On October 29th, Chris Wills, the Hispanic vote director for Joe Biden in South Florida, sent an e-mail to the campaign’s leadership, with the subject line “WE ARE ON TRACK TO LOSE FLORIDA.” In Miami-Dade County, a liberal stronghold, Republicans were ahead of Democrats in turnout by six per cent among early voters and held a lead among Latinos of eight per cent. If immediate action was not taken, Wills warned, Biden would fail to gain the level of support that Hillary Clinton had won, in 2016, in the state’s most populous county. “There is still time to get our vote out,” Wills wrote. “If the response continues to be excuses, the statement made in my subject line will become a reality.” His direct supervisors, members of the campaign’s national leadership and the state director, Jackie Lee, were copied on the e-mail. No one responded. Two days later, with less than forty-eight hours of early voting left, Wills followed up with a second message. “The Republicans wiped out another 40,594 votes from our lead,” he wrote. “Nothing different is being done in our state to change our trajectory towards a loss.” It, too, went unanswered.
On November 3rd, Donald Trump carried Florida by nearly four hundred thousand votes, more than twice the margin that he received in 2016. Four years after Clinton won Miami-Dade by thirty percentage points, Biden performed dismally—beating Trump by only seven per cent. Democrats lost two House seats, along with key races at the county and state levels. To the shock of many Democrats, Trump improved his standing in Miami-Dade in majority Latino, Black, and white precincts alike. Exit polls showed that he won roughly fifty-five per cent of the Cuban-American vote, thirty per cent of the Puerto Rican vote, and forty-eight per cent among myriad other Latino diasporas. Wills was shattered by the results but not surprised. For months, he had been pleading for help. Wills and his fiancée, Daniela Ferrera, a campaign volunteer, have blamed the campaign’s state leadership for contributing to Biden’s disastrous performance in Florida.
Wills and Ferrera, who are both Cuban-Americans, had supported the Republican Party until Trump became the Party’s nominee, in 2015. Ferrera, who is twenty-two, fled Cuba with her family seventeen years ago. “I know what an authoritarian looks like,” she said, noting also that she was repulsed by Trump’s bigotry toward Latinos. Wills, who is thirty-eight, shared Ferrera’s opposition to Trump’s divisiveness and was keen to help Democrats make inroads with the state’s young Cuban voters, who were seen as being more liberal than their parents. A Florida political operative, he believed that the former Vice-President could turn Florida blue. But, after three months working on Biden’s campaign, he grew disenchanted with the state leadership’s field operation and its apparent disregard for the Latino electorate. “It was clear that the resources for the Hispanic team were an afterthought,” Wills told me. “They spat on us, trampled on us, and ran over us.”
A spokesperson for Biden’s state campaign said that it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a wide-ranging effort across the state to convince Latinos to back Biden. “Just in the last weeks, we announced a separate six-figure get-out-the-vote investment for Hispanic outreach, which included direct voter contact, paid media for smaller, micro-targeted outlets, and other outreach and events for the Hispanic program,” the spokesperson said. “This funding always emphasized voter-contact efforts.”
But e-mails and documents obtained by The New Yorker show that the campaign’s state leadership did not respond to dozens of requests and warnings raised over the final three months of the race by members of its Latino-outreach team. In interviews, three members of the team said that they were never allocated a fixed budget, were not provided access to a Spanish-language auto-dialer until late September, and did not receive bilingual campaign literature in Miami-Dade until three days before the election.
In an October 15th e-mail, Millie Raphael, a Biden Latino-outreach associate, asked Lee, the Florida state director, for two things: “surrogates” and “a budget.” Raphael argued that the Latino vote in the state could not be won over Zoom. After working on Andrew Gillum’s gubernatorial campaign, in 2018, she recognized that Biden could not win in Florida without greater support from Latinos, who make up seventeen per cent of the state’s eligible voters. Raphael warned that she could not “overstate” the amount of “resentment” that the lack of resources and support was causing among Latino field workers. “The members of your Hispanic team and our grassroots leaders have gone out of pocket financially to accomplish the excitement seen on the streets,” she wrote. “I came aboard this campaign because I knew I could deliver the South Florida Puerto Rican vote. I never imagined that I would be hamstrung in my attempts to accomplish this endeavor.”
For the past eight years, Democrats have experienced deep political frustration in Florida, losing every statewide race since the 2012 Presidential campaign, when Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney. The results of last Tuesday reflected a trend seen elsewhere in the country: Trump’s rising support among Latinos. Although Biden won two-thirds of the Latino vote—much as Clinton did four years ago—the President improved his standing by four points, from twenty-eight per cent to thirty-two per cent. Trump was able to chip at the margins of Latino voters’ support for Biden in Florida, but he also benefitted from the former Vice-President’s underperformance with white voters. Many Democrats believe that the Party has struggled to mount effective field operations in the state to turn out its voters. Fernand Amandi, a Democratic strategist and pollster, said that the state Party’s efforts often prove wasteful and ineffective because they invest little in a campaign’s early stages and then try to make up for it with “hundreds of millions of dollars” in last-minute spending. “It’s much more efficient and strategic to invest a fraction of the money that ends up being ultimately spent in the last two months,” Amandi said. “The Democratic approach to campaigning in Florida is a shell of what the Republican approach is.”
Wills and Ferrera hoped to reverse that trend. After Biden announced his Presidential bid, in April, 2019, they both began working for his campaign as volunteers. They believed that Biden’s centrist positions gave him the best chance of beating Trump and started putting together field events to expand his base in the state. After formally joining the campaign, Wills adapted to its pandemic-based ban on door-to-door canvassing by organizing drive-in rallies and rolling car caravans. When state campaign officials provided no money for such events, he paid for it himself, buying blue masks, placards, and buttons. “I literally had to stand at an A.T.M. to find out how much Wells Fargo would allow me to overdraw to pull out one of these events,” Wills said.
In July, the state leadership came under scrutiny after ninety field organizers submitted a letter to the Florida Democratic Party, accusing the campaign of “suppressing the Hispanic vote” and lacking a “fully actionable field plan.” Two months later, Ken Salazar, the former Secretary of the Interior and a co-chair of the campaign’s national Latino Leadership Committee, requested a conference call with the Florida campaign leadership and members of the Hispanic vote team. Salazar asked if the Latino outreach team had enough resources. State leaders said it did. Wills disagreed but decided to make a separate point. He told Salazar that he was particularly concerned about news that was spreading fast on Spanish radio: that the site antifa.com redirected visitors to Joe Biden’s home page. He said that the campaign was not doing enough to counter the spread of misinformation. After the call, members of the campaign’s state leadership never followed up with Wills about his warning—and he interpreted their silence as a form of retaliation.
Republican messaging to voters in South Florida was riddled with such incendiary claims. In e-mails to its supporters, the Trump campaign cast Biden as “the candidate of rioters, looters, arsonists, gun-grabbers, flag-burners, Marxists, lobbyists, and Left-wing RADICALS.” Kamala Harris was “100% controlled by the Left-wing MOB” and would take over the Presidency shortly after Biden’s Inauguration. An adviser to the Biden campaign in Florida blamed broader political dynamics as well, arguing that the unrest following George Floyd’s death drove some voters away from the Party. “When the protests started, the numbers started to move. We had no control over that,” the adviser said. “We had been dealing with the socialism accusation. We can deal with that. But socialism overlaid on Blue Lives Matter and ‘law and order’ is something else.” In Amandi’s view, the state Party committed “the cardinal sin of electoral politics in Florida with Hispanic voters,”allowing Trump supporters to define it as “the party of socialism and Communism.” The Democratic pollster went on, “As absurd as it is for Republicans to call Democrats Communists, it’s more absurd for Democrats not to directly rebut that labelling, confront it or refute it, and overcome it.”
In mid-September, the billionaire and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg donated a hundred million dollars to boost Biden’s campaign in Florida. Most of it was spent on television ads, including several produced by Amandi’s communications firm. “They allowed us to do the type of work that frankly should have been done six months before, not six weeks before,” Amandi said. “The people leading the effort are people that have never been successful winning in Florida before.” Party members and political operatives told me that the Florida coördinated campaign could not have been more uncoördinated. Some blamed its top leadership; others pointed to the quality of the work done by consultants, who have become central to the state Party’s operation. One source bemoaned a “consulting cartel,” led by familiar faces who this person believed were more concerned with securing commissions than winning elections.
The adviser to the Biden campaign in Florida blamed the pandemic for the Party’s struggles this year. “We just started too late,” the adviser said, adding that COVID-19 infections were always a concern. “It was a moral decision for us.” The Biden campaign maintained a strictly digital operation until early October, when canvassing and other in-person activities resumed. In the lead-up to the election, Biden, Harris, and Barack Obama visited the state multiple times, but all their events were held in front of small and sometimes exclusive crowds. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign carried on its field operations as if the pandemic were a thing of the past. Volunteers never stopped knocking on doors, and thousands of people, most not wearing masks, rallied to see the President and Vice-President speak. At three polling sites in South Florida during early voting, Trump supporters publicly disparaged voters wearing Biden T-shirts and hats, calling them “Comunistas!” and “baby killers.” Several of them told me that they did not display campaign signs outside of their homes, because making such a statement carried too high a risk. At a time when politics had become tribal, they found a sense of community in the caravanas, the car rallies, which drew together hundreds or even thousands of Biden supporters.
As October came to a close, the campaign had not yet provided the Hispanic-vote team what is commonly known as a win number—the number of votes a candidate needs to secure in order to succeed. Raphael and her colleagues were encouraged to use the Biden campaign’s database to reach voters but found that much of the information in the system was outdated. Frustrated, Raphael turned to volunteers with expertise in the field. In the week before the election, she contacted three hundred volunteers, who made more than fifteen thousand calls to Latino voters. “We were trying to make up for what the campaign hadn’t done,” Wills said. But it wasn’t enough. By the Sunday before the election, a surge in Republican turnout reduced the Democrats’ early lead to less than a hundred thousand votes. In an e-mail to Lee, the campaign’s state director, Raphael shared her exasperation. “The only resources I have been provided are a computer that needs to be returned and 5000 Boricuas Con Biden placards,” she wrote, adding that the placards had arrived in mid-October.“This is an unfortunate, regrettable and somewhat short sighted decision. In 5 days Republicans have cut our lead in Florida in half.”
Wills and Ferrera had proposed to state officials that the campaign have a presence in cities such as Hialeah, a Republican stronghold where Clinton had tied Trump in 2016. Hialeah is home to the largest number of Cuban-Americans in the country and also has some of the highest numbers of Obamacare enrollees. Ferrera believed that Democrats could pull votes away from the G.O.P., as they had four years earlier. State campaign leaders questioned why they would waste time in pro-Trump communities.
The day before the election, Wills, Raphael, and other volunteers gathered early in the morning in a one-story house in Little Havana and set up their own war room. Nearly half of the Latino electorate in the state had not voted yet. “The Hispanic vote in Miami-Dade could still swing to Trump,” Raphael said on a call with her team that morning. “If we can save the county, if we can save Florida, we can save the country.” A debate ensued about whether to focus on phone-banking or canvassing. Ultimately, the team decided to do both, but to narrow its focus, owing to a lack of resources. With less than twenty-four hours to go before Election Day, they would reach out only to female voters, since many men favored Trump. “We cannot waste our time with limited resources on Latino men,” the senior staffer said.
The next day, Wills and Ferrera drove to another area of Miami-Dade County, which they said was overlooked by Democrats: Homestead. The southern city, known for its sprawling farms, is home to one of the largest concentrations of Mexican voters in the state. Voters appeared to know little about what to do with their vote-by-mail ballots or where to go to vote in person. One woman poked her head over her front door, looking wearily at her visitors. “I have COVID and still have symptoms,” she said. Wills asked the woman if she had requested a mail ballot. “No,” she responded, making it clear that she would not be voting. A few doors down, they met a middle-aged woman standing by her car. She said that she had already voted, but her daughter, who was driving from New York that day, would not be home in time to submit her mail ballot. Wills explained that her daughter could still sign an affidavit that would allow her mother to return the ballot on her behalf. The woman said that she would try her best to deliver the ballot, which was sitting in her living room, before the polls closed at seven.
That day, Wills and Ferrera knocked on more than two hundred doors, looking for people who hadn’t yet been to the polls. In front of a garage door, they met two Puerto Rican women in their twenties and got a hint of what was to come. One of them had already voted for Trump, and the other was on her way to do so, too. “You know who’s going to determine this election? Puerto Ricans,” Ferrera said, referring to the fact that Puerto Ricans had surpassed Cubans as the largest group of Latino voters in the state. She made the case that Trump had treated them as second-class citizens. “For him to be as nasty as he was, and disrespectful, he doesn’t deserve your vote. He doesn’t deserve your respect,” she said. It wasn’t clear whether she had changed their minds.
Hours later, they met Raphael and dozens of volunteers at a drive-in Election Night watch party in Miami, where a giant screen had been set up, adorned with hundreds of blue, red, and white balloons. People brandished Biden/Harris flags and waved placards. They blew plastic trumpets and rang blue bells; the mood was festive, if guarded. Behind the stage, Raphael sat in a large, empty room, closely following the vote count with her colleagues via Zoom. In Miami-Dade and across Florida, no blue wave was emerging. Biden and Trump were in a dead heat. All of the down-ballot candidates in Miami-Dade were underperforming, except for Daniella Levine Cava, who was running for mayor.
“What the hell is wrong with our country?” Raphael asked.
“Socialismo, socialismo—the campaign had no message to counter that,” the senior staffer responded.
At eight o’clock, results from the Panhandle further boosted Trump. “We didn’t have enough time,” Raphael said to her colleagues. By ten o’clock, it became clear that Democrats had lost their fourth statewide race in Florida since 2012. The state would not be part of a Democratic repudiation of Trump and his presidency.
Raphael decided it was time for her to address the crowd that had gathered outside. “Has it been seen that Mexicans, and Colombians, and Puerto Ricans, and Cubans, and Venezuelans, and Ecuadorians, and Costa Ricans, all of you took pride in your ethnicity. And, still, you came together as one. But this campaign let you down,” she said, referring to Biden’s leadership in Florida. “This campaign did not give you the resources that you needed to do your jobs.” The audience fell silent, but Raphael went on. “For that, I must apologize,” she said, her voice dropping. “I must say, we let you down.”
