President Joe Biden formally launched his 2024 re-election campaign last week but there are serious concerns that he may have lost significant support from a key voting bloc that will be crucial for his victory -- Hispanic and Latino voters.
There doesn't appear to be any one particular reason for the reported decline in support, but it has prompted a scramble among the president's team to try and address concerns and boost his support among those key voters ahead of the next election, the Conservative Brief reported.
The outlet noted that it could simply be a continuation of the trend begun under former President Donald Trump of minority voters, especially Black and Latinos, incrementally shifting their support from the Democratic to the Republican Party, as has been observed by analysts over the past few election cycles.
Politico published a lengthy report on Monday about how "Hispanic voters have soured on Biden" and the efforts of the president's team to try to "win them back."
Biden's re-election campaign immediately stumbled out of the gates with respect to that voting bloc by publishing a Spanish-language version of his campaign website that was full of mistranslations and typos and had to be edited several times over the course of a few days before being relaunched.
The outlet further reported that Biden hired a Latina woman, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, to be his campaign manager, ostensibly as a sign that he is "serious" about reaching out to Hispanic voters, "But the website snafu is part of a larger question: mainly, how will his reelection effort adjust after experiencing some difficulty recruiting his 65 percent share of the Latino vote in 2020?"
"I have firsthand knowledge of not only how much it resonates with the community, but also how much work it takes," explained Jess Morales Rocketto, an operative who helped the campaigns of both Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) conduct Latino outreach.
"It’s good that there’s two years here where they can really work out the kinks … I don’t think the problem is making mistakes," she added. "The problem is when you don’t have a strategy. The problem is when you don’t respect us in your policy positions, in your personnel positions."
The Politico report also noted that Republicans are taking "aggressive" advantage of every opportunity to expose and widen "any fissures" between President Biden and Latino voters, primarily by highlighting areas where Democrats are out of step with the ideals and values of that community.
"What it tells me is that after four years, his Hispanic operation is still a mess," Giancarlo Sopo, a GOP operative focused on Hispanic outreach and bilingual communications, told the outlet. He added that the mistranslations of the campaign website and elsewhere are "confusing" for Spanish-speaking voters and fuel perceptions that Biden's team is "not that serious about going after the Hispanic vote … or that they’re ill-suited for that task."
The outlet went on to note that Democrats placed an emphasis on Hispanic voter outreach in the 2022 midterms -- likely in response to complaints that they had been ignored by Biden's 2020 campaign in favor of outreach to White and Black voters -- but there are legitimate concerns among some that those efforts, largely focused in Arizona and Nevada, will be too difficult to match or expand nationwide in 2024.
Politico also pointed out that President Biden won majority support from Hispanics in the 2020 election but has since seen his approval among that voting bloc decline by as much as 30 percent in some polls, particularly in recent months.
Indeed, a major poll from UnidosUS just prior to the 2022 midterms found that Biden's approval among Hispanics and Latinos stood at around 65 percent, but has dropped almost precipitously since then.
Now, per the past several surveys from Quinnipiac University, the president's approval among those key voters averages around 35 percent -- a dismal number that would doom his re-election bid if that holds until November 2024.
