President Joe Biden is spending most of his Tuesday launching a campaign push to gain ground with the Latino community, as different polls have shown him losing support against Donald Trump heading into the 2024 elections.
In this context, the president gave an interview to a Univision radio show, in which he highlighted the importance of the demographic and criticized his presumptive contender's approach.
Speaking to "El Bueno, la Mala y el Feo" (The good, the bad and the ugly), Biden said that "the Latino community is critical to the value set we have." "I plan on working like the devil to earn your support," he added.
Recent polls show that Biden has his work cut out for him. The latest one focused on Latinos, released this month by The New York Times and Siena College, shows the former president with a six percentage point lead over the current one, 46 to 40%.
"We're working hard to get their vote," Biden added in another passage of the interview, seeking to draw a contrast with Trump. "Here's the thing I want to stop: Trump called — he said migrants are not people. He said immigrants are 'poisoning the blood' of this country. He separated children from parents at the border," Biden said.
He added that Trump wants to end birthright citizenship and plans mass deportations if elected. "We have to stop this guy, we can't let this happen. We are a nation of immigrants."
The Biden campaign's efforts include more field work. The Associated Press reported that, along allied Democratic groups, it has opened offices in Washoe County and certain areas of Las Vegas to better target Latinos, Blacks and Asian American voters.
Moreover, there are already bilingual campaign organizers and and office in Maryvale, a large Latino community in Phoenix. "The campaign has hired more than 40 staffers in Nevada and Arizona," the outlet added.
The Biden campaign has been investing in addressing this with campaign events and ads before this larger push. Conexión, a communications and content production firm, was recruited by the Biden campaign's operatives in late 2023 to bolster its efforts with the demographic.
Whether the effort will succeed is still an open question. Campaign officials believe that voters will start paying more attention to the campaigns as the election date gets closer, with Biden using momentum gained after his fiery State of the Union speech as a platform to grow.
Despite the nuances from this particular campaign, a recent deep-diving analysis by the Financial Times' John Burn-Murdoch concluded that Biden's losses can be part of a larger, more historical trend where "many of America's non-white voters have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest."
The migration we're seeing today, he said, is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realizing they've been voting for the wrong party."
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