Shifting Winds
What’s behind the bluing of sections of Miami-Dade County that have for so long been reliably Republican? The answer lies in the numbers.
By David Quiñones
Originally appeared in February/March 2013 issue of Poder Hispanic Magazine
The eulogies were sung before the corpse of the GOP presidential campaign was cold and days before the Florida vote count was even official.
Still, on the evening of Nov. 6 the cable news talking heads parsed each precinct in the critical battleground that is South Florida, mining specks of exit poll data and treating them as truth, unreliable as those data may often be. A storyline emerged: Little Havana has turned blue.
The Cuban vote has abandoned the Republican Party. There’s a problem with these presumptions. They don’t delve into what has happened in the Miami electorate and what the change-agents really are. In some ways, the county mirrors the concerns of Hispanics nationwide with immigration as potent an issue here as anywhere.
Yet it is the increasing Latino diversity in the region along with generational shifts that are behind changes in voting patterns. Democrats will have to recognize those changes if they hope to consolidate their gains.
Republicans, of course, have lessons to be learned if they want to built strength beyond sections of the region they’ve long held — think Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s lock on the 27th district, or Mario Diaz-Balart in far west Miami-Dade County.
MIAMI-DADE IS THE FULCRUM
Not since George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988 has the county gone red in a presidential election. But while the winner-take-all Electoral College makes margins of victory irrelevant on the state level, those same state results are comprised of county contests wherein parties hope to amplify turnout of their respective bases to pad home field advantages.
Miami is one such home field. Like most urban areas in swing states, it boasts a heavy concentration of Democrats so actually winning outright is an unlikely prospect for the GOP. However, eroding the Democratic base there is a winning strategy for Republicans to sway the state’s coveted electoral votes.
Consider the younger President Bush’s showings in South Florida in 2004. Then-Senator John Kerry prevailed by a 50,000-vote margin (of almost 800,000 cast) in Miami-Dade County. In 2000, then-Vice President Al Gore took the county with an even slimmer margin, around 38,000 votes. If either of them had posted the wide victories in South Florida earned in 2012 by President Obama — who won Miami-Dade in a landslide by some 208,000 votes and neighboring Broward County by more than 260,000 — they’d have prevailed nationally.
Instead, both won Miami-Dade only narrowly. Both lost Florida, and with it the presidency.
But Miami-Dade is different from other urban areas. A conservative core constituency continues to send Republicans to Congress and the statehouse. Immigration, while crucial, is not the sole issue on the local voter’s mind. Economics dominates the conversation, and while Hispanics have increased in population, it has becomes clear they are not a monolithic bloc.
Analysts and demographers say that the enthusiastically Republican Cuban Americans who once defined Little Havana have moved westward and southward to Westchester and Kendall, where they have carved out their own American suburban dream. Pockets of conservative potency still do exist in the South Miami, Coral Gables and Sunset neighborhoods surrounding the University of Miami.
They still venture to Calle Ocho for anti-Castro rallies and colada at Versailles, but these outlying suburbs are where the Cubans now live.
And while Cuban Americans still make up more than half of the Hispanic Americans in Miami-Dade, and indeed have increased their slice of the population pie (52.7 percent in 2010, versus 50.3 percent in 2000), data tells another demographic story. While the reliably Republican Cuban Americans haven’t abandoned their convictions, they may have fared poorly at passing their political beliefs down to the next generation.
“As a lifelong South Florida resident… I’ve observed the way Cubans who’ve grown up here roll their eyes and reject the style of propaganda of [conservative station] Radio Mambi and [influential conservative radio host] Ninoska Pérez Castellón,” says Miami Herald political reporter Marc Caputo, a veteran of Florida elections, referring to the long running anti-Castro radio station. “I think that has had a major role in the change as well.”
So what changed? For one, the first generation that left when Castro rose to power is aging. Could this mean Florida — which still holds a majority Republican statehouse — is nevertheless poised to become the next big blue state in presidential races, joining Democratic strongholds like California and New York?
“I think if you hold all else equal, that’s the natural expectation,” says Dr. Benjamin Bishin, associate professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Why Won’t Little Havana Turn Blue? and other research on the topic of Hispanic voting. “You have all these underlying demographic trends telling you that, for instance, those Cubans in coming years are going to be disproportionately leaving the electorate.”
Analysts agree the ground is shifting.
“To me, the most eye-opening development of the most recent general election is that for the first time there appears to be an opening from Cuban voters in the Democratic Party that to this point had been closed,” says Fernand Amandi, managing partner at Bendixen & Amandi International, a Democratic research, media and communication strategy firm.
It is true that Cubans are the oldest Hispanic population living in the United States, with an average age of 40, (compared to an age of 27 for the U.S. Latino population overall) and Miami is home to far and away the greatest concentration of these aging exiles. Once a transformative powerhouse that flexed political muscle earlier and more effectively than any other Hispanic group, Miami Cubans still wield outsize influence locally, consistently electing Cuban local, state and federal representatives at rates inconsistent with the actual population.
This is because Cuban American voter turnout is not tied to national presidential elections — they vote as a matter of routine during midterm and special elections, not just because it’s “in” this year. That trend is not expected to change.
OTHERS HAVE SWAY
Still, others from Latin America and the Caribbean have increasingly arrived in South Florida. Once insignificant precincts in places like Doral, Miami Lakes and Medley have seen large numbers of Hispanic non-Cubans — particularly Venezuelans — settle and change the electorate’s collective DNA. Doral’s three largest precincts voted overwhelming for Obama, 73–26.
Little Havana itself has a Nicaraguan population that is the fastest growing in the county. Eight precincts making up the heart of Little Havana, cumulatively, have gone from a heavily George W. Bush majority, to a slight John Kerry plurality, to blowout Obama wins in 2008 and 2012.
“The really eye-opening change was the Honduran and Nicaraguan voters who as recently as four years ago were voting Republican and are now overwhelmingly voting Democratic,” Amandi says.
NOT DEFINED BY ONE ISSUE
Too often, national political outfits paint Hispanics as more homogenous than they actually are. Many thought, for example, that had Mitt Romney chosen Sen. Marco Rubio as his running mate, it would have meant an increase in Latino votes for the GOP in Miami and beyond.
The Washington Post’s George Will showed his tone deafness on the issue, taking to the television airwaves on Election Night to pronounce “[i]f there’s a winner tonight, it’s the senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, because all eyes are going to be turned to him as a man who might have a way to broaden the demographic appeal to his party.”
But in fact Rubio, did not sweep the Hispanic vote in 2010. “In the case of Marco Rubio, if you take the exit polls at their face value, this is someone who only got 55 percent of the Hispanic vote in Florida. So thinking that he’s the solution to their problem seems, to me, not likely to be true,” Bishin says.
Bishin points out that, unlike some other demographic groups, there is no one unifying issue, no single platform plank that can reliably coalesce the 23.7 million Hispanic voters who hail from divergent backgrounds. Puerto Ricans and Cubans — the second and third largest Hispanic group in the nation behind Mexicans, respectively — have no dog in the immigration fight. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens by birth, and Cubans by virtue of the 1995 revision to the Cuban Adjustment Act are afforded a guaranteed path to citizenship when they arrive on domestic soil.
Hispanics will account for 40 percent of the net growth in the electorate between now and 2030, and the core GOP message might resonate with more Hispanics absent the immigration issue.
They care about the same things everyone else cares about: the economy, getting jobs, educating their kids, living in safe communities.
“There can be a cogent argument to be made by Republicans along the lines of more limited government, less spending, less taxation,” says Casey Klofstad, associate professor of political science at the University of Miami. “That view of government could appeal to a lot of Latinos if the packaging around it allows them to say, ‘yes, that party is me.’ But if the party is on the correct side of every issue except for immigration, that’s going to really sour the milk.”
Adds Bishin: “It’s not just immigration. They care about the same things everyone else cares about: the economy, getting jobs, educating their kids, living in safe communities. Conservative economic philosophy provides a host of possible policy solutions that would allow [Republicans] to send a message saying, ‘Hey, we care, and here’s how we plan to show we care,’ rather than ‘let’s just talk about self-deporting, we’re all about immigration rhetoric.’”
GET OUT THE VOTE
Another ingredient contributing to the Democrats’ Miami success is the increased ground operations deployed by the past two Obama campaigns.
“Despite all the headwinds that [Obama’s] campaign was facing, the fact that he was able to win Florida speaks volumes about his ground game,” says the Herald’s Caputo. He added that the Obama operation, which dwarfed those of both Romney and 2008 GOP candidate John McCain, has done an unprecedented job recruiting and registering the population.
Sensing the possibility of change, the Obama campaign even opened its own office just off historic Calle Ocho that, while it remains a cultural hub [Despite the support of Sen. Marco Rubio and former Gov.
“If you go back to 2004, Democrats did a poor job of mobilizing Hispanic voters,”
Jeb Bush, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was unable to generate much Hispanic American enthusiasm] for the Cuban community, is also now home to a rainbow of Latin American immigrants. The Obama campaign worked hard to activate these voters, and the precinct data suggests it worked.
“If you go back to 2004, Democrats did a poor job of mobilizing Hispanic voters,” Bishin explains. Republicans, for their part, acknowledge that wooing the Hispanic voter is crucial. On January 11, GOP leaders quietly convened in Miami to discuss the party’s future and how it can meaningfully court the Hispanic vote. The meeting, which included conservative heavy-hitters Jeb Bush, former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and former United States Treasurer Rosario Marin, was organized by the conservative action group Hispanic Leadership Network.
“Today we laid out the plan for the next few years on how to engage the Hispanic community on center-right issues as we look forward to 2014 and beyond,” said HLN communications director Emily Benavides by email after the summit.
It remains to be seen if Republicans can reverse recent trends. What’s clear is the Hispanic vote in Miami, mirroring the Hispanic vote nationwide, is emerging as one of most coveted electoral target in the land. Finding the right bait to capture that voter is another matter entirely. •
