A recent poll found Joe Biden had the backing of 59% of registered Latino voters, compared with 22% for President Trump. The former vice president joined a picket line in Las Vegas on Feb. 19.
Photo: Patrick Semansky/Associated PressJoe Biden, seeking to unify the Democratic Party and generate voter enthusiasm in November’s presidential election, is trying to make rapid inroads with Latinos, many of whom sided with Bernie Sanders in early primaries.
Mr. Biden’s campaign secured the endorsement of a Latino voter-registration nonprofit, Voto Latino, with 22 pages of policy proposals that described the former vice president as “ready on Day One to implement the changes needed for the Latino and Hispanic communities to thrive.” In early April, gave him its first-ever presidential endorsement.
How to bring other Latino voters and advocacy groups on board presents a challenge. Many Democrats, including some longtime Biden backers, are urging him to copy the Sanders campaign’s extensive outreach to younger Latino voters to generate enthusiasm. But they also caution that he shouldn’t veer too far left and isolate older Latino voters who were skeptical of Mr. Sanders, a self-described socialist.
“Latinos are not a cohesive group of voters, we are all very diverse,” said U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who represents a heavily Hispanic district in Florida. She endorsed Mr. Biden and was critical of Mr. Sanders during the primary.
In 2016, Democrats thought President Trump’s promise to build a wall at the U.S. border with Mexico would prompt Latinos to abandon Republicans. Instead, Mr. Trump won slightly less than one-third of Hispanic voters, about the same as 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, according to the Pew Research Center.
More than half of Cuban-Americans, who are especially concentrated in the general election battleground of Florida, backed Mr. Trump in 2016, according to exit poll data, compared with 26% of non-Cuban Latinos.
“For Joe Biden, the name of the game is stealing potential Donald Trump voters,” said former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a moderate Republican who was unseated by Ms. Mucarsel-Powell in 2018. “He has to assume that any Hispanic who was a passionate Bernie Sanders supporter is going to vote for Joe Biden just because they reject Donald Trump, so it’s not taking those voters for granted necessarily, but it’s investing resources and efforts wisely. And in a state like Florida that means going after middle-of-the-road Hispanic voters.”
Mr. Biden has campaigned on an immigration reform plan that would include a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. and boosting funding to Central America to try to deter migrants from coming to the southern U.S. border.
Members of United We Dream attended a rally for Sen. Elizabeth Warren in Houston on Feb. 29. The immigrant-youth-led group, which endorsed Sen. Warren and Bernie Sanders, says it is in talks with the Biden campaign but hasn’t endorsed the presumptive nominee.
Photo: Michael Wyke/Associated PressBut his history on immigration policy came under scrutiny during the primaries, including for the record number of deportations of undocumented immigrants during the Obama administration.
Mr. Biden has argued that the Obama administration’s priority was on deporting those who committed a felony—a position he said he would maintain as president, after a 100-day moratorium on deportations for those already living in the U.S. He also split with progressives who want to decriminalize crossing the U.S. border without authorization.
Since he became the presumptive nominee, Mr. Biden hasn’t changed those stances, but in the document sent to Voto Latino, his campaign acknowledged the Obama White House made mistakes in its approach to deportations: “It took the administration too long to get the priorities right,” the letter read.
A poll released last week by polling firm Latino Decisions on behalf of the New York physicians network Somos Community Care found that Mr. Biden had the backing of 59% of registered Latino voters nationwide compared with 22% for Mr. Trump. Less than two-thirds of those surveyed said they were almost certain to vote in November.
Migrants lined up at the Paso del Norte border bridge in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, last week to reschedule immigration hearings.
Photo: jose luis gonzalez/ReutersSome Democrats say Mr. Biden already has the right policy platform but that he needs to devote more resources to advertising to Latinos.
Rep. Tony Cárdenas of California, the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s Bold PAC, which has endorsed Mr. Biden, said he has urged Mr. Biden and his aides to invest more. “Bernie Sanders put his money where his mouth was, and he invested in that communication and it paid off,” said Mr. Cárdenas. According to entrance and exit polls, Mr. Sanders won about half the Latino voters in both Nevada and California, states he captured before dropping out.
“As Latinos we all have friends, cousins, family members that put their heart and soul into the Sanders movement. We let them know they have a home here too,” Biden senior adviser Cristóbal Alex said.
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If Mr. Biden were to pick up where Mr. Sanders left off when he suspended his campaign, such an effort might cost tens of millions of dollars in key battleground states, according to Chuck Rocha, the Sanders adviser who led Mr. Sanders’s outreach to Hispanic voters.
Mr. Rocha said his general election proposal to Mr. Sanders for a three-month Latino engagement program in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Florida would have cost $22 million. A six-month program would have cost $40 million, he said.
Mr. Alex said the vice president has always been committed to investing in the Latino community, but didn’t disclose how much the Biden campaign plans to spend on Latino outreach.
Florida, in particular, may be tough terrain in a general election. The president has already sought to tie Democrats to socialism in Florida with an eye toward Cuban-Americans and Venezuelan-Americans there. Ali Pardo, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, said the president was running on an economic message among Latinos because “they understand that his policies actually help families like theirs.”
Mr. Biden secured Voto Latino’s endorsement after the national nonprofit, which is focused on outreach to young Latinos, sent the campaign a two-page list of requests that included expanding voting rights, ending Mr. Trump’s immigration policies and reinstating Obama-era criminal-justice reforms. The group also included trademark Sanders ideas: It asked Mr. Biden to look into a Medicare for All system, free college and more funding to fight climate change.
In the campaign response, Mr. Biden didn’t offer new promises but detailed his proposals, including student-debt elimination for those making less than $125,000 and free college for families making under that threshold.
María Teresa Kumar, the president and CEO of Voto Latino, called those ideas significant for young voters.
“We want it to be a meaningful endorsement, and we would have had concerns, and our audience would have concerns, if we didn’t address the issues that were top of their mind,” Ms. Kumar said.
—Sabrina Siddiqui contributed to this article.
Write to Eliza Collins at eliza.collins@wsj.com.
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