Mike Pence, GOP bet on ethnic community centers to win Florida ahead of midterms
Former Vice President Mike Pence inaugurated a Republican National Committee Jewish Community Center on Monday in Boca Raton to attract voters ahead of this year’s midterms and the 2024 presidential election.
The community center is part of a multimillion-dollar outreach effort by the RNC to engage with voters in targeted communities. The RNC has centers that cater to Hispanics in Orlando and Doral and another in Jacksonville focused on Black residents.
The center in Orlando was opened last month, the one in Jacksonville in February and Doral’s in October, said Julia Friedland, RNC Florida communications director.
In a room full of Republicans, Pence said the RNC is opening its doors to voters from all backgrounds by inaugurating these centers across the country.
“We are going to win back Congress in 2022, we are going to reelect Gov. Ron DeSantis, and we are going to win back America in 2024,” he said.
Pence emphasized that dozens of RNC community centers across the nation are being used to recruit and train local volunteers to increase voter registration and to make sure “that our candidates and our cause have the support at the grassroots level.”
He also touted former President Donald Trump’s achievements, he said, to protect Jewish people in the U.S. and in Israel, focusing on when their administration transferred the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the signing of the Abraham Accords to “strengthen peace in the Middle East.”
“I take great pride in having been vice president with the most pro-Israel president in American history,” he said.
Florida state Rep. Randy Fine, a Republican from Brevard County, lauded his own political wins in Florida such as sponsoring a bill that requires state and local governments to boycott companies who support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions or BDS movement, a Palestinian-led effort against companies in Israeli occupied territories.
Barbara S. Feingold said freedom in the U.S. is in peril and that the left’s “woke ideology” must be stopped in academia, media and government. Feingold is a former member of the State Board of Education who was appointed last year by DeSantis to the Florida Atlantic University Board of Trustees.
While this was Pence’s first South Florida appearance in quite a while, he has been active lately. Pence spoke at an RNC event in New Orleans in March, where he said there’s no room in the GOP for Putin apologists and that elections are about the future, not relitigating the past. In February, he made an appearance at Stanford University in California where he defended the RNC’s resolution to censure U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, for serving on the committee investigating last year’s attack of the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, The Washington Post reported.
He was in Columbia, South Carolina, on Saturday and will return to the state Thursday for an event at a “crisis pregnancy center,” Marc Short, a Pence adviser, told the Herald on Sunday.
“I’m here to say to each and every American, especially those of you in the Jewish community, that now is the time for every American to step forward and do everything in our power to win back America starting in 2022,” Pence said.
McClatchy Senior White House Correspondent Francesca Chambers contributed to this report.
This story was originally published May 2, 2022 at 9:05 PM.
