How non-Cuban Hispanics in Miami helped deliver Florida for Donald Trump

President Donald Trump’s surge in Miami-Dade County — and therefore his victory in the state — wasn’t just fueled by Republican Cuban Americans. His incredible turnaround in the state’s most populous and diverse county also was due to support from the other half of Miami-Dade’s Latino electorate: non-Cuban Hispanics, many of whom are registered with neither the Republican nor Democratic parties.

In a county where non-Cuban Hispanics make up close to half of the Latino voting electorate, Trump’s campaign tailored its messaging and the president’s campaign stops specifically to Nicaraguans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans and Venezuelans.

And it worked, with some analysts speculating Trump may have won as much as half of non-Cuban Hispanics — a group Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign believed would help run up the score against the Republican president.

“President Trump’s campaign reached out to many voter groups across all spectrums, sometimes new to the GOP. And sometimes they were nontraditional voter groups,” said Susie Wiles, the head of Trump’s campaign in Florida. “The focus was additives. The campaign didn’t do that at the expense of traditional Republican voters. And that, we believe, is the new Republican coalition in Florida.”

The change was dramatic. As a whole, the county swung 22% in Trump’s favor from four years ago. In Hialeah, where four years ago Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton split the vote, Trump took home around 66% support Tuesday.

But his 2020 results were even better in The Hammocks, a census-designated place in West Miami-Dade that is home to one of the largest Colombian-American communities in the country. According to a Miami Herald analysis of precinct results, in 2020, he did 31.5% better there than his 2016 showing. He lost The Hammocks’ 17 precincts by just 184 votes in 2020, after losing the same territory by 8,808 votes four years ago.

The numbers shifted even further for Trump in Sweetwater, a city in western Miami-Dade known informally as Little Managua and home to the country’s largest Nicaraguan community as a percentage of population. His 2020 numbers there were 33% better than his 2016 showing, turning a 17% loss four years ago into a win by 16%.

And in Doral, home to the largest Venezuelan community in the United States as well as Trump’s golf resort, the swing in numbers was even bigger. Trump turned a 40% loss in 2016 into a 1.4% win, a 41.4% pro-Trump shift.

“That’s a historic shift,” said Wiles. “And one that the president’s campaign is very proud of, and one that we think will carry forward because it recognizes the changing demographic of the state of Florida.”

Non-Cuban Hispanics, many of whom register without party affiliation, represent the two fastest growing voter demographics in Florida: independents and Latinos.

From 2016 to 2020, independent voters grew in size in Miami-Dade County from 28.5% of the electorate to 30.8%. That growth came at the expense of Democrats and Republicans, each of which dropped as a share of the electorate. The share of Hispanics in the electorate also grew, increasing from 57% in Miami-Dade County four years ago to 58.4% in 2020.

Both of those upward trends were seen at the statewide level, as well.

Trump’s turnaround in Miami-Dade was so dramatic that, in some places, he exceeded the support that U.S. Sen Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American Republican from West Miami, had four years ago, said Rob Schmidt, a Miami-based McLaughlin & Associates pollster who worked on down-ballot GOP races.

In 2016, Schmidt noted, Florida House District 105 — which includes Sweetwater, The Hammocks and parts of Doral — handed Trump a 22-point loss, even though Rubio won it by 7 points. On Tuesday, Trump won the district by 10 points.

“There’s undoubtedly Clinton-Trump voters there by a pretty sizable margin when you look at those swings,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt said that while Trump was often criticized for not trying to expand his 2016 base, Miami-Dade County shows that he, in fact, did.

“He certainly broadened his coalition to a degree we haven’t seen anywhere else in the country,” he said. “This was a Trump-Republican wave in Miami-Dade County. There’s no denying that.”

The 2020 swings helped not only Trump but also Republicans up and down the ballot, including Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez and former TV journalist Maria Elvira Salazar. Gimenez and Salazar defeated Democratic incumbents Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala for U.S. House seats in majority Hispanic districts.

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, Miami-Dade’s only House Republican before Tuesday’s election, said local Democrats were punished by voters because Democratic Party leaders didn’t disavow socialism strongly enough.

“What you’re seeing is a total rejection of the Democratic Party leadership, and it’s no longer just the Cubans. It’s the South Florida non-Cuban Hispanics,” Diaz-Balart said. “It’s a total outright rejection of the Democratic Party and the left’s policies of appeasing the socialist dictatorships in this hemisphere.”

Trump’s campaign tailored its ads to different slices of Miami-Dade’s Hispanic electorate, of which only about half is Cuban-American, according to Miami pollster Fernand Amandi. And Trump himself made frequent appearances in Miami’s western suburbs throughout his four years as president, talking up his tax legislation during an April 2018 event in Hialeah and attending a Southcom briefing in Doral to applaud a drug trafficking operation in July 2020.

The events weren’t political rallies and weren’t solely focused on Latin America foreign policy, but were part of the argument made to non-Cuban Hispanics throughout the last four years. In September, Trump campaigned at his Doral golf resort with entrepreneurs from Nicaragua, Colombia, Puerto Rico and Honduras.

“Hispanic Americans enrich our nation beyond measure,” Trump said, sounding little like the candidate who four years ago launched his campaign using nationalist rhetoric. “They champion our shared values.”

Fabio Andrade, a Colombian-American airline executive and activist who campaigned for Trump, said the September event received lots of media coverage on Colombia-based outlets that are regularly consumed by Colombian Americans.

Andrade said he noticed a shift in Colombian-American support for the president after the event because Colombians had “a seat at the table, talking about economic issues, [Paycheck Protection Program] issues.”

“Colombians were a sleeping elephant and now we are awakened and people are listening,” he said.

In contrast, Biden didn’t visit Miami-Dade until October, and never ventured farther west than Little Havana. His running mate, Kamala Harris, briefly visited Doral to eat arepas and held a rally the weekend before the election at Florida International University. Former President Barack Obama held a similar rally at the same location in Miami’s western suburbs two days later.

But the outreach efforts in the Biden campaign’s final weeks couldn’t dent the four years of work Trump and his campaign put in.

“There’s this sense of holding progressives or Democratic candidates to one standard but holding Donald Trump to another,” said Juan Gómez, director of the Carlos A. Costa Immigration and Human Rights Clinic at FIU.

While the Trump campaign tailored most of its messaging to Cuban Americans, it began in early October to make inroads with other groups such as Colombians, who make up about 8% of the Hispanic electorate in Florida.

The campaign used similar attacks on Biden as it had for other Hispanic groups, painting him as a socialist and claiming he abandoned Venezuela. But to link Colombians to the rhetoric used to reach Nicaraguan, Venezuelan and Cuban communities, Latino staffers for the Trump campaign began inserting the term “Castro-Chavismo” in their messaging, a buzzword that is frequently used by right-wing conservatives in Colombia to describe the expansion of leftist regimes in Latin America.

“They saw an opportunity and they grabbed it,” said Colombian-American Democratic state Sen. Annette Taddeo, of GOP messaging targeting Colombians. “Clearly, they were smart to do it.”

The GOP also linked Biden to Gustavo Petro, former Colombian presidential candidate and guerrilla member for the militia group M-19, who said on Colombian television and then on Twitter that he would vote for Biden if he were in the U.S.

“Joe Biden is a Castro-Chavismo candidate,” said one digital attack ad in Spanish, which had more than 76,000 views on YouTube and was widely written about in Colombian media. “Biden is too weak.”

Castro-Chavismo was also popularized by Álvaro Uribe, the conservative former Colombian president who is under investigation over allegations of fraud and witness tampering. On Aug. 14, Vice President Mike Pence tweeted about Uribe’s case, referring to him as a “hero” and calling on Colombian officials to release him from house arrest. In October, Trump himself tweeted about defeating Castro-Chavismo.

“Having the opportunity to listen to the president, the most important person in the world, talk to us is very important,” Andrade said. “The fact that the opposition leaders in Colombia endorsed Biden, that’s a no-no.”

Juan David Vélez, a member of Colombia’s legislature who represents Colombians abroad, campaigned with Miami Republicans in the weeks before Election Day. He said Colombians were drawn to the Trump campaign’s message and the attention he and Pence paid to the country.

“The results in Miami’s local elections [are] evidence that Colombian Americans comprehend that America’s future was on the ballot,” said Vélez, who splits his time between Colombia and Miami. “I represent a community that deeply cares about the economy, job opportunities, national security, and the fight against a dangerous progressive agenda.”

Efforts from Democrats were not insignificant with non-Cuban Hispanics, which they viewed as a crucial share of the Latino vote in Florida who could be swayed. The campaign hosted online events every month which later transformed into massive caravans throughout Florida, particularly in Miami-Dade County, and which sometimes intersected with Trump caravans.

But polls showing gains for Biden and other down-ballot Democrats among Latino voters in Florida did not materialize on Election Day. Gómez, of FIU, noted that in the Miami-Dade climate of 2020, Maureen Porras, a Democratic Nicaraguan immigration attorney who ran for the state House District 105 seat just two years after voters there nearly elected a progressive, openly gay candidate, couldn’t compete.

“Look at Maureen [Porras] in West Miami-Dade. How could a Nicaraguan, in Sweetwater of all places, not win? She should’ve been the poster child to show this next generation of Nicaraguan Americans,” said Gómez.

Helen Aguirre Ferré, a Nicaraguan-American former White House communications aide and executive director of the Florida Republican Party, said events in the campaign’s final weeks helped sway non-Cuban Hispanics to vote for Trump. She said calls from some Democrats to add justices to the Supreme Court after Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination reminded Hispanics of efforts to reshape court systems throughout Latin America.

While adding justices to the Supreme Court is constitutional, it hasn’t been done since 1869.

“The packing of the courts, as you saw in Nicaragua, in Venezuela, as well as Cuba, the stripping of judicial independence for that body impedes democracy,” Ferré said. “I think that for our community, we view this threat as very real. That can’t be ignored.”

Andrade said 48% of Colombians in Florida voted for Trump in 2020, up from 36% four years ago. And with the exception of Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, he said Colombians didn’t have much regular communication in the last two years with federal Democratic elected officials such as Shalala and Mucarsel-Powell.

That was a mistake, he said, because the community is growing. He predicted that the 2020 Census will show “close to a million” Colombians in Florida.

“When Marco Rubio was at the Trump rally and asked the crowd, ‘How many Cubans are here?’ They were the loudest,” Andrade said. “When he said how many Colombians? We were the second-loudest.”

This story was originally published November 5, 2020 at 7:25 PM.