Posted recently in the thread on Bloomberg’s donation to the Florida Biden-Harris effort, but thought it would be good to expand a bit into a full diary. We’re the grunts in the trenches down here and while we’re not up on the policy and strategy debates coming down from high command, we’re seeing how things are playing out on the streets and neighborhoods in Florida, amid efforts to canvass, convince and GOTV, and can give some information useful to upping our game here. First of all it’s true what the polls and operatives are saying: Florida really is dead-tied now from all our observations, surveys and street-level interactions. Tied among voters overall and among Latinos (esp. the younger Cubans who’ve been trending Dem before and whom we really need to win). The Trumpsters are very active here particularly on social media, including the Spanish WhatsApp, FB, TikTok (ironically enough), Snapchat and Twitter communities and they have been effective, and we really need to wage an aggressive battle. It's a tough fight but it is winnable for us. Some key tactical and practical things we need to address down here.
- Voter registration of the eligible Latino and African-American populations (especially the Puerto-Ricans and Haitians) has slowed down for some reason, and this may be contributing to some of the poll-tightening, as these are some of our best constituencies. We’re not sure why this has happened, but apparently Voto Latino has noticed, and we all need to step up the door-to-door GOTV and registration for these Dem-friendly populations, not just doing digital or long-distance targeting. One key to winning Florida is massive turnout among the Puerto-Rican, Haitian, Dominican, Colombian and Guatemalan communities especially down in the Broward/Miami-Dade/Palm Beach countries triangle. One of our teammates down in Orange County put together a very effective targeted Spanish-language packet that’s been helpful in registration and vote-pledging among the Puerto-Rican, Mexican, Guatemalan and Democratic-leaning Cuban sub-communities there. This microtargeting, street by street and neighborhood by neighborhood, is critical here.
- There’s been a lot of concern and hand-wringing about how and the reasons why the Biden-Harris campaign appears to be polling much worse among Florida Latinos than Hillary did, a decisive factor for the state, and there have been some facile explanations that we’ve found to be dead wrong on examination—no, it’s not due to worries and chants about “socialism” among the Florida Cubans (FL is in a deep economic crisis and people have much more immediate concerns than such abstract ideological bullshit, ex. everyone wants more guaranteed healthcare now) nor is it even about BLM or the protests (despite the media coverage it’s not something that’s swaying Floridians much on a personal level). It’s about Floridians’ hatred of the H-1B visa and its abuse, across the political spectrum and in the Cuban and South American expat communities, and the Trumpsters have managed to tap into this. Out of 100 issues that the media and political operatives go on about, for non-politico types in Florida and the other Battleground states, there are maybe 4 or 5 that really motivate their actual votes, and above all these have to do with health and job and economic security because these are seen to affect them directly. And for a tech-heavy state like Florida, in which Cubans and other expat Latino communities are heavily employed, any support for the H-1B is a killer for a candidate’s election prospects because it’s seen as directly threatening Floridians’ job security and incomes, which will outweigh virtually every other issue in voting decisions. We’ve been talking to people, including to the Cubans, Venezuelans and educated Puerto-Ricans and this is what’s causing erosion of support for Biden-Harris among Florida Latinos, who are heavily employed in the tech and parallel white-collar industries most affected by the H-1B.
To understand this, first read every word of this article from 2015 in the New York Times:
www.nytimes.com/...
and these
www.epi.org/…
money.cnn.com/...
The long and short of is that Disney was using the H-1B visa to bring in cheap labor from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, often at half the wages of Americans (plus longer hours and fewer benefits), to lay off American tech workers who were then forced to train their replacements. This sparked rage throughout Florida, including among Democratic voters and Latinos here, and left a bitter aftertaste—it’s even worse now given the absolute shit state of the economy down here. And even the highest skilled tech workers are very worried about their job security--both the older tech workers who are often the targets of layoffs prior to pension vesting, and the younger ones working their way up, including the younger otherwise Dem-leaning Cubans--and their capacity to manage their mortgages and provide for their kids. All of the wonkish counterarguments about how “the H-1B doesn’t cost too many jobs” or “you’ll be OK if you’re highly skilled” (certainly not true for older workers or those fresh out of college) or “there are steps to make sure they look for qualified American workers first” (easily circumvented by corrupt companies and big firms with slick attorneys, as Disney did) do nothing to affect this sentiment. People in Florida simply don’t care, and they hate the H-1B either way. They’ve seen how the H-1B visa was abused by Disney, Facebook and the “body shop” indentured servitude suppliers like Cognizant, Wipro and Infosys (they’re derisively seen as various forms of slave labor suppliers down here), they see the 1.6 billion strong population of South Asia with (still) women’s rights restricted and skyrocketing populations they can’t support, and hundreds of millions so desperate for a green card they’d work for half the salary of a trained American—and they’re scared shitless about their economic security, which overtakes all other issues in terms of what actually motivates their voting. So even though, from our observations, the large majority of Florida Latinos want to vote Biden-Harris, including the younger tech-savvy Cuban-Americans, they fear for their job security and will vote for Trump if they see Biden and Harris as being H-1B-friendly.
Here’s where recent Trumpster social media messaging has been devastatingly effective. We’re not really aware of recent statements by Biden or Harris in any form about the H-1B, and as far as we know they’re still formulating this policy. But the Trumpsters in Florida are very good at the “dropping hints” strategy on social media, and Spanish-language media (some trad but esp. social) in particular, for whatever reason, has been running with the narrative that Biden and Harris want to not only revoke Trump’s halt on H-1B visas, but vastly expand them. Yes, Trump is wrong on 1,000 different things but even a stopped clock is occasionally right, and halting the H-1B and other tech visas especially amid a terrible pandemic and job insecurity is necessary. Whatever Trump’s other blunders, this policy has been wildly popular in Florida, especially among the Latinos heavily employed in the tech and white-collar industries, and the lack of clarity from the other side has allowed the Trumpsters to flood social media (especially WhatsApp, FB messaging and the various Spanish-language channels) with memes to the effect that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to flood Florida with H-1B workers, and allow a repeat of the bullshit Disney tried to pull in 2015 on a much larger scale. And this scares the shit out of people into voting Trump.
Now to be clear, the Florida Latinos and voters in general are not anti-immigration as a rule. This is a many faceted issue and the terms “pro-immigrant” and “anti-immigrant” are too broad, but in general, people down here do support the Dreamers, they do support treating Latino immigrants stuck in limbo with respect, they even support providing assistance to undocumented immigrants. It’s not immigration in general that troubles them—it’s the H-1B visa specifically that arouses the hatred here and is seen as a direct threat, and it’s not seen in racial terms but in economic ones, which is why the H-1B provokes such opposition even among Latino voters here. This is especially true of Cuban middle-class and upper-class voters in the suburbs who’ve been gradually trending Dem, but are now worried about their jobs and work heavily in tech, especially down in Broward, Miami-Dade and Orange Counties.
The H-1B visa is not a progressive immigration program and it’s a terrible hill to die on for any Democrat foolish enough to support it—it’s largely become a tool for big US corporations to get dirt cheap labor and abuse the hell out of the workers brought in from overseas while laying off Americans, dangling the carrot of a green card in lieu of actual incomes and benefits. And the Trumpsters have cottoned onto this, and they’re using it to devastating effect to create a meme that’s hurting us in Florida and the other Swing States. Biden and Harris must get out in front of this, make it clear the US will not re-open the H-1B spigots until full employment (determined by real statistics like labor force participation--discouraged workers coming back--not the massaged U-3 unemployment stats), that the quotas will not be raised, and that even then, the restrictions (putting out real job invitations first for American workers, strict reviews of requests, high fees to ensure no one is brought in as cheap labor) are enforced in full. with harsh and public penalties for corporate abusers. And perhaps do away with it entirely if a sincere reform is put together. Again, people are viscerally afraid of losing their jobs or suffering reduced wages in the current economy, esp. in tech and white-collar positions that Florida is full of, especially the educated Latino and Cuban population down here, and this is the sort of thing they vote on.
- Not sure of why this is, but the Biden campaign’s messaging on COVID19 and Trump’s blunders on it have been muddled and aren’t reaching voters down here as well as they should, which is a shame because this is where Trump is most vulnerable. He and DeSantis truly did royally fuck up on COVID19, and they should be getting hit much harder for it. There hasn't been enough coverage of the catastrophe wrought by Trump and DeSantis here, and not just on the death rate but the hundreds of thousands of people now facing horrible medical bills and permanent injury to their lungs and brain (COVID brain fog and similar problems) from all the terrible things that COVID is doing over the long-term. It’s like the COVID-related political ads and campaigning in Florida (especially the Spanish ads) have been half hearted, without a clear message, and afraid to hit Trump and DeSantis hard for their clear failures and the acute danger that these failures are posing to the population, beyond just the death rate itself. This has to be clearer and much harder-hitting.