MIAMI: In Miami, Florida Latino voters remain highly sensitive to messaging around socialism and communism due to their personal experiences with oppressive regimes in Latin America. This perspective resonates with many in Miami’s Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan communities, who fled socialist or communist governments.
Cesar Grajales, a political commentator on the right-leaning radio station La Poderosa, underscores how deeply these concerns influence the Latino electorate. “Maybe the young people who were born in this country, the people who have not had to emigrate in the recent years of these regimes, because it seems to them that this is not going to happen here, it is not going to happen, that it is a utopia,” Grajales said.
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Many older voters, who remember living under such regimes, are especially attuned to these warnings. He encourages them to channel this fear into political action, urging listeners to vote in upcoming elections to prevent the spread of policies they associate with the governments they fled.
Former President Donald Trump has also tapped into these concerns, accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of embracing socialist policies.
“She went full communist. She wants to destroy our country. After causing catastrophic inflation, Comrade Kamala announced that she wants to institute socialist price controls,” he said in August, when speaking to a crowd in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Alejandro Alvarado, Director of the Spanish Language Journalism program at Florida International University, pointed out that many Latino voters in Florida “flee from communism or socialism” and are particularly vulnerable to messaging that draws on these fears.
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“They have this fear that something like that could happen here in the United States,” he explained, adding that this fear is a key driver in shaping political preferences in the state.
Florida, which has been trending more Republican in recent election cycles, is still deemed a key battleground state by many. In 2020, Trump carried Florida by over three percentage points, a significant margin in a historically competitive state. His support among Latino voters, particularly in South Florida, played a crucial role in his victory.