Where Might President Biden Next Discuss His Views About Engagement With Cuba? At Fundraiser In Miami On 30 January 2024.

Politico
Arlington, Virginia
19 January 2024

Biden to visit Miami for campaign fundraiser
The trip, his sixth to the state as president, could invite chatter about the campaign’s intent to compete in the state.

By Lauren Egan

President Joe Biden is scheduled to travel to Miami on Jan. 30 for a fundraiser hosted at the home of Chris Korge, the national finance chair of the Biden Victory Fund, according to an invitation shared with POLITICO.  Ticket prices start at $3,300 and go as high as $250,000 for a co-chair ticket.

While the trip is designed to pad campaign coffers, it will likely invite chatter about whether the president is looking to compete in Florida, which had been a traditional swing state up until its recent rightward drift.

The trip will be Biden’s sixth visit to Florida as president. He last visited the Sunshine State in September to survey damage caused by Hurricane Idalia. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis skipped out on meeting Biden during that trip.

Biden lost Florida to Trump in the 2020 election by more than three percentage points and his campaign has been clear-eyed about the difficulty of winning the state in 2024. They see a clearer path to victory through the Rust Belt states that Biden took back from Trump as well as the Sun Belt states of Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

The Biden campaign entered the new year on the heels of a successful fourth quarter fundraising stretch. Biden, the Democratic National Committee and their joint-fundraising committees brought in more than $97 million in the final three months of 2023 — putting the president ahead of his recent Democratic predecessor. The campaign, which has been slow to staff up and relatively frugal, announced on Monday that it had $117 million cash on hand.

Former President Donald Trump has not yet announced how much he raised in the fourth quarter of 2023. But Biden’s fundraising numbers trail behind what Trump was able to bring in at the end of his third year in office, when he and the Republican National Committee collected more than $154 million.

In the email invitation to donors, Korge wrote that he hoped the Miami reception would be the largest fundraiser for a presidential candidate ever hosted in Florida and said the “excitement around this event has been amazing.”

The Hill
Washington DC
21 January 2024

Rick Scott’s pitch to Florida Hispanics: Kitchen table issues with a side of Latin America
by Rafael Bernal

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) says Hispanic voters have the same concerns as the general population, with added focus on conditions in Central and South America.  “[Hispanics] generally care about the same thing as everybody else. But they also do care about democracy and freedom in Latin America. So while they care about jobs, they care about education, they care about law enforcement, they also care about that,” Scott told The Hill.  That view is central to Scott’s reelection campaign approach in Florida, a state where a quarter of the population is Hispanic.

“In my campaigns, if I’m gonna run an ad, I generally run an ad in English and in Spanish. If I’m doing events, I’m doing events, like in the Panhandle and I’m also at same time doing events in Miami. Or if I’m in Tampa, I might do an event with the Chamber [of Commerce], then also do it with the Hispanic Chamber,” he said.  “So I’ve always reached out to everybody, because I represent everybody.”

That approach stands in contrast to mainstream thinking in national Hispanic-focused campaigns, where apples-to-apples bilingual outreach is slowly being replaced by tailor-made messages for individual cultural subsets.  Scott’s more traditional approach in part responds to the large number of different Hispanic groups in Florida.  “Hispanics in the way it works in Florida — we have Cubans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, Nicaraguans — they’re all different communities but it’s a good melting pot, but I reach out to each one of them and I do things with every group. I just never — I never stopped talking to them,” said Scott.

His confident approach — he has won three straight statewide elections — also relies on his constituent services, which in 2022 were awarded the Congressional Management Foundation’s Democracy Award.  “I’m running on my record and so, you know, the I’m very — I’m very comfortable that I’m going to continue to do my job and you know, my constituent services team won for the best constituent service team in the country,” said Scott.

But Scott’s statewide wins have not been by large margins: In 2010 he won the governorship by about 1.2 percentage points, he was reelected in 2014 by a single percentage point margin and he won his Senate seat in 2018 against then-incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson (D) by less than two-tenths of a percentage point — about a 10,000 vote difference out of more than 8 million votes cast.  And Scott, along with Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas), is the closest thing Republicans have to a vulnerable incumbent in 2024. Both senators’ races are ranked as “likely Republican” by the Cook Political report, as opposed to the “solid Republican” rankings of the other nine GOP-held seats up for renewal.  Scott is also facing a GOP primary opponent, Keith Gross, who pledged to spend copiously to unseat the incumbent, though as of September Gross had spent just under a million dollars compared to Scott’s $12 million already spent in the 2024 cycle.

Throughout his political career, Scott has successfully fended off attacks on the source of his fortune, a 2003 settlement after a complex fraud case involving the company he ran, Columbia/HCA, once the country’s largest health care company.  Those attacks have continued in the GOP primary, and from challengers across the aisle, including Democratic front-runner former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (Fla.), who called the events leading to the settlement “the largest Medicare fraud ever committed in the history of this country.”  Mucarsel-Powell, who was born in Ecuador, is playing full-court press on Hispanic media in Florida, doing nearly daily Spanish-language interviews on influential radio stations in an attempt to outflank Scott through cultural competence and Spanish-language fluency.  “The problem she has it’s not the language she speaks, it’s her positions,” said Scott.

Attack lines in the general election — likely to be between Scott and Mucarsel-Powell — are forming along predictable fronts.  “She runs around with people that are anti-police; I don’t know Hispanics that are anti-police. She basically is, you know, she runs around with people that are anti-Israel. In my experience with Hispanics, they’re not anti-Israel. You know, she basically is a socialist. My experience with Hispanics is they’re not socialists,” said Scott.  Mucarsel-Powell, meanwhile, is attacking Scott as a political extremist for his support of former President Trump, whom she equates to authoritarian strongmen in Latin America.

Both candidates converge, however, in the importance that Florida Hispanics put in their representatives understanding Western Hemisphere politics.  “With Cubans, I mean, they care about the freedom and democracy in Cuba, generally, or Venezuelans, they care about what [President Nicolás] Maduro is doing or the Nicaraguans, they care about what [President Daniel] Ortega is doing, or if they’re Colombians, they care about what [President Gustavo] Petro is doing or you know, if they’re Argentines, they care about what [President Javier] Milei is doing,” said Scott.  

Though U.S. citizens of Latin American and Caribbean origin are a powerful voting group, particularly in South Florida, Puerto Ricans in central Florida have changed the state’s political dynamics.Puerto Ricans are statutory U.S. citizens if they’re born in the territory, so even recent arrivals from the island are eligible to vote. In 2019 Florida became the state with the largest Puerto Rican diaspora, now more than a million strong.Like Hispanics with non-U.S. national origins, Scott is pitching kitchen table issues to Puerto Ricans, but he’s also diverging — with caveats — from the Republican Party mainstream on an issue that polls particularly well with Florida’s Puerto Rican community: statehood.“First off, what they want to do is they want to take care of their families. No. 2, their futures, their kids, so they care about education. And the other thing is they want to have a low crime rate.”

“It’s important to talk about the issues and work with the issues that impact Puerto Ricans and, and acknowledge, I think — I think Puerto Rico eventually will be a state. I think they have to get their fiscal house in order and whether everybody agrees with me here, I’m one vote.”

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