RED BAITING WORKS IN AN ECHO CHAMBER
‘People believe it.’ Republicans’ drumbeat of socialism helped win voters in Miami

Andres Viglucci, David Smiley, Lautaro Grinspan, Antonio Maria Delgado
Sat., November 7, 2020


Two nights before the Nov. 3 election, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio stood before thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters and said something he had to know was untrue:

“Not all Democrats are socialists,” Rubio said, setting up a punchline for the masses gathered at the Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport to see Trump speak. “But all socialists are Democrats.”

In a state where 1,157 voters are registered to the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the statement by Rubio — the Cuban-American acting chairman of the U.S. Senate intelligence committee — was false. But in Miami, it was too effective not to keep repeating.

Republicans’ use of “socialism” rhetoric to browbeat Democrats — an old tactic resurrected and seemingly perfected by Trump — has been persistent and widespread, a talking point that has seen heavy rotation on Fox News and even permeated communities in Central Florida like The Villages, where white, conservative retirees talk openly about not wanting to become socialist Venezuela.

But it has been most effective in Miami-Dade County, where exaggerated fears of Democrats ushering in a leftist dictatorship have shifted the political landscape in Florida to the right and left neighbors and families deeply at odds. The county’s dramatic swing toward Trump in 2020 helped him win the state by more than 370,000 votes.

“When you repeat something over and over again, people believe it and take it seriously,” said José ‘Cucho’ Vivas, a Venezuelan-American voter who told the Miami Herald his family received threats after they posted online photos of themselves with “Venezolanos con Biden” signs in support of then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden. “And that’s what the Republican strategy has been.”

The drumbeat began well before the president’s re-election campaign was formally launched. After Trump’s 2016 election, GOP strategists looking for ways to eat into Democrats’ heavy, historic advantage in Miami-Dade leaned into the “socialist” tag to reach a large, receptive and largely conservative audience: Cuban and other Hispanic immigrant and refugee populations from countries where leftist regimes or guerrillas have wreaked political, economic and social havoc.

And even as Democratic standard-bearer Joe Biden — a lifelong moderate effectively caricatured as a puppet for the left by Trump and his local backers — appears set to move into the White House, the divisions and false perceptions fed by the campaign will linger.
‘The same can happen here’

“He’s managed to put together a lot of fear-mongering and has stoked up a great deal of resentment,” said sociologist Lisandro Perez, a veteran expert on Miami’s Cuban exile and Hispanic populations, of Trump. “That won’t go away when he goes away.”

Biden’s popular-vote and electoral-college win hasn’t swayed Hispanic voters like Jose Edgardo Gomez, a Venezuelan-American county resident, who likely spoke for many when he said he saw no difference between the Democrat and socialist autocrats back home.

“I voted for Trump to prevent the United States from resembling countries like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Biden is basically the same,” Gomez said in an interview. “We want the United States to continue being free and to continue having a true democracy. We are surprised to see how many Americans don’t understand the threats that socialism posses. We have lost our freedom in our countries, and the same can happen here.”

The GOP’s campaign among Miami-Dade’s Hispanics proved ruinously effective for Biden’s chances in Florida, likely playing a major role in Trump’s relatively easy win in the usually close battleground state. The Democratic presidential ticket’s advantage in the left-leaning county shrank from 30% during Hillary Clinton’s run in 2016 to 7% this Election Day, allowing Trump to more than make up that smaller difference with gains elsewhere in the state.

And while precise numbers on Hispanic turnout and voting patterns aren’t yet available, majority-Hispanic districts and precincts clearly swung in Trump’s favor. For instance, in overwhelmingly Hispanic and Cuban Hialeah, where Trump and Clinton split the vote four years ago, the president garnered around 66% support on Tuesday. Some analysts believe Trump won as much as half of non-Cuban Hispanic voters in Miami-Dade, a group Biden’s campaign thought would broadly back him.

Trump’s campaign in Miami-Dade played out on several fronts, much of it in Spanish: in the traditional form of TV ads, mailers and rallies, as well as on the newer frontier of social media. On Spanish-language talk-show radio and on social media, in particular, Trump’s sometimes unofficial backers carried out what some critics have described as a brutal and relentless campaign of disinformation and distortion that often promulgated conspiratorial memes to paint Biden and Democrats as dangerous radicals, and worse.

At times, as it did across the country in pitching its message to a white conservative majority, the campaign played on the racial fears of an immigrant Hispanic population that mostly identifies as white, depicting Black Lives Matter activists and the summer’s widespread protests over police brutality against Black people as threatening and communist-inspired — labels that by extension were also applied to Biden’s Black running mate, Kamala Harris.

“That whole law-and-order thing, antifa, and all these Blacks who are coming to your house — for Cubans, that whole theme of disorder also had some resonance,” Perez, the sociologist, said. “It stokes fear in a lot of Cubans.”
The ‘comunista’ label never went entirely away

To be sure, many Miami-Dade Hispanic voters needed no priming to cast their lot with Trump.

Voters of Cuban, Cuban-American and Nicaraguan backgrounds, in particular, have for decades provided a broad and dependable base of support for GOP candidates and conservative policies. That’s in sharp contrast with the more-liberal sympathies of the country’s largest Hispanic group, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, and other large, U.S.-born Latino populations like Puerto Ricans, whose support Democrats have long assumed.

But the potency and open use of the once-common “comunista” label in Miami politics, though never entirely gone, seemed to fade in recent years as first-generation exiles became less active or passed away. The local Hispanic vote began to split, with roughly as many supporting Democratic candidates in presidential elections, especially as many younger, U.S.-raised Latinos and Cuban Americans embraced more-liberal viewpoints.

That may be changing back.

The rise of self-described democratic socialists such as U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the push in some corners of the Democratic Party to nationalize health insurance have created fertile soil for Republicans to plant the seed. And Democrats like New York mayor and former presidential candidate Bill DeBlasio, who repeated a Cuban Revolution rallying cry — “Hasta la victoria, siempre!” — last summer when Miami hosted the first Democratic presidential primary, unintentionally watered it.

Surveys suggest that recent arrivals from Cuba have flocked to the GOP generally, and Trump in particular. After living their entire previous lives amid the economic austerity and repression of the island’s communist regime, they may be more responsive to the “socialist” tagging than second- and third-generation Cuban Americans, observers say. Many of those more recent exiles and immigrants were enthusiastic participants in the banner-bedecked Trump caravans that crisscrossed the county in the closing weeks of the campaign.

The suspicions that many Cuban Americans harbor about Democrats and the Democratic Party go back almost 60 years, to 1961, when President John F. Kennedy withheld air support during the Bay of Pigs invasion that unsuccessfully attempted to topple Fidel Castro’s government. Even as those suspicions have waxed and waned, it continues to be fodder for Little Havana newspapers and radio stations.

An example during the campaign were columns that appeared in LIBRE, one of Miami’s old-line Cuban exile newspapers. El Nuevo Herald, the Miami Herald’s Spanish-language sister publication, unwittingly gave some of LIBRE’s rabidly anti-Democrat writings added exposure when it included copies of the publication for eight months as an advertising insert in printed copies that no one at the company reviewed. The relationship was terminated after a reader complained.

“We still have to parse out where the Cuban vote went,” said Perez, a longtime Florida International University professor who now teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “The whole red-baiting, communist thing we’ve had here all along, but I do think it has a greater resonance this time among many Cubans.”
Amplifying Trump’s anti-socialist message

But one key to the GOP’s efficacy on Trump’s behalf was its ability to dice up its appeal to local Hispanic populations by nationality. The campaign expanded its voting base broadly by pitching its Democrat-bashing message to the specific fears and concerns of a small but growing segment of Venezuelans who have fled the regimes of socialist autocrats Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro, to Colombians who experienced decades of civil war with Marxist guerrillas, and smaller blocs of conservative Hispanic immigrants worried about the impact of liberal Democratic economic policies they may see as socialistic.

The pitch was two-fold: Not only is Biden either an outright socialist or a patsy for his party’s growing left wing, but he’s likely to surrender to, or even embrace, socialism abroad in places like Venezuela and Cuba. So canny was the campaign that Latino staffers adopted terms like “Castro-Chavismo” — a buzzword used by right-wing conservatives in Colombia to describe the spread of leftist regimes in Latin America — to link Colombians to the rhetoric used to reach Nicaraguan, Venezuelan and Cuban communities.

The GOP also touted an unsolicited Biden endorsement by Gustavo Petro, a former Colombian presidential candidate and guerrilla member for the militia group M-19. “Joe Biden is a Castro-Chavismo candidate,” said one digital attack ad in Spanish that had more than 76,000 views on YouTube and was widely written about in Colombian media.

In doing so, one analyst said, the Trump campaign significantly amplified its anti-socialist message to a receptive audience locally and beyond.

“The fear-mongering anti-communist strategy will always have a market in the U.S.,” said Aquiles Este, a political consultant in Miami who focuses on South Florida’s Hispanic voters. “And if you have a Democratic Party heavily laced towards the far left, there will always be an audience willing to buy that narrative and to vote in response to those fears.

“The Venezuelan voter is a marginal subgroup that has no real weight on the election, but the Venezuelan plight has become an issue that has great resonance within the Cuban, Colombian and Central American communities.”
Unexpected GOP wins

To many of those voters who experienced political and economic dislocation first-hand, that message rang strong and true, interviews suggest.

Oswaldo Navarro, 44, moved to Miami from Venezuela in January with his 14-year-old son, who needed better medical care than was available back home for a critical kidney ailment. Navarro said he became caught up in the presidential campaign because he saw Trump as fighting the socialism he had just fled. Though he can’t vote in the United States, Navarro was out at the Kendale Lakes public library every day campaigning for the Republican Party.

“The initial offer [of socialism] looks pretty good,” Navarro said. “But it’s a terrible formula.”

The Trump campaign’s courting of Miami-Dade’s Hispanic voters was patient and calculating — and helped vault local GOP candidates to often-unexpected wins in congressional and state legislative races.

As early as 2016, Trump traveled to Miami to accept the endorsement of the Bay of Pigs veterans association. Since then, he has visited Miami to sign an executive order restricting U.S. interaction with Cuba, held a rally at FIU to declare the twilight of socialism under his administration, and met with Cuban and Venezuelan exiles in more-intimate settings. Vice President Mike Pence also made repeated visits to South Florida on behalf of Trump to meet with exile leaders.

Pence also came to Miami to help formally launch Latinos for Trump, a coalition devoted to mobilizing the Hispanic community in part by using anti-socialist language to characterize the Democratic Party.

The campaign also deployed a large platoon of local acolytes and allies, official and not. And it won eager support from social-media influencers such as well-known Cuban exile and anti-communist activist Alexander Otaola, who critics say has been one of the leading local purveyors of pro-Trump misinformation. Four years ago, Otaola voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton for president.

Rubio, while warming up the crowd in Opa-locka Sunday for the president, said people who push back against Republicans’ warnings about socialism and the Democratic Party as a smear “are the ones who are confused.”

“Part of the things you’ll hear them say is, ‘Well, they scared the people about socialism.’ This is not a group that needs to be scared about socialism. It’s seen it, face-to-face. It knows it’s reality,” said Rubio. “Another group of people will say, ‘They confused these people.’ These people are not the ones confused.”

Asked to comment for this article, Rubio’s office alluded to tensions among Democrats in Congress, who this week held a contentious conference call, with moderates warning that the party was shifting too far to the left as ideas like defunding the police become more mainstream.

“House Democrats and their campaign arms are in crisis mode after realizing that embracing socialism cost them elections in working class and minority communities across the nation,” Rubio’s spokesperson said. “To claim that socialism is not mainstream in the Democratic Party is laughable and devoid from reality.”
For Trump or against Biden?

Fear of socialism was not the only factor the campaign exploited successfully. It also targeted former President Barack Obama’s normalizing of relations with Cuba’s communist government and his inability to stymie Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela, hanging those policies and perceived failures on Biden, his vice-president. The Trump campaign often circulated a photo of an informal encounter in 2015 in Brazil between Biden and Maduro that appeared to show the two speaking warmly. Another popular image: a clip of Obama and Cuban Communist Party leader Raul Castro doing the wave while watching a baseball game in Havana in 2016.

The GOP campaign struck some traditional Republican themes as well, underscoring Trump’s business background, his tax cut and small-business-friendly policies — a message that played well with Miami-Dade’s entrepreneurial-heavy Cuban and Hispanic populations. A lot of the campaign’s Spanish-language TV ads, Perez said, claimed Biden would heavily tax and hurt small businesses.

Some Hispanic voters said their GOP vote was not so much for Trump as it was against Biden and the Democrats. José Rodríguez, 49, a Cuban American registered Republican and a self-employed computer technician, said he wasn’t the biggest Trump fan, but was willing to overlook his shortcomings.

“He talks too much, I know that,” Rodriguez said. “But it’s more of a vote against Democrats. I am really scared for our country and what it could become in the next four years.”

Other Hispanic Trump voters appeared to be in some degree of denial about some of the president’s most controversial policies and practices. Some affirmed erroneously that he favors immigration and embraces immigrants, and praised his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, widely seen as a failure that has led to a disproportionate level of deaths and infections among Latinos and other minorities, including in Miami and Florida.

Some Hispanics who have been in South Florida long enough acknowledge they know better, but still backed the Trump campaign.

Gustavo Garagorry, chair of the Venezuelan-American Republican Club of Miami-Dade, said he knows that Biden and most Democrats aren’t actually socialists. But he says a perceived leftward shift by the Democratic party over the course of the past four years played into the hands of Trump as he sought support among South Florida Latinos.

“Democrats have historically been moderate, centrists. But the reality is that, in this moment in time, the Democratic Party has become home to socialists and leftists and they’ve started to change the direction of the party,” Garagorry said. People like Bernie Sanders, he said, are “getting their voices heard more and more.”

The change in attitude among his Venezuelan peers from 2016 to this year has been dramatic, he said. Whereas he felt lonely as a pro-Trump Latino in 2015, when Trump launched his presidential campaign, now he feels embraced — a testament, he said, to the campaign’s success.

“Back then people were telling me that I was crazy,” he said. “They cut me as a friend. They stopped calling. They asked how it was possible for me to support [Trump].... But the curious thing is that all the other people, the people who criticized me at the beginning, today they tell me, ‘Gustavo, you were right. We support the president, too.’ So I’ve seen that change happen firsthand. I lived it. I’m still living it.”

He added: “Esto es un fenómeno,” or “It’s a phenomenon.”

The numbers bear that out: In Doral, the city Garagorry works in and home to the country’s largest concentration of Venezuelan-Americans, Trump turned a 40-point loss in 2016 into a narrow 1.4-point win in 2020.
Reflection of ‘Democratic party leadership’

Among the local Republican politicians who most eagerly emulated Trump’s “socialista”-mongering was Maria Elvira Salazar, a former TV journalist who defeated incumbent Democratic Rep. Donna Shalala in her second try by depicting the moderately liberal former University of Miami president and Clinton administration official as a radical.

In late October, Salazar ran a last-minute attack ad that jumped on an interview Shalala did on NBC 6, a Miami TV station. Shalala meant to call herself a “pragmatic capitalist” but accidentally said, “I’m a pragmatic socialist.” The two-second clip was played thousands of times in the race’s final days and featured in rafts of mailers sent to voters’ homes. Salazar later suggested Shalala had only herself to blame.

“Socialism? You can’t be playing around with that word. It’s too acidic. It’s too dangerous” in Miami-Dade, Salazar said, in an interview a day after her victory.

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, Miami’s only Republican in the House of Representatives before Tuesday’s election, said Shalala in particular was undone by the Democratic Party’s leadership.

“That was less a reflection on Donna Shalala than it was on the Democratic Party’s leadership position of appeasing, playing footsies with and helping assist socialist dictatorships in our hemisphere,” Diaz-Balart said, referencing Biden’s position of wanting to undo the Trump reversal of Obama’s Cuba rapprochement and other polices on Latin America.

He also said new arrivals from Cuba and elsewhere are more likely to reject Democrats.

“What you’re seeing from them is a total rejection and it’s no longer just the Cubans, it’s South Florida non-Cuban Hispanics,” Diaz-Balart said. “What everyone in this community understands is that Cuba, Maduro, the FARC...they are all one and the same cancer.”

One of the key disputes in the conversation around the Democratic Party’s more progressive policies is whether they emulate European-style socialism or the socialism seen in Latin America.

“If you place it in the context of socialism in Europe, it’s not a very radical socialism,” Perez said. “The label for what goes on economically in Cuba is also socialism, but meaning the restrictions on your ability to make a living, the restriction on whether you can have your own business — socialism as this wealth-killing ideology.”

The Trump campaign’s success has also prompted a sharp backlash by Cuban American, Venezuelan and other Hispanic voters who backed Biden. Some say the campaign’s indiscriminate lobbing of anti-socialist rhetoric at Biden supporters stigmatized voters who didn’t back Trump or the GOP.

They say it’s fostered an atmosphere of public harassment and intimidation directed at Biden supporters that has bitterly split families, discouraged them from openly expressing their support for Democratic candidates, and at times caused them to fear for their physical safety. Some local Hispanic Biden voters who expressed support on social media say they’ve been shunned by friends and family members and subjected to threats and hostile accusations of harboring socialist or “chavista” sympathies.

One “Venezolanos con Biden” supporter, Adelys Ferro, said the anti-socialism rhetoric got so heated that some people in her community were simply scared to venture any criticism of Trump.

“We’ve reached such levels of fanaticism and cult-like behavior that if you step away from that cult, you get condemned. And that terrifies people,” Ferro said.

The tensions in Miami-Dade County this fall paled in comparison to the days when Miami politicians used to purchase remote car starters in case someone tried to blow them up in their own vehicle. But some say that Trump’s scorched-earth approach in Miami-Dade has left a toxic legacy that Hispanic residents will have to contend with for some time to come.

Now that Biden is projected to be president, some of his backers say Democrats can’t afford to repeat the mistake they made during the campaign — failing to reach out closely, personally and consistently enough to win over a majority of Miami-Dade’s Hispanic residents and overcome the “socialista” slurs of Trump and his backers.

“You need to keep educating people. You need to keep knocking on doors and explaining why [the socialism attacks] are not true,” said Cuban-American voter Clara Vargas, who spent the final days of the campaign canvassing in support of the Democratic ticket across the county with fellow members of her workers’ union, 32BJ SEIU.

“I personally don’t believe that fighting for a living wage and affordable healthcare is communist,” she said. Vargas added that there will always be people “who will see communism everywhere … but there are others who have a more open mind. I think that going out and knocking on doors and speaking to people will always move the needle.”

Ferro also sees a way out. She believes the relentless rhetoric around socialism could abate if Biden’s foreign policy decisions as president reflect a strong commitment to regime change in places like Venezuela.

“When my Venezuelan compatriots see Biden fighting for democracy and putting pressure on Maduro, I don’t think they will be able to say, ‘I was wrong.’ But hopefully at that point, much of this rhetoric will quiet down, and everyone will be able to keep enjoying the fruits of American capitalism,” Ferro said. “At least that’s what I hope will happen.”

Miami Herald reporters Karina Elwood and Alex Daugherty contributed to this report.