The Biden campaign launched its Spanish website in late April. It was terrible. “Si se pawde” or “breakfast tacos” level bad.
This website contained many errors that even a native Spanish speaker or someone who is fluent in Spanish would notice. The website said “agrega your application to our bank of talentos”, which means “add your application,” instead of “your application.”
The chatbot also used phrases such as “let’s complete the work for the American people,” a literal translation. Although not technically incorrect in this case, it is unusual to hear a bot use language like that. Like Republican commentator Giancarlo SOPO said it is as if the translator was a Latinx chatGPT.
It’s obvious what happened: The Biden Campaign didn’t consider this important enough to pay several hundred dollars to a translation agency. By looking at the content and tabs of this website, I can tell that they could easily have found a bid in the three or four digit range for such a job.
It may not seem like a big deal, but the Biden campaign’s disastrous website shows just how little respect the Biden administration and hispanic Americans have. Democrats assume Hispanics will vote for them. They think they’ll get away with this. This is an opportunity for Republicans.
In 2020, a seismic shift in the Hispanic voting seemed to have begun. Biden’s support dropped to 61 per cent, down from 69 per cent in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was elected. In 2022, the midterms saw similar results but with a significant Republican gain in Florida. polls show that while most Hispanics vote for Democrats, they only approve of Biden 40 percent. The Biden administration, even after two and a half years, has not learned from their mistakes: Biden ‘s use of‘Despacito’ in his campaign, Democrats’ repeated use of the term “Latinx,” despite Latinos across the board, regardless of age, ideology, or origin, abhorring the term, and Jill Biden, who botched her attempt to speak Spanish and said that Latinos were as unique as “breakfast tacos and
Biden was elected president of the United States in 2020 and had one the best midterms ever for a sitting President, despite losing Hispanic votes. He lost just 1 percent more among Hispanics despite a terrible first two years of his presidency. He may not feel the need to change his strategy. He can continue to win by taking Hispanics as granted.
The Democratic Party has a monolithic strategy when it comes to Spanish-speaking voters. They hire staffers and activists who are from leftist organizations, and they seem to think that all Latinos share the same traits. This is why their Hispanic communications appeal to Mexicans exclusively. Biden’s campaign team did not care to ask one of the nearly 42 millions Americans who speak Spanish to test their website. Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez is Hispanic and the granddaughter of Cesar Chavez, the labor leader.
The narrative about a Hispanic voter shift towards the GOP has grown stronger since the 2020 elections. This shift was even better because it seemed to contradict the conventional wisdom that said the GOP needed to be more tolerant on immigration in order to win Latinos. Under Trump, the GOP grew even more radical, and its numbers among Hispanics increased. The Hispanic base that the GOP has built is more likely to be attracted by the new populist right-wing conservatism rather than the old-school Reaganism.
In the past few years, outreach to Hispanics has improved. The Republicans have a greater number of Hispanic candidates and have made investments in community centers. They also have more Spanish-speaking aides. In Florida, Republicans have focused on their ground game which has allowed them to win heavily Latino areas such as Miami Dade during the midterm elections.
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This model, however, has not been implemented nationwide. The GOP still doesn’t understand that South Florida Venezuelans, South Texas Mexicans, and Virginia Salvadorans have vastly different priorities. They also speak different kinds of Spanish and come from very different backgrounds. Unfortunately, those who believe that the GOP can’t, shouldn’t, or doesn’t need to appeal directly to Spanish-speaking Americans will not win elections in the near future by simply giving away Hispanic votes. Hispanics have doubled in the swing states of North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Nevada in the past twenty years. In Arizona and Michigan, they’ve increased by over 60%.
The GOP has the same problem with Hispanics as it does with all other voters: It lacks a coherent project, an image of the American nation or a clear policy guideline beyond being non-woke and lowering taxes. Individual politicians may have clearer visions, and populist impulses point to this, but as a group, the GOP does not. In 2022, it was not enough to make your entire brand negative (antisocial, antiBiden, etc.). In 2024, it will be a lot harder to do.
Hispanics’ poverty rate dropped by 40% between 2010 and 2019. A significant number of small businesses were started by Latinos. Hispanics are a large part of the law enforcement community, including first responders and border patrol agents. A mix of law and order, strong borders, and pro-American-business populism is the kind of message that the GOP can sell to Hispanic communities. As Senator Marco Rubio put it , if the GOP wants be the party for the multi-ethnic workers, then it needs to offer a working-class populist message. The Democrats will continue to have Latino voters as a given, thanks to their broken Spanish and ridiculous stereotypes.
