Sunshine Sentinel

As Joe Biden travels to Florida on Tuesday, here are three critical questions that he should be asked.

Why did Biden snub Florida before? What changed?

Joe Biden has not visited Florida at all in 2020. Now, after months of barely leaving his basement, Biden finally decided this month to again venture above ground, and will actually pay a visit to the battleground state of Florida on Tuesday. Previously, he bizarrely claimed that the “science” would not allow him to travel. The claim was dubious, of course, especially given that he can effectively travel privately in a bubble with constant government security protection. Moreover, nothing regarding the “science” changed recently. There are no major new developments regarding the virus, no changes to safety protocols in Florida or elsewhere. So, did the science change…or, did the political science change? 

After all, the recent NBC News poll shows President Trump leading among Florida Hispanics vs. Biden, and tied overall in the Sunshine State. The RealClear Politics average of Florida polls shows a similarly tight race, with Biden losing his 8% advantage of just 6 weeks ago, and now only leading by 1%.  So, it seems that the recent momentum of President Trump and our campaign finally smoked Joe out of his subterranean hideout.

Why would Floridians of Cuban and Venezuelan descent trust Biden?

A huge factor in the above-cited tightening of Florida polls is Biden’s unpopularity among Hispanic voters in South Florida. For example, right now according to a Miami Herald poll, Biden lags Hillary Clinton’s performance in Miami’s Dade County by 13%.  A big driver of this lag is Biden’s past record and current views on socialist policies broadly, and Cuban relations specifically. From a philosophical standpoint, as the 2020 Democratic Party lurches further left, embracing ideas like reparations, confiscatory taxation, and de-facto open borders, many traditionally-minded Latinos who previously voted for Democrats now find themselves as political orphans. 

For Floridians of Cuban and Venezuelan origin, Biden’s softness toward tyrannical regimes in Latin America presents a huge obstacle. Specifically, Biden advocates rescinding Trump’s toughness toward the Havana regime and a return to the Obama/Biden policies that recognized and normalized the six-decade old military dictatorship of Cuba. As Vice President, Biden naively promised that engagement and tourism would somehow transform the Castro brothers’ legacy of oppression into liberation. Instead, the Havana junta simply acquired the legitimacy of official ties to the United States along with fresh capital to fuel more repression.

The tens of millions of Latin Americans who fled their homelands for America, like my own father, have never sought to replicate the mistakes of their home countries here in this blessed land. Instead, they flow to America seeking an entirely new way of life, not some leftist facsimile of the corruption, deprivation, and socialism that afflict so many countries of Central and South America.   

Why does Biden oppose education choice for Florida students? 

Governor Ron DeSantis likely owes his narrow gubernatorial victory in 2018 to the “School Choice Moms,” per analysis from the Wall Street Journal. DeSantis aggressively promoted policies to continue Florida’s generous education choice options. DeSantis provided a clear alternative to the anti-choice, teachers union-backed policies of his opponent, Andrew Gillum. Specifically, DeSantis won 18% of black women, which is more than double the GOP’s national average, and many of the 100,000 black women who chose the white male Republican candidate over a black Democratic candidate, were clearly motivated by the idea of educational options. 

Already more than 100,000 Florida children attend private schools with state assistance via the Step Up for Students program of tax-credit funded scholarships. Now that DeSantis is governor, those numbers will grow, thanks to new legislation he signed this June.

But Joe Biden, politically enslaved to the leaders of the national teachers unions, promises that his administration would attack all that progress, and strip away the choices afforded to needy children in Florida, and across the country. Joe Biden opposes education choice for parents, as shown by his specific pledge with Senator Bernie Sanders in their “Unity Task Force” agreement to end Washington DC’s Education Opportunity Project. That program allows over 1,700 needy Washington children to attend private schools. 80% of the children are black and 42% come from family’s receiving food stamps, yet Joe Biden wants to deny these children the same opportunities that his very own children enjoyed: the option of a private (often religious) school. Biden also opposes any federal funds for charter schools, even as he promotes massive new federal spending on legacy public schools. He further promises that a Biden Department of Education would be “teacher-oriented,” rather than student-oriented. 

Biden’s record and agenda make it clear that he cares little about the millions of working-class and poor American young people trapped in failing public schools. This school year in particular, with so many public schools defaulting to virtual-only learning, it sure seems like a civil rights issue for the 2020’s to empower poor children, many of whom are black and brown, to prepare their minds to compete in a 21st century economy and digital age. 

– Steve Cortes is Senior Advisor for Strategy to the Trump Campaign.