Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden compared President Donald Trump to the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro Tuesday in an apparent attempt to sway Latino voters in Florida, per Fox News.
Trump and Biden have been battling it out for Florida voters — a demographic now considered key to winning the 2020 presidential election — and recent polls indicate that Trump is narrowly edging out Biden among Latino voters in the Sunshine State.
“Last week, an NBC News/Marist poll showed Mr. Trump with a narrow edge over Mr. Biden among Latino voters in Florida, earning 50% of their support compared with 46% for Mr. Biden,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
More worrisome for Biden, he’s polling well behind Hillary Clinton’s 2016 support numbers: “An August survey of Latino voters by Equis Lab, a Democratic polling firm, found Mr. Biden with a 16-point lead over Mr. Trump among that group in the state, substantially less than Mrs. Clinton’s exit-poll advantage in 2016.”
“A string of polls shows Trump has increased his standing with Hispanic voters over the last four years,” CNN adds.
President Trump and the Republican Party have made “a concerted effort” to court Hispanic voters this time around, particularly former Cubans, who already lean Republican. CNN explains that Trump has used a “three-pronged” approach to sideline Biden’s support among Latinos: “Tie Biden to the left wing of his party in an effort to win over immigrants from authoritarian socialist countries; promise economic growth and low taxes to the sizable pool of Hispanic Americans starting small businesses; and pledge to combat gang activity in big cities in an effort to win over older Hispanic voters.”
Biden, Tuesday, fought back in a Univision Orlando interview by directly comparing Trump to Castro, whom many older Florida voters emigrated to the United States to escape.
“Trump has more in common with Castro than with Churchill,” Biden said. “Look who he admires. He admires Putin, he admires Xi, he admires everyone who behaves in an authoritarian way. I am the exact opposite. I have faith in the democratic system.”
He later added that he’d “work like the devil to make sure I turn every Latino and Hispanic vote.”
There’s a problem with Biden mentioning Castro: the Obama administration, where Biden was second-in-command, took great pains to normalize relations with the Communist country. The Trump administration rolled back those changes, reinstituted sanctions and cut off increased economic activity between the United States and Cuba.
Biden, back in April, said that a Biden White House would return to Obama-era relations with Cuba, according to The Hill.
“In large part, I would go back,” Biden told a Miami CBS affiliate at the time. “I’d still insist they keep the commitments they said they would make when we, in fact, set the policy in place.”
That would mean, though, that Biden would be communicating directly with the last vestiges of the Castro regime — something President Donald Trump has not done.