democrats fear that’s where the role of disinformation and conspiracy theories might prove effective against Biden, because it plants seeds of doubt in an otherwise-Democratic bloc of the electorate that the former vice president needs to win. The net effect would be to depress turnout, possibly enabling President Donald Trump to carry a state that is essential to his reelection.

Biden is getting worked over by Trump in social media, particularly by a widespread disinformation campaign over Facebook. And yes, it's the same QAnon conspiracy crap we're seeing out in other parts of the country, only aimed directly at Latino voters. Biden's people are missing these attacks and they are going to slip in Florida because of them if they don't start fighting back immediately.

And it's not just social media where Biden is getting hurt.

Some of the information shared in chat groups and pulled from YouTube and Facebook goes beyond hyperbolic and caustic rhetoric.

On Informativo G24, long-time Colombian news anchor Sandra Valencia brings on guests via webcam for discussions about Latin America and U.S. politics with analysis that often relies on conspiracy theories, such as how Black Lives Matter and other activist groups are planning a “siege” on the White House later this month. The site does not detail who funds it, but asks supporters to donate to a PayPal account registered to Valencia.

Valencia bills her Spanish-language YouTube page, which has more than 378,000 followers, as a channel for geopolitical analysis. But it often resembles English-language right-wing news sources, such as Infowars, sharing conspiracy theories and strong anti-globalization messages.

And unlike the conspiracy theories that circulate in English-language news media and social media, there’s relatively little to no Spanish-language media coverage of the phenomenon nor a political counterpunch from the left.

Some of the disinformation discussed on Informativo G24 has been led by Omar Bula-Escobar, a former United Nations representative and Colombian geopolitical analyst, who in recent years has become a frequent guest on various Latin American radio and television news shows to talk about globalization. Bula-Escobar, who’s also a frequent guest on Miami-based Radio Caracol — which is one of Colombia’s main radio networks and widely respected throughout Latin America — has gained an increasing amount of notoriety for pushing the claim, often seen as anti-Semitic, that billionaire George Soros is “the world’s biggest puppet master” and is the face of the American Democratic Party.

“Who’s going to celebrate the day, God forbid, Trump loses? Cuba; ISIS, which Trump ended; Hezbollah, which Obama gave the greenlight to enter Latin America; Iran; China… All the filth of the planet is against Donald Trump. So, if you want to be part of the filth, then go with the filth,” Bula-Escobar said in a recent episode of Informativo G24.

Other shared content has included a translated clip of Christian conservative pastor John MacArthur claiming that there is no pandemic and coronavirus death numbers have been wildly exaggerated.

In June, a Noticias 24, a Venezuela-focused news site that has a large following in Latin America, amplified disinformation with a story bearing the headline “social networks also accuse Joe Biden of being a pedophile.” A month later, when the lie resurfaced, “#BidenPedofilio” trended in Spain.

It's almost like there's a level of political disinformation here and voter suppression that approaches a state-sponsored scope, from a foreign actor that definitely wants to see Trump prevail in Florida, North Carolina and Arizona, to keep Texas, Ohio and Georgia, and to take Nevada, a foreign state that specializes in such political disinformation activities and has possibly run them against other Democratic party base groups in the past.

Now I can't imagine who that could be...

Stepping back though, it's important to remember that Biden is still doing very well with Latino voters overall.

A new survey released Monday morning shows Trump in deep trouble in Arizona. The survey, conducted by Phoenix-based OH Predictive Insights, shows former Vice President Joe Biden leading Trump by a 52 percent to 42 percent margin.

It is the eighth consecutive public poll that has showed Biden leading in Arizona and Biden has led in 17 of the last 20 polls. A CBS News poll released Sunday showed Biden leading by a smaller three-point margin, 47 percent to 44 percent.

OH Predictive Insights, a nonpartisan firm, has showed Biden leading Trump throughout the year, by between four and ten points. In August, before either party convention, the firm found Biden ahead 49 percent to 45 percent. Biden’s current lead comes in a survey sample in which Republicans outnumber Democrats by five percentage points.

The latest poll underscores the foundations of Biden’s lead over Trump, in both national and swing-state surveys: He is winning about the same percentage of voters as Hillary Clinton did in 2016 among groups that lean toward Democrats, but he is doing substantially better among groups that chose Trump over Clinton four years ago.

Biden and Clinton pull about the same percentage of Hispanic or Latino voters, 59 percent in the current poll and 61 percent for Clinton four years ago. But where Clinton lost white voters in Arizona by 14 points, according to exit polls, Biden leads by six among those voters.

And that's the difference.  Biden is actually doing about the same with Latino voters but he's doing substantially better with white voters, in particular white college-educated voters and specifically with white college-educated women.

The conspiracy nonsense still has a chance to hurt Biden in the long run, however.