While the Delta variant of COVID is making headlines, Joe Biden is attempting to shore up support from minority voters, a normally solid Democratic voting bloc, in advance of the upcoming midterm elections.
Biden and White House aides are meeting with key figures in the Latino, and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, reports the Washington Examiner. These are two demographics that Biden and Democrats have been warned they can’t take for granted in 2022, says former Democratic consultant Christopher Hahn.
“I believe they did in 2020, and it almost cost him the election,” Hahn told the Washington Examiner. Hahn is the host of the podcast Aggressive Progressive.
Donald Trump made huge gains with Latinos and Asians in 2020. And that swing, if it continues, threatens the Democrats’ electoral prospects. Moreover, Biden’s efforts to change the trend have been plagued with missteps. For example, Biden’s poor response to the pro-democracy protests in Cuba last month is likely to hurt the Democrats with the increasingly Republican-leaning Cuban-American community.
According to Hahn, “There was a significant effort by the Trump campaign to reach out to those voters, and they basically sold them a bill of goods that Biden was some sort of communist dictator akin to the ones their families have fled in the past.”
In a tweet, the State Department initially linked the pro-democracy Cuban protests to “rising COVID case/deaths & medicine shortage” and was widely mocked for it. White House press secretary Jen Psaki initially refused to acknowledge that Cubans were protesting communism.
“Do you think that people are leaving Cuba because they don’t like communism?” a reporter asked Psaki.
“I think we’ve been pretty clear that we think people are leaving Cuba — leaving Cuba or protesting in the streets, as well — because they are opposed to the oppression, to the mismanagement of the government in the country. And we certainly support their right to protest,” Psaki replied.
It took Biden and the White House several days to finally condemn communism.
Back in June, Biden also bizarrely implied that all Latinos are in the United States illegally. “It’s awful hard as well to get [Latinos] vaccinated as well. Why? They’re worried that they’ll be vaccinated and deported,” Biden said.
As for the AAPI community, Biden’s rhetoric on anti-Asian racism is severely undermined by his DOJ’s decision to drop a lawsuit accusing Yale of discriminating against white and Asian applicants—reversing a Trump administration position. Polling suggests that despite Democrat efforts to claim Trump’s linking COVID to China was racist, Trump didn’t lose support from Asian Americans in the last election.
Of course, Joe Biden is perhaps not the best person for minority outreach, given his history of blatantly racist comments. For example, during a virtual campaign event last year, Biden bizarre claimed that Trump was wrong to hold China accountable for COVID-19 because Americans can’t distinguish “between a South Korean and someone from Beijing.”
So Democrats have reason to panic. They spent years painting Trump as a racist, but their rhetoric doesn’t cover their own actions. The groups they’re trying to fool into supporting them clearly aren’t buying it as Democrats hoped. Somehow, amid their panic, Democrats forgot that Biden is probably the worst person to be leading the efforts to keep Latinos and Asian Americans in the party.
Story cited here.
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