Former Sanders adviser: Biden did not do enough ‘intentional organizing’ in Florida Latino community

Chuck Rocha, a former senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) presidential campaign, said Wednesday that President Trump’s electoral success in Florida can partly be attributed to the reelection campaign’s early and sustained outreach to Cuban and other Latino voters in the state, adding that the Biden team did not start early enough to provide an “alternative narrative.” 

“Intentional organizing, intentional work. That’s exactly what Donald Trump did. They stayed laser-focused on these Cubans, and everything they did worked off of each other,” Rocha said in an appearance on Hill.TV’s “Rising.”

“Donald Trump started Spanish-language advertising in Miami to these Cubans and Latinos statewide … in the middle of June, while Joe Biden didn’t get that started until almost the end of July,” Rocha explained. “So, he had a six-week head start, and his ads were always never how great Donald Trump is for Latinos, it was always, ‘Can you really trust Joe Biden?’ ”

Rocha said that many of the Trump campaign’s advertisements argued that a Biden presidency could lead to a socialist United States, reinvigorating fears among Cubans who remember the history of Fidel Castro’s socialist regime in Cuba. 

Rocha added, “when you have this unique ecosystem of these Cubans in Miami on these radio programs, these YouTube stations, and on the media that they listen to down here where you have these talk show hosts who are then amplifying everything that Trump’s doing, even though some of it’s misinformation … there was not an alternative narrative over that time period.”

The Associated Press called the race in Florida for Trump early Wednesday, with 96 percent of estimated votes reporting that Trump led with roughly 51 percent of the vote to Biden’s 48 percent. While Biden won Miami-Dade County, his margin was significantly smaller than that of Hillary Clinton in 2016. 

Watch Rocha’s interview above.