Biden targets vets, Hispanics during first Florida visit as Democratic nominee
Inside
Results of latest FAU poll say Florida is a toss-up, A2
Democratic National Committee makes a major ad buy in Palm Beach County timed to today's release of "Rage," Bob Woodward's book, A2
Joe Biden used his first trip to Florida since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee to try to make up ground with Hispanic voters and hammer President Donald Trump on veterans issues, particularly his alleged comments denigrating American war dead.
Biden returned multiple times to reports that Trump described dead soldiers as “losers” and “suckers,” which were relayed to The Atlantic magazine by anonymous sources and confirmed by other media outlets. The former vice president said during a veterans roundtable in Tampa that wounded soldiers often told him they wanted to return to their units and asked if that sounds “like the heart and the grit and patriotism of a sucker or a loser?”
“Sounds like heroism to me,” Biden said, his voice rising inside the gymnasium at Hillsborough Community College, which is near MacDill Air Force Base.
More personally, Biden noted that his son, Beau, who died of cancer, served in Iraq.
“He’s gone now, but he was no sucker,” Biden said before donning a mask for a roundtable that often veered off into other topics, including the coronavirus, Social Security and offshore oil drilling.
Trump has forcefully denied making the comments about dead soldiers. His supporters said Tuesday that they don’t believe the media reports and attacked Biden’s record on military issues.
About 50 protesters waving Trump flags greeted Biden in Tampa at the entrance to the community college.
“Trump definitely is a better supporter of the military than Biden,” said Clifton Alexander, a Riverview resident who left the Air Force in June after attaining the rank of captain and wore a red Make America Great Again hat to Tuesday’s protest. “Biden doesn’t even know what day of the week it is.”
Standing with Alexander, Trinity resident Carl Prewitt called the reports about Trump’s comments “fake news” and questioned the use of anonymous sources.
Biden touched on other veterans issues Tuesday as he sought to put Trump on the defensive with a key base of his support in Florida, which has a large number of veterans and military bases. He pledged to help veterans struggling with mental health issues, get them good medical care and support their families while they’re deployed, while also veering off into a range of other issues.
Saying Trump needs to get off the golf course “figuratively and literally,” Biden argued the president should be doing more to push Congress to approve more coronavirus relief. He criticized Trump’s effort to boost paychecks by suspending Social Security payments, saying it “makes no fiscal sense,” and listened as one of the roundtable participants called Trump’s executive order extending a moratorium on offshore drilling an election-year ploy.
Biden's play for military voters at the Tampa roundtable got a thumbs up from a military veteran seeking a congressional seat in South Florida.
Pam Keith, a Democrat running in a north Palm Beach County and Treasure Coast district, said its veterans and military families are a voting bloc that is very much in play, and could prove decisive in Florida, a state known for narrow margins.
"There are some fundamental core values that all people in the military, and who served in the military share, and one of them is honor and the way we conduct our mission," said Keith, who served in the Navy. "It's a core cultural norm. In the military, we do not lie, we do not cheat. When we brief that we are accurate and we go out of our way not to embellish or exaggerate. Our word is our bond."
Trump, she said, has fundamentally trampled over those virtues as commander in chief.
"What has happened over these three years is the Trump administration has shown it has absolutely no respect or grasp of any of those concepts," Keith said.
That includes the nonresponse to the intelligence reports alleging Russian bounties for killing U.S. military members, the abandonment of Kurdish forces and the disrespect shown to U.S. allies. These are betrayals, Keith said, that weigh heavily on all who have worn the U.S. military uniform.
"It's not just how Trump makes decisions that puts the lives of those in uniform at risk," she said. "But also in the dishonorable way that he makes decisions that heavily affected our allies and our partners on the ground."
Add to that, she said, the way he has disparaged Americans who served, from such generals as James Mattis and John Kelly, to even the disgraceful attempt to fire Brett Crozier as commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier after Crozier tried to protect the ship's crew during an outbreak of COVID-19.
"He has looked down upon those who have served in the military over long periods of time and earned the respect of their subordinates," Keith said. "That is what obtaining rank is. It is obtaining the respect of those beneath you, those parallel to you and those above you."
But Biden was playing catch-up in Florida Tuesday with a key group of Florida voters, attending a Hispanic Heritage Month event in Kissimmee near Orlando, which has a significant number of transplants from Puerto Rico.
Biden’s jaunt down the all-important Interstate 4 corridor comes as Florida Democrats are increasingly worried about his prospects for carrying a state where he led by significant margins in many polls taken over the summer.
An NBC News/Marist poll released last week had Trump up by four percentage points with Florida Hispanics. Other polls have been better for Biden, he was leading with Florida Hispanics by 16 points in an August poll by Equis Research, but that’s still well below Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margin with such voters.
Biden led by three percentage points in a Florida Atlantic University poll released Tuesday, within the poll's margin of error. Biden was up by six in an FAU poll from May.
The latest FAU poll found Trump supporters are more enthusiastic than Biden supporters.
“Florida continues to be too close to call, but the enthusiasm still favors President Trump, and that could be the difference,” said FAU political science professor Kevin Wagner.
Biden held a 5-point lead among registered voters and those who are "highly likely" to vote in another Florida poll released Tuesday by Monmouth University, outside the 4.7 point margin of error.
State Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, an Orlando Democrat of Peruvian heritage, said Biden still has plenty of time to make up ground with Hispanic voters.
"This is the time where folks are really paying attention," Smith said.
Smith's husband moved to Florida from Puerto Rico shortly after the 2016 election and will vote in a presidential race for the first time. Many other Puerto Rican transplants living in Florida are in the same situation, and Smith said they are open to hearing Biden's message.
“This is a novelty for Puerto Rican voters who have moved to Florida since Hurricane Maria" in 2017, Smith said. “They won’t forget the long list of insults and indignities that Trump has thrown toward Puerto Rico, his failed response after Hurricane Maria that has cost lives.”
But Biden could have a tougher time winning over Hispanics in Florida — where they make up about 20% of eligible voters according to the Pew Research Center — than elsewhere.
Many Florida Hispanics are of Cuban descent, and some may be wary of the push by Biden and former President Barack Obama to normalize diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba, something Trump reversed. The president has targeted Cuban voters and those from other oppressive socialist regimes, such as Venezuela.
Those outreach efforts appear to have paid off, and Trump's hard-line immigration policies have received less emphasis in recent months and may be less of drag for him with Florida Hispanics.
“It’s important Democrats are proactive in their message," Smith said. "Joe Biden I think understands really well that Hispanic voters who fled totalitarian regimes… don’t want any dictator left- or right-wing, and Donald Trump has demonstrated in so many ways his love for dictators and his totalitarian tendencies.”
Jorge Duany, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, said it is no shock that Trump is winning the majority of Cuban-American voters, but it is significant that he is running up the score on Biden in Miami.
"What is noticeable is that the actual numbers of Cuban-American voters that Trump has increased," Duany said. The institute is polling now, and Duany said he would not be shocked if the next round of findings "shows a substantial consolidation of the Cuban-American vote for Trump and the Republican Party."
Duany said the gains are very much policy-driven.
"I think it has to do primarily with his U.S.-Cuba policy, the fact that Trump overturned the Obama policy of rapprochement since 2014," he said. "Even though he has not closed down the U.S. Embassy, that would probably be the next step."
The policy moves play especially well older Cuban-Americans, who are a reliable voting bloc.
"They are very happy with the hard-line policy of the Trump administration and they support him on that account," he said.
The anti-socialism and anti-communist rhetoric also is a factor.
"His tough stance on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are quite popular here in Little Havana and among Cubans in the United States," Duany added.
That being said, Duany said there lots of other votes out there for Democrats to seek among the Hispanic demographic, including Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Venezuelans and others.
He says that is why Biden campaigned in Central Florida Tuesday, and why the Trump campaign is investing in the I-4 corridor, too.
"They do know there is a significant number of undecided voters that might go either way, which is the reason why they are trying to capture that vote that's not Cuban-American voters, which I think is decidedly with Trump," Duany said.
Hours before Biden visited Kissimmee, Republicans held a news conference in the Central Florida town to tout Puerto Rican GOP candidates and issues.
Helen Ferre Aguirre, executive director of the Republican Party of Florida, taunted Biden's campaign stop in Central Florida.
"We've been here all along," she said. "We don't need an election to bring us here."
Aguirre said the Trump campaign and GOP candidates will succeed by talking up public safety and key issues like school choice.
"They are worried and concerned about the violence in the streets," Aguirre said of voters she's spoken to along the I-4 corridor. She touted the Trump administration's efforts to produce a COVID-19 vaccine and promised there would be an economic revival, if Trump is reelected, that would lower the Hispanic jobless rate to under 3.4%.
Aguirre also criticized Jill Biden for, she said, a 2014 trip to Cuba and said she was waiting for the former vice president to call out the Cuba dictatorship.
"She's had four years to speak up, and so has Joe Biden," Aguirre said.
Also speaking was Leo Valentin, the GOP candidate for Congressional District 7.
Valentin noted how the Trump administration is returning pharmaceutical manufacturing to Puerto Rico, which he said evaporated after Democrats removed the erstwhile Sec. 936 law that gave the island preferences on drug production. Instead, that production went to China.
"As President Trump said, we are firing China and hiring Puerto Rico again," Valentin said.
Biden is getting help in his Hispanic outreach effort from billionaire former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who announced recently that he will spend up to $100 million in Florida to back the former vice president. Part of that effort will target Hispanic voters.
Biden's campaign event in Tampa Tuesday contrasted sharply with the rallies Trump has begun holding again despite public health guidelines warning against large gatherings.
There were six veterans at the roundtable. They were outnumbered by the media. There was no clapping or cheering and Biden largely spoken in a subdued, low-key tone, his voice occasionally becoming more forceful when criticizing Trump.
Tampa Pastor Allen Temple, an Army veteran who participated in the roundtable, said the event was "appropriate for the uncertain times that we're in."
"I'm thankful that Vice President Biden is getting out but doing it in a safe way and relying on science," Temple said.