Is Donald Trump Blowing It with Venezuelan American Voters?

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In the 2020 presidential election, perhaps no voting bloc swung harder toward Donald Trump than the Venezuelan-American community. One of the highest concentrations of Venezuelan voters is in Doral, a city in Florida’s Miami-Dade County. In Donald Trump’s first presidential bid, he won Florida but was crushed in Doral by 40 points. But four years later, we saw the birth of the MAGAzuelan voter, as Trump won Doral by 1.4 percentage points, a neck-snapping margin shift of 41.4 points.

The Venezuelan-American bloc, amounting to just 2 percent of the Latino-eligible voting population in Florida in 2020, according to Pew Research Center, is not significant. In contrast, the state’s Cuban-American and Puerto Rican electorates combined account for the majority of the state’s Latino vote. But if Florida becomes close—and one recent state poll shows Kamala Harris trailing Trump by only two points—every vote and voting bloc will count.

Similar to Cuban Americans, whose fervent opposition to Cuba’s Communist Castro regime has long made them partial to the Republican Party, many Venezuelan Americans resist chavismo, the left-wing nationalist political movement in Venezuela started by its late President Hugo Chávez and now led by his authoritarian heir Nicolás Maduro.

In 2020, Republicans in Florida hammered Democrats for their association with self-identified democratic socialists like Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It worked. According to Florida exit polls, Trump won 35 percent of the Latino vote in 2016, then 46 percent in 2020. The improvement largely came from non-Cuban Latinos, with whom Trump moved from 26 percent in 2016 to 49 percent in 2020. MAGAzuelans–if Doral is any indication–were a big part of that shift.

This historic change has prompted a debate about a rightward political realignment among the Hispanic/Latino electorate in Florida and across the country. But Trump’s approach to Venezuela’s political crisis may prove to be a turnoff to the MAGAzuelans in this year’s election.

“Trump saw Venezuela 110 percent through the prism of Florida’s electoral votes,” said an anonymous “former senior U.S. official” to The New York Times. As president, beginning in 2017, Trump imposed harsh economic sanctions on the Maduro regime, blocking the government and its oil companies from international credit markets and restricting oil exports. The intent was to force Maduro out, but he stayed in power while many Venezuelans suffered severe economic hardship. Trump’s Treasury Department officials warned him that devastating sanctions would fuel massive migration, but he plowed ahead.

In early 2019, Trump and dozens of international leaders recognized opposition figure Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s president. But Maduro would not budge, and support for Guaidó eventually deteriorated. As a consolation, Trump invited Guaidó to be a guest at his 2020 State of the Union address, which, according to The New York Times, “seemed like a political masterstroke.” Trump won Florida in 2020 by a bigger margin than in 2016. But he had to leave office in 2021 while Maduro stayed. Moreover, the short-run electoral value of the sanctions to Trump was greater than their political effectiveness in breaking the Venezuelan political stalemate.

The Biden administration–facing a rise in oil prices and a record number of Venezuelans crossing America’s southern border–took a different approach to Venezuela.

Many Venezuelan Americans have benefited from the Biden-Harris administration’s policies of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and the parole program known as Advance Travel Authorizations (ATA). These instruments have allowed Venezuelans with a legal status to bring family members to the United States, even while Biden has clamped down on border crossings by asylum-seekers.

Biden also pursued negotiations with the Maduro regime to restore democracy, giving Maduro incentives to participate in a free and fair election, including a prisoner swap and an easing of sanctions. (In a 2023 Latino Public Opinion Forum poll of Venezuelans in Florida, only 30 percent found the sanctions effective.) Last year, Maduro agreed to a deal that included a new election in July 2024, and some sanctions were partially lifted, but Biden reimposed sanctions last April when Maduro didn’t live up to his end of the bargain. World leaders widely rejected Maduro’s claim to victory last month, yet the strongman remains in power. The expectation of removing Maduro from power is subsiding, especially after Edmundo Gonzalez left Venezuela for exile in Spain after weeks of pressure and the threat of jail.

How has Trump responded to recent events? By maligning Venezuelan migrants trying to escape the authoritarian regime.

The Republican nominee has insisted that Venezuela is sending criminals and the mentally ill to the United States, an unproven claim he repeated during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. The assertion lacks supporting evidence, though Trump often exploits the single case of an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant charged with murdering a Georgian nursing student. He has also falsely claimed that Venezuela’s crime rate has dropped by 67 percent because it ships criminals to America, and told Elon Musk, “If something happens with this election, which would be a horror show, we’ll meet the next time in Venezuela because it’ll be a far safer place to meet than our country.”

This is the second election cycle in which Venezuela is a topic for Trump’s stump speech. But he’s not talking about the scourge of socialism and the death of democracy in the Venezuelan government. Now, the Venezuelan people who are fleeing that government are the enemy.

The demonization of Venezuelan migrants is reaching a point where, even among the diverse Latino communities in Florida, we are starting to identify a hostile environment reminiscent of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, in which 125,000 Cubans fled for Florida.

The fear that a migrant influx will affect the status of those who have been in the U.S. for years is not new among diaspora communities. There is a natural apprehension regarding the type of migrant crossing the border, as well as the threat more migrants pose to the interest of established communities. This was true in the aftermath of the Mariel Boatlift, as it is now with the Venezuelans arriving at the border. But while the Venezuelan crisis might have some similarities to that of Cuba in 1980, the populations are not necessarily in the same situation. Castro used the Carter administration’s open-door policy to expel people he considered undesirable for the Cuban regime, while Maduro did not directly send Venezuelans to the U.S.

Such nuance is lost on today’s Republican Party. The party of Ronald Reagan largely welcomed those fleeing socialism. The party of Donald Trump, abetted by the governors of Texas and Florida, demonizes the victims of socialism and uses them as political pawns. Moreover, Ron DeSantis seems to be taking his cues from Maduro’s crackdown on the opposition in Venezuela. The governor’s election police in Florida have questioned people who signed the petition to get the abortion amendment on the ballot this November. In Texas, the Attorney General’s office is conducting raids in a voter fraud probe that has targeted Latino activists. These practices should remind immigrant communities in the country of the authoritarian regimes they left behind.

Can Trump scapegoat Venezuelans and continue to make inroads with Latino voters? Although there is a small percentage of Latinos that seem sympathetic to his promise of rounding up undocumented immigrants for massive deportations, a recent poll of Latino voters by the Hispanic Federation and Latino Victory Foundation found that “57 [percent] of respondents … are more interested in voting due to Vice President Harris entering the presidential election.” Harris led Trump 59 to 35 percent. That’s close to Biden’s 60 percent support among Latinos in the 2020 election, according to Catalist, and a vast improvement from last month’s Pew Research Center poll in which Joe Biden and Trump were tied with Latinos. Although Vice President Harris has some work to do to reach previous levels of support among the Hispanic electorate—in 2012 and 2016, Democratic nominees won about two-thirds of the Latino vote—Trump’s criminalizing of Venezuelans might unwittingly help Harris’s cause.

Furthermore, Harris is showing a much better understanding of what is at stake with the crisis in Venezuela. She has reached out to the opposition leadership, Edmundo Gonzalez and Maria Corina Machado, to express support for a peaceful democratic transition. In doing so, she highlighted the need for transparency in the electoral process, called out the military for human rights violations, and demanded more pressure from the international community. Trump, meanwhile, has yet to articulate a clear Venezuelan policy.

In 2020, Trump was able to disqualify Democrats as socialists in the eyes of many Latinos. In 2024, his unwillingness to embrace Venezuelans fleeing socialism may damage his capacity to build on his past success and allow Harris to win back critical Latino swing voters.

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