Biden Heads to Florida to Court Latino Vote

LiveUpdated Sept. 15, 2020, 9:03 a.m. ET
Sept. 15, 2020, 9:03 a.m. ET
Joe Biden is making his first Florida trip of the general election, while President Trump will hold a town-hall-style meeting in Philadelphia. Hillary Clinton warned that Kamala Harris would face a sexist double standard in her debate with Mike Pence.
Heres what you need to know:
Joseph R. Biden Jr. will make his first trip to Florida of the general election on Tuesday as he seeks to rally Latino voters in the crucial battleground state.
Mr. Biden, whose itinerary includes a Hispanic Heritage Month stop in Kissimmee, outside Orlando, did not mince words about the purpose of his trip. I will talk about how I am going to work like the devil to make sure I turn every Latino and Hispanic vote, Mr. Biden told reporters after a speech in Delaware on Monday.
His visit comes days after his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, visited Miami, making a stop at an arepa joint, and as some Democrats have raised alarms about President Trumps traction among some Hispanic voters.
Mr. Bidens efforts in the state are getting a large financial boost, after the billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, announced plans to spend $100 million in Florida in the final 50 days to boost the Democratic nominee.
Already, Mr. Biden has been advertising heavily in the state, spending $6.2 million on television in the last week, according to data from Advertising Analytics.
For his part, Mr. Trump has aggressively sought to portray the election of Mr. Biden as a step toward socialism. The message could be especially resonant for Floridas large Cuban-American population, which leans more conservative than other Hispanic groups.
Floridas Latino population is both growing and diverse.
Cubans are the dominant group, Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist who runs a pro-Biden super PAC, explained in his election-year preview of the states political dynamics, though there are meaningful and growing populations from nations all over Latin America, most notably Colombia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Honduras, Peru and the Dominican Republic.
Asked about his support among Latino voters on Monday, Mr. Biden compared his numbers favorably to the presidents.
Much higher than his, Mr. Biden said. But theyve got to go higher.
Shane Goldmacher
Shortly after the 2018 midterm elections ended, progressive groups looking at the 2020 Senate map alighted on one state where they had a chance to contest a safely Democratic seat against a centrist incumbent.
But Delawares 2020 Senate race never became a cause célèbre on the left. Liberal groups instead focused time and resources on House races, where they won key primary victories over veteran congressmen in Chicago, St. Louis and the Bronx.
Senator Chris Coons, a 10-year incumbent who faces a progressive challenger, Jessica Scarane, in Tuesdays primary, is widely expected to coast to re-election to his second full term.
A poll conducted last month by a confederation of progressive organizations considering investing in the race on Ms. Scaranes behalf found Mr. Coons leading by 40 percentage points, a margin sufficient enough to dissuade groups from spending money to help Ms. Scarane.
Still, Mr. Coons has used his enormous fund-raising advantage to blanket Delawareans with television ads, spending nearly $800,000 compared with Ms. Scaranes $65,000. The only third-party organization to devote significant resources to the race has been the American Chemistry Council, which aired more than $200,000 in ads backing Mr. Coons.
Ms. Scarane, who moved to Delaware from New York 10 years ago, does not have the profile of other left-wing upstarts who have ousted incumbent centrist Democrats. Indeed, progressive organizations looking to topple Mr. Coons had first sought to recruit a woman of color to support in the race. Kerri Evelyn Harris, a Black progressive organizer, gave Delawares other Democratic senator, Tom Carper, a brief scare in 2018 before Mr. Carper prevailed by nearly 30 percentage points.
In down-ballot Delaware contests, Sarah McBride, a candidate for State Senate, is on track to become the nations highest-ranking openly transgender elected official. She faces a token challenger for an overwhelmingly Democratic open seat in Wilmington. Her primary opponent, Joseph McCole, reported raising no money for his campaign.
Ms. McBride was the first transgender person to work at the White House when she served as an intern during President Barack Obamas administration.
There are currently four openly transgender elected officials serving in lower chambers of state legislatures in Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia.
Reid J. Epstein
LAS VEGAS For the past decade, Democrats in Nevada have notched one hard-fought victory after another. In 2010, Senator Harry Reid won his hotly contested re-election campaign, even as the party lost other battles all over the country. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the state, though with a smaller margin of victory than Democrats saw in the past two presidential contests. And in 2018, the Democrats managed to capture the governors office and the State Senate.
Nevadas Democratic political machine was held up as a model for other states where neither party has consistently dominated. But it was a machine built for another era.
Its success relied on hundreds of people knocking on thousands of doors for face-to-face conversations with voters. Now, there are less than half the number of people canvassing for Democratic voters than in September 2016. And some Democratic strategists warn that Nevada could be in 2020 what Wisconsin was in 2016 a state that the Democrats assume is safely in their column but that slips away by a narrow margin.
I am saying every day: We are more vulnerable than you think we are, said Annette Magnus, the executive director of Battle Born Progress, a liberal group that has yet to raise enough money to start the kind of campaigning this fall that it has previously deployed. We frankly need to fire up our base a little more, and we have so much work in front of us. Nevada does not have the resources we need to do that yet.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. maintains an edge over President Trump in the state, according to new polling from The New York Times and Siena College, with Mr. Biden leading by four percentage points, though the difference is within the polls margin of error. But Democrats worry that they will struggle to get the kind of enthusiastic turnout they need particularly among Latinos and working-class voters who make up a significant part of the partys base here.
In 2016, Mrs. Clinton won Nevada by just 2.4 points 10 points less than Barack Obamas margin in 2008. Last week, the Cook Political Report changed its rating of the state from likely Democrat to lean Democrat. Mr. Trump has indicated he intends to fight for Nevada, holding two rallies over the weekend, including a Sunday event entirely indoors, despite the states ban on gatherings with more than 50 people.
Jennifer Medina
Michelle Wu, a 35-year-old Chinese-American city councilor and progressive Democrat,announced on Tuesday that she will enter the 2021 Boston mayoral race, asserting a moment of change for a city which has been led by white men since its incorporation in 1822.
Ms. Wu is challenging Mayor Marty Walsh, who is expected to run for a third term.
Mr. Walsh has won widespread approval for his handling of the coronavirus, and it is difficult to defeat a sitting mayor in Boston; the last time it happened was in 1949.
Still, Massachusetts politics has been jolted repeatedly in recent years by progressive candidates who built come-from-behind campaigns around issues of climate change and social justice.
Ms. Wu, a policy wonk and former student of Senator Elizabeth Warren, has proposed sweeping solutions to issues like gentrification and social inequality.
She has recommended waiving all fees for public transportation, and abolishing the Boston Planning and Development Agency to give communities more influence over construction. Last year, she proposed a Boston Green New Deal, which aims for the city to be carbon neutral by 2040.
Her announcement video released in English, Spanish and Mandarin describes a painful period when she, after graduating from Harvard University, had to quit her job and move home to Chicago to care for her mother, who was struggling with mental illness.
Juxtaposing footage of family life with Black Lives Matter protests, she appeals to voters who are fighting a system that wasnt built for us, doesnt speak our languages, doesnt hear our voices.
Im a mom, the daughter of immigrants, and Ive lived my whole life knowing what its like to feel unseen and unheard, even when you most need help, she said.
City Councilor Andrea Campbell, who is Black, is also widely expected to enter the race.
Ellen Barry
Here are the daily schedules of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates for Tuesday, Sept. 15. All times are Eastern time.
Joseph R. Biden Jr.
1:30 p.m.:Hosts a discussion at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Fla., with military veterans.
6:30 p.m.: Attends a Hispanic Heritage Month event in Kissimmee, Fla.
President Trump
10:30 a.m.: Hosts officials from the Kingdom of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates at the White House.
9 p.m.: Holds a 90-minute town hall in Philadelphia with uncommitted Pennsylvania voters, carried live on ABC News.
Kamala Harris
Afternoon: Meets with emergency service personnel for an assessment of the wildfires in Fresno, Calif.
Evening: Attends a community conversation focused on the impact of Covid-19 on working families in the Latino community in Las Vegas.
Vice President Mike Pence
5:30 p.m.: Hosts Workers for Trump event in Zanesville, Ohio.
President Trump and his campaign are defending his right to rally indoors, despite the private unease of aides who called it a game of political Russian roulette and growing concern that such gatherings could prolong the coronavirus pandemic.
Im on a stage, and its very far away, Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Las Vegas Review-Journal on Monday, after thousands of his supporters gathered on Sunday night inside a manufacturing plant in a Las Vegas suburb, flouting a state directive limiting indoor gatherings to fewer than 50 people.
The president did not address health concerns about the rally attendees, a vast majority of whom did not wear masks or practice any social distancing. When it came to his own safety, he said, Im not at all concerned.
The decision to hold a rally indoors, officials said, was something of a last resort for a campaign that had tried to procure five different outdoor locations. A Trump campaign official said they all faced pressure from state officials not to host the rally.
Xtreme Manufacturing, which finally agreed to host, immediately faced threats from the city of Henderson, Nev. Officials said in a letter made public that the city could charge a fine of $500 for every person over the states limit of 50 people and suspend or revoke Xtreme Manufacturings business license.
Mr. Trump had been defiant during the rally. If the governor comes after you, which he shouldnt be doing, Ill be with you all the way, he told the crowd.
Annie Karni
With wildfires raging across the West, climate change took center stage in the race for the White House on Monday as Joseph R. Biden Jr. called President Trump a climate arsonist while the president said that I dont think science knows what is actually happening.
A day of dueling appearances laid out the stark differences between the two candidates, an incumbent president who has long scorned climate change as a hoax and rolled back environmental regulations and a challenger who has called for an aggressive campaign to curb the greenhouse gases blamed for increasingly extreme weather.
Mr. Trump flew to California after weeks of public silence about the flames that have forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, wiped out communities and forests, burned millions of acres, shrouded the region in smoke and left at least 26 people dead. But even when confronted by Californias governor and other state officials, the president insisted on attributing the crisis solely to poor forest management, not climate change.
Mr. Biden, for his part, assailed Mr. Trumps record on the climate, asserting that the presidents inaction and denial had fed destruction, citing not just the current emergency on the West Coast but flooding in the Midwest and hurricanes along the Gulf Coast. In an outdoor speech at a museum in Wilmington, Del., the Democratic presidential nominee sought to paint a second Trump term as a danger to the nations suburbs, flipping an attack on him by the president.
If we have four more years of Trumps climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned in wildfires? Mr. Biden asked. How many suburban neighborhoods will have been flooded out? How many suburbs will have been blown away in superstorms? If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?
Peter Baker, Lisa Friedman and Thomas Kaplan
Hillary Clinton, speaking candidly during an online fund-raiser Monday, counseled Kamala Harris to modulate her responses during her upcoming debate with Vice President Mike Pence to avoid a sexist double standard that portrays strong female leaders as frightening.
Mrs. Clinton, who lost the 2016 election despite posting strong debate performances against Donald J. Trump, warned Ms. Harris that Mr. Pence would try to undermine her without bombast.
Pence will somehow, subtly undercut Kamala you know, he will try to say, Well, thats not the way its done, Mrs. Clinton said, adding that Mr. Pence would seek to use the debate, scheduled for Oct. 7 at the University of Utah, to put her in the box of, you know, the inexperienced woman candidate.
She has to modulate her responses because we know there still is a double standard, alive and well when it comes to women in politics, Mrs. Clinton added, so shes got to be firm and effective in rebutting any implication that comes from the other side but do it in a way that doesnt scare or alienate voters.
Mondays online event, which attracted 100,000 viewers and raised an estimated $6 million in small donations, featured not only Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Harris but their two best-known celebrity doppelgängers, the former Saturday Night Live cast members Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph.
At times, the discussion resembled an informal conversation between four friends, with Mrs. Clinton saying she has used the forced confinement of the pandemic to spend time with her grandchildren and to catch up on decades of sleep deprivation. Ms. Harris said that her family had been cooking a lot more, and binge-watching Marvel movies, at least before she was picked as Mr. Bidens running mate.
At one point, Ms. Poehlers microphone went dead, and the three other participants chatted among themselves as Mr. Bidens team scrambled to figure out what had gone wrong.
Somebody unmute Amy! Mrs. Clinton said.
I smell sabotage, joked Ms. Rudolph.
You never know what is really going on these days, Mrs. Clinton said. Maybe, she added later, its the Russians.
Glenn Thrush
Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, one of the Republicans most vulnerable incumbents, tried to turn around his faltering re-election campaign on Monday night, clashing with Cal Cunningham, his Democratic challenger, in a televised debate that largely focused on the coronavirus pandemic.
The contest in a key swing state is one of a handful of races that could determine control of the Senate next year, and almost every recent public poll shows Mr. Tillis, a first-term incumbent who is mostly allied with President Trump, trailing Mr. Cunningham, a former state senator and Iraq war veteran.
Seeking to halt that momentum, Mr. Tillis repeatedly tried to chip away at Mr. Cunninghams image as an inoffensive moderate, painting him instead as a craven, ladder-climbing liberal who would say anything to get elected.
Mr. Tillis implied Mr. Cunningham would defund the police, a position his rival rejected. He leaned heavily on his own status as an incumbent, highlighting bipartisan work done by Congress to provide relief to millions of Americans suffering from economic hardships caused by the coronavirus.
But Mr. Tilliss biggest break came without much effort when Mr. Cunningham said he would be hesitant to take a vaccine approved by federal health authorities because of extraordinary corruption in Washington that he said was warping science in favor of commercial interests.
Yes, I would be hesitant, but I am going to ask a lot of questions, he said, adding that he thought other Americans felt the same way given the way we have seen politics intervening in Washington.
Mr. Cunningham later clarified his remark, saying he would take a vaccine if the F.D.A. approved it and politics was not involved, but Mr. Tillis pounced, chastising Mr. Cunningham as irresponsible. Republican groups quickly began circulating a clip of the exchange on social media.
That statement puts lives at risk and it makes it more difficult to manage the crisis he pretends to say he is up to the task to manage, Mr. Tillis said. He said he would trust a vaccine and the scientists behind it.
Still, at other points Mr. Tillis found himself on the defensive over his record as the two men sought to reintroduce themselves to North Carolina voters.
Nicholas Fandosread more