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How Democrats Took Latino Voters for Granted

Slate Daily Feed

Slate

News, Business, Society & Culture

3.91.1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2020

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Some early exit polls showed Joe Biden winning a strong majority of Latino voters but if you look closely there’s a more complicated story. In some key areas, Biden and Democrats more broadly underperformed with Latino voters compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016. How did the Biden campaign miss the mark?

Guest: Chuck Rocha, head of Nuestro PAC.


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Transcript

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0:00.0

On election night, Chuck Rocha was at home in D.C. by himself.

0:09.7

I like spending election night alone.

0:12.9

Hold it why?

0:15.4

I'm an emotional creature, if you can't tell.

0:18.6

And so I have found it through doing this for 31 years and living

0:22.5

through the trials and tribulations of losing lots of elections that, trying to keep everything

0:27.7

in perspective. It's kind of controlled chaos on election night. Even though he was on his own,

0:33.7

Chuck still had an audience. He's got 50,000 followers on Twitter. And when he saw the results come in from Florida, he couldn't help himself. He tweeted, my next book is going to be called, I Told You So.

0:46.9

I just knew that from watching that we were going to have not as many victories as I think everybody thought we were going to have on election night.

0:54.9

And my intuition played true.

0:56.8

30 years of doing this work came to be what I thought it would be.

1:00.4

Chuck's specialty is advising candidates how they can reach out to Latino voters.

1:05.5

The very voters, Joe Biden, seemed to lose in Miami-Dade County.

1:10.4

I always thought Joe Biden would win. I knew that we would,

1:13.4

he would have some softness in certain geographical areas with a Latino vote, and that was true.

1:18.5

And I knew that white people loved Donald Trump, but that we would get enough to get by.

1:23.2

We had Chuck on the show just a few weeks back, but I wanted to talk to him again to try to figure out what happened here.

1:29.9

When we last spoke, he was looking at the numbers, seeing this weakness among Latino voters,

1:35.2

and basically begging the Democratic operatives to send him money.

1:39.6

And he says that actually did work.

1:42.0

And I will give Joe Biden credit.

1:43.5

He invested money there. Was it a little late? Yes. Was it a lot? Yes. So I will give Joe Biden credit. He invested money there.

...

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