Joe Biden likes to pander to Hispanic voters in speeches, but his actions show that we’re nothing more than an afterthought for this shrewd establishment politician.
Recently, nearly 100 field organizers for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign issued a warning that he is “suppressing” the Hispanic vote in Florida by disregarding local voices and concerns. According to the leaked letter, the campaign is squandering Hispanic staffers with deep connections to their local communities by sending them to other parts of the state.
Perhaps even more worryingly for a candidate desperate to woo the far-left fringe of the Democratic base, the field organizers allege that the campaign organization perpetuates a “toxic” work culture that “fails to confront a system of white-dominated politics we are supposed to be working against as organizers of a progressive party.”
They shouldn’t act so surprised. This is nothing out of the ordinary for Joe Biden and other establishment Democrats. They pander to Latino voters on the campaign trail, but they don’t really care about us.
Based on 2018 exit polls, Democrats can’t afford to take Hispanic support for granted, especially here in Florida. Then-Gov. Rick Scott made major inroads with Democratic-leaning Hispanic voters neglected by his political opponent during his successful 2018 Senate race, garnering a larger share of the Hispanic vote in 2018 than Republicans had in either 2014 or 2016. Democrats are counting on Hispanic voters to put them over the top in 2020, but if they aren’t willing to put in the trouble to understand our concerns and earn our votes, they are going to be in for a rude awakening.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., showed how much of a liability a far-left platform can be with his disastrous performance in the Florida primary. His support for authoritarian socialist regimes was politically toxic in a state where many Hispanic voters have personal experience with the brutal repression practiced by the dictatorships in countries such as Cuba and Venezuela. It symbolized Sanders’s beholdenness to a mostly-white, college-campus left who couldn’t even imagine the misery of the regimes their professors romanticize.
Joe Biden has now formally committed himself to exactly the same toxic political coalition, adopting many of the same “democratic socialist” policies espoused by Sanders, including massive tax increases on middle-income Americans. Repealing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, as Biden has vowed to do, would cost the average Florida family of four nearly $2,000 each year.
Biden’s tax proposals call for increasing taxes by $4 trillion over the next 10 years, which would reduce our GDP by 1.5 percent and eliminate 585,000 jobs — eliminating one of the main reasons that Latino immigrants come to America in the first place.
These figures do not account for the devastation that would be inflicted by a reversal of President Trump’s common-sense deregulatory agenda, which has saved the average American household $3,100 a year by eliminating unnecessary red tape. In a 2014 study, the National Association of Manufacturers estimated that economic regulations — which had increased dramatically during the first four years of the Obama-Biden administration — cost the U.S. economy over $2 trillion in 2012, equal to over 12 percent of GDP.
A hypothetical Biden administration staffed with progressive ideologues would bring back the deluge of regulations, undoing the progress President Trump has made toward breaking down barriers to American success. Biden’s proposals include a nation-wide implementation of California’s crushing regulations on gig economy industries like Uber and Lyft, which would eliminate livelihoods for many entrepreneurial people seeking to earn additional income or flexible hours.
Biden’s California-inspired rules go far beyond ride-sharing services, however. The regulations also affect other forms of freelance work, such as restricting freelance journalists to contributing no more than 35 articles per year for any given publication. With around one-third or more of American adults participating in some form of independent work, including approximately 1.8 million workers in Florida who participated in the gig economy during 2018, these crushing regulations would have far-reaching effects that would harm working families from coast to coast.
A Joe Biden presidency would be disastrous for Floridians, particularly the entrepreneurial and industrious Latinos of our great state. That shouldn’t come as any surprise for those of us who remember Obama and Biden cozying up the Castro regime for a photo-op.
Biden and other establishment Democrats have been taking our votes for granted for decades. This time, their cavalier attitude and big-government policy platform will cost them big.
Julio Gonzalez founded Engineered Tax Services.
Author
