What A Day - The Florida Key Demographic

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

Concerns about whether the Biden campaign is doing enough to speak to Latinx voters have grown in recent days following polling that suggests weakness among this group, particularly in Florida. Political consultant and former Bernie Sanders advisor Chuck Rocha joins to discuss.The director of the CDC says that a vaccine for Covid-19 might not be available until the summer or fall of 2021. He also said that wearing a mask could be more important in fighting the spread of the virus. Trump disagreed.And in headlines: Hurricane Sally drenches Alabama and Florida, Big Ten football is back on, and a former data-scientist for Facebook blows the whistle on Zuck.

It's Thursday, September 17th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick, and this is What A Day, where we are avoiding visiting our Animal Crossing towns because, oof, it has been a while. Yeah, I don't think that my squirrels are going to be happy when they see me. I have really been avoiding them, and I haven't been giving them their gifts. The truth is, I tend to avoid squirrels in every context. And I think I'm going to keep doing that. On today's show, a conversation with Chuck Rocha about Latino voters and whether the Democratic Party is doing enough to speak to them. But first, the latest. On masks, masks have problems too. When I talked about the masks have to be handled very gently, very carefully. I see that in restaurants,

there are people with masks and they're playing around with their mask and they have it, their fingers are in their mask and then they're serving with plates. I mean, I think there's a lot of problems with masks. Wow. So there's a lot of mask talk happening there. I counted like 57. So that was President Trump contradicting the testimony that his CDC director gave yesterday on the importance of wearing, you guessed it, masks. Experts have said for months that masks are crucial and effective in slowing the spread of the coronavirus. And Trump is still creating confusion about this very simple public health tool. Yeah, he saw like one waiter doing something and he's been telling the same story multiple times recently. I don't really follow it.

He loves an anecdote. First it was toilets, now it's this. Well, we'll get more into that and what else the CDC director said yesterday when we get to the headlines. But we want to start the show today talking about the election. That's right. So in recent days, some prominent Latino Democrats have been raising public concerns about what appears to be a weakness in Democratic nominee Joe Biden's campaign with Latino voters across the country. And some of the biggest worry has been centered around Florida, an obviously critical swing state with razor thin margins in past elections, and a place where President Trump has actually demonstrated some strength with Latino voters in recent polls. Now, Hillary Clinton won Latino voters there by around 25 points in 2016, while losing the state overall. And Biden is also

ahead among this voting group, according to polling, but his lead is considerably smaller, which could make the difference in a really close election this year and will continue to be an important demographic in future elections. So now there's a more vigorous push by his campaign and outside advisors to heavily invest in and engage with these voters as much as possible before time runs out. Yeah, and one of the people pushing the Biden campaign and doing work on his own is Chuck Rocha. He is a former senior advisor for Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, which prioritized outreach to the Latino community early, hired more Latino staff members than any other campaign, and used that mobilization to win states like Nevada and California in the primaries. More recently, Rocha and his political action committee, Nuestro PAC, are targeting persuadable Latino voters in battleground states. Rocha firmly believes that many of these voters are gettable for Biden, but that there needs to

be more investment, not just from the campaign, but also from donors and outside groups. We spoke with Rocha about what worked on the Sanders campaign, the issues that are important to the broad and diverse community of Latino voters across the country right now, and how to make sure they're able to make their voices heard in this election. Here's that interview. Well, Chuck, thank you so much for talking to us today. Happy to be here. We want to just start by asking about some recent polling that suggested that President Trump is doing better with Latino voters than he did in 2016. I think that's, you know, led to a lot of sort of scared headlines, if you will. And putting that another way, the polling suggests that Biden is doing worse with Latino voters than Clinton did in 2016. So broadly speaking, what do you think is going on here? I'm not surprised. I kind of saw this coming.

And I think that it's a wake-up call for lots of us. I think we have been spoiled for year after year to just think Latinos are going to show up for any reason without an investment into our community. And in a year where you have COVID over-indexing in our community, killing our people at three times the rate. Latino children are eight times more likely to catch the disease than white children. We're more likely to be an essential worker. So we have our community literally trying to figure out how to stay alive, and people are trying to get them to show up and vote at the same level as white voters when we are spending just a fraction of the money to actually go have that conversation. Now, a listener might say, well,

Chuck, isn't it the same thing we did with Hillary and Barack Obama? Yes, but it's different because Barack Obama was a once in a lifetime candidate. And with Hillary Clinton, lots of Latinos knew Bill Clinton and he was fine with them and she was fine with them. And at a time where you have somebody that Latinos don't know who is Joe Biden, who didn't spend any money in the primary talking to them, who needs to reintroduce himself to us, and then you sprinkle in the way COVID has over-indexed in our community,

you have the perfect storm for underperformance, lagging numbers. And then the last piece I'll show you, because I'm running a Latino super PAC, so I've been monitoring all the Spanish language spending to try to make my own strategic decisions, is Joe Biden started about three and a half weeks later than Donald Trump, who got to spend $1 million in Spanish

language communications via Spanish TV unanswered. And anybody who's worked in politics more than 30 seconds knows you only get one time to make a first impression. That's for sure. I mean, before we go any further, I kind of want to talk about the importance of Latino voters. You touched on the fact that there has been this acceptance that I guess they're just going to show up and vote for Democrats because the alternative is so unappealing. But that is just taking a community for granted. So can you kind of give us a sense of the diversity of Latino voters and any trends

and the issues that you've seen that rise to the top and sort of discussion? I really appreciate you asking that question because most people don't understand our community or communities of color or, or multiracial communities. It's just, this is the new America and people need to wake up to that, that our children and our grandchildren, and I'm old enough to have children. And to be honest, I've got twin, three-year-old grandchildren, and they're just a broad palette of brown, black, light brown, like all the colors of the rainbow. And they think about politics differently than I do or my mother does. And we're all alive. People that are actually listening to this podcast are probably even asking themselves, why are they interviewing an old white man to talk about Latino politics? Well, I am very brown and I'm very Mexican. I just sound like an old white man who raised me when

I was a little boy. This I described to you because this is our community. Mexicans in San Antonio are different than Mexicans in East LA. Cubans in South Miami are much different than Dominicans in New York City. And Puerto Ricans who are US citizens who have to re-register when they move to the mainland live in the same states as the Cubans, but they couldn't think more differently about Joe Biden. So if you don't take the time to show up in the community and show up in the right way, if you show up at a Cuban community and play Mexican music from Mexico that you'll run in a San Antonio ad, you've just turned a whole lot of people off who ain't going to listen to a dang thing you've got to say. If you sprinkle in on top of that, the lack of money

that's normally spent to mobilize black or brown voters, they see our community as what we call a GOTV universe, something that you just go in and if you get them black people and then brown people out to vote, they're going to vote for us at high enough numbers. We don't really need to talk to them. The whole crux of why I've been doing this media tour in the last four or five weeks is to explain to people, if you'll take a Latino voter and just treat them like a persuadable white voter who you spend hundreds of millions of dollars talking to, you would not have to ever worry about an election from now on because you'd win 80% of that vote and you would build a progressive Democratic base that would go on to lift up the party for generations to come. I want to ask, too, Chuck, also on, you know, sort of these policy issues and how they're

discussed and where they're discussed. Biden was just in Florida this week. And, you know, one of the things he was talking about was his recovery plan for Puerto Rico, given, you know, hurricanes, financial issues that are there. What did you make of the visit overall? There were obviously some of the sort of viral highlights, like the playing of Despacito on his phone, some other things like that. But what was your impression of this entire visit? It was good. There's things that he should do differently, but showing up in the community is a head nod. Or if you're Mexican, it's a hat tip. We go back,

we don't go forward. So when we see you, we don't say nothing. We just kind of throw our head back, like what's up? Anyway, so it's a hat tip to the community saying, I'm showing up here and I want you to know that you're seen. He should do more of that. Now, it doesn't really matter where he goes because all that really matters around that area, I mean, where he goes in Florida, is that the local coverage of the TV commercial, because brown people right now are trying to figure out how to make things work. So they're sitting at home watching the news, right? So the news covers that he was in our community and he has this plan. That's great. So showing up is very, very important and he should do as much of that. Kamala Harris should do that as well. She has an amazing story, child of immigrants, multiracial family. Like I could write those commercials in my sleep.

And so showing up like that matters. But then also what's more important than this, and I've been saying this all morning, is that he does have great plans. And I've done focus groups all summer where Latinos love his plans and it moves them. But you have to spend resources to get that plan in the hands of people so they can dissect it and understand it. And what's happening right now is you only have his campaign, who's now has caught up with Donald Trump and has spent as much money in Spanish and he's getting out there, but he will never be able to spend enough money to do it alone. Case in point is that as of July the 31st, white-focused super PACs have raised $500 million to reinforce Joe

Biden's plans with white persuadable voters. And under the same time period, Latino super PACs, which is only three, and I run the largest one, Nuestro PAC, we've only received $5 million in funding. That's $5 million compared to $500 million. But then you turn to look at us and go, but Chuck, why do Latinos not vote at the same level as white people? I mean, it just answers itself. And it just drives me absolutely bonkers. Yeah. It's funny. The refrain of this conversation is like, if they would just actually talk to people, they could do so much better. It seems so simple. And yet, it is this sort of contentious thing. I mean, sort of to that point, you know, you were a top advisor to Senator Sanders on his campaign earlier in the year.

He did really, really well among Latino voters in the primaries, particularly in California and Nevada. Any lessons that Democrats can learn from that? I think so. I tell people it breaks down into really four things. One is we started early. So I'm practicing what I'm preaching. In each of those states, our first bilingual communication page started six months in advance. Second, we set up offices in the community. So we were in East LA, we were in Las Vegas first. That's where we put our first offices, not our second or third. And then we

hired a whole lot of people from that community. We had over 200 Latino staffers on our staff in the primary. Thirdly, we had a very culturally competent campaign. But people don't realize this is that Bernie Sanders did not have a Latino outreach department in the campaign. Because I was the senior advisor and got to do the budgeting and built out the campaign and hire most of the folks, I made sure that the Latino outreach was integrated into every department and that we wouldn't be in a department that is normally siloed off from the rest of the campaign, told to just show up at the NCLR or the NAACP meeting, not giving any budget authority and not really knowing what the overall strategy of the campaign is. So we included Latinos in the beginning. And so doing that piece, having me there that could protect the budget, hiring out people, our national political

director was an Afro-Latina, Anna Lilia. The leaders of the departments were women of color because I knew Bernie Sanders needed to change this false narrative about this Bernie bro thing. So I was very intentional. And I talk about this in my book, T.O. Bernie, about you can have diversity and inclusion if you're intentional about the hiring practice. There's plenty of talented people of color, but you should just got to work a little bit harder and go through a hundred white boy resumes to get to a good person of color because they just have more time and resources at their disposal. Yeah, that's for sure. I mean, if you were giving advice to the Biden campaign right now, what would you say? Because, you know, you make a really great point. You all started early. It was intentional from the beginning. Like it was ingrained in the campaign. So we're down to the wire. We have less than 50 days to go. Luckily, they don't have very far to go. Like they're already have great support and they have the majority of support. And he only needs to move probably in a few states, maybe between two and eight points. And he'll have this thing right where he needs to be if we accept the baseline of what most operatives take, which is like 65, 68, 70 percent, which in my mind, if they actually did this right, they could get 85 percent of the vote if they spent that kind of money like they should be in our community.

So I would say the more money you can put into TV, into digital, whatever you're currently doing, double it. Just double all of it, because Latinos aren't getting the message on the ground because they're worried about COVID. They're worried about their kids in school. They're worried about all the things everybody else is worried about. And now we want them to focus on an election. There's one thing focus groups have told me all summer long. They all were like, we get it. Donald Trump is a bad person. We don't trust him. We don't like him. But you don't have to tell me no more why I should not like him. Tell me what Joe Biden's plan is to make my life better and what he's going to do to fix this COVID thing. Get me back to work where I can have insurance again for my family. I've heard it all summer. That was Chuck Rocha, and you can learn more about his campaign philosophy and his experience in his book, T.O. Bernie, the inside story of how Bernie Sanders brought Latinos into the political revolution. It's Thursday, WOD Squad. And for today's Temp Check, we're talking about Saturday Night Live's announcement that the elastic-faced eccentric Jim Carrey will be stepping in to play presidential nominee Joe Biden

when the show returns in October. Jim Carrey is just the latest in SNL's recent history of casting big name celebs to portray their meteor political roles. Just in the last few years, Robert De Niro played Robert Mueller. Larry David recurred as Bernie Sanders. And Alec Baldwin even won an Emmy Award for his portrayal of Donald Trump. And Brad Pitt is up for an Emmy of his own this weekend for his portrayal of Dr. Anthony Fauci. So Giddy, do you think Jim Carrey is a worthy choice to take on the role of a lifetime Joe Biden? Worthy in the sense that there's going to be insane chaotic energy to this performance.

I don't really know what to expect. I certainly hope that he wears a yellow pinstripe suit and says smoke in a bunch in some way or other, even if that has nothing to do with Joe Biden at all. This is truly weird to me. I love it and I also think that it's really funny that your frame of reference was immediately

the mask because I don't think there could be a bigger difference in energy between a Jim Carrey character and Joe Biden to be Frank. I mean, look, the mask can cut a rug. He's probably got some weird stories in his past, you know, about like there's mobsters in the mask and probably one of them is named Corn Pop. I mean, I see some similarities here in terms of like method acting that you could link the roles that Carrie is pursuing. Yeah. I mean,

I dig it. I think that, uh, I think that any nineties revival role is worthwhile. We're all bored. Please just do the thing for us. Yeah. Put the mask on,

but be careful what it does to you. But Akilah, the more important question here though, who is SNL hiring to play us this season? All right, so I've been thinking about this. Obviously, for me, it's going to be Kiki Palmer because she's already played a character named Akilah, and I think she owes me this

because I never got to play that role, and I'm pretty sure it was based on my life. People know this about me, but I do have a one-sided vendetta. She could care less, but I personally can't get over it. For you, you know, that's tough. I would say, hmm, hmm, hmm.

You know, here's the thing. You always want somebody who's like kind of got their own like individual appeal, which I feel like, you know, with Jim Carrey, like he's obviously his own thing. So it makes sense that he would bring some of his own wonderfulness to Joe Biden. So I would say maybe like an Oscar Isaac for you, like you could have Oscar Isaac show up and be like, Oh, I'm beauty and Resnick. I don't know what sounds you make, but that's, I made you, um, fat Albert for some reason. That's like, that's like Oscar,

Oscar Isaac doing Oscar the grouch as fat. Like it was, it was a very, it was like a Russian doll type performance. But that's what I want and that's what I hope I get. Yeah. You know what? Well, if they listen to this podcast, please let Oscar Isaac play Gideon Resnick. Just like that, we've checked our temps.

Stay safe. Hopefully someone really cool plays you on SNL and we will be back with another Temp check tomorrow. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. Hurricane Sally made landfall yesterday morning in Alabama as a Category 2 storm, and it's continued to drench parts of that state along with the Florida Panhandle. Floodwaters reached five feet in some areas, and over 350,000 people in both states lost power. Emergency crews have already rescued over 370 people from their homes.

Scientists say climate change is responsible for the storm's extremely slow pace, which means areas hit by the storm experience longer periods of high winds and heavy rains and damage that comes from both. Experts have said that this year's hurricane season has been one of the most active on record and that there is a high chance that another hurricane will form within the next five days. Yesterday, the head of the CDC, Dr. Robert Redfield, testified to Congress and made two big pieces of news. The first is that he said that a vaccine might not be widely available to the public until the summer or fall of news. The first is that he said that a vaccine might not be widely available to the public until the summer or fall of 2021. So that's one more year until we can start canceling plans with our friends again. And similar to what other health officials have

been saying, Redfield argued that even if a vaccine were available now, it could take six to nine months to get enough Americans vaccinated in order for there to be widespread immunity. For now, we just have to keep wearing masks. And that leads us to the second major news item. Redfield said that wearing a mask could actually be more effective at protecting against COVID than getting a vaccine because vaccines might not confer 100% immunity. He also said that if all Americans wore a mask, the country could get control of the pandemic in a matter of weeks. At his press conference following that testimony, President Trump said that the CDC director, quote, made a mistake, may have misunderstood the questions and answered them, quote, incorrectly.

I don't think he did. Well, less than five weeks after announcing they would be delaying all sports activity until spring for the safety of the student athletes, the Big Ten Conference announced that they had voted unanimously on Tuesday to reverse their decision and restart sports, most notably college football. Talk about moving those chains. Though the representatives from the universities say it was evolving guidance from the experts they've consulted that gave them the confidence to restart school sports, President Trump was more than happy to take credit for the reversal on Twitter. The conference happens to be home to a number of battleground states

in the upcoming election, including Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, so we can safely assume Trump has no ulterior motives here, right? The Big Ten must proceed with a condensed schedule to catch up with other conferences and will rely on daily testing to mitigate the risk of outbreaks. If a student athlete does test positive, the earliest they will be able to return to game competition is 21 days following the positive test. Since the season began less than a month ago, 13 games have been postponed among the other conferences due to teams dealing with COVID-19 outbreaks. Go teams go

straight to mandatory isolation. That's right. That's why we play the game. It's a bird. It's a plane. It's another social media freeze that you might find yourself lacking the context for. Well, I'm here to help. On Wednesday, celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Mark Ruffalo and Sacha Baron Cohen promised to not post to their Facebook and Instagram accounts for the full day, accompanied with the hashtag StopHateForProfit. The campaign is part of a larger effort by organizations like the NAACP, Color of Change, and the ADL to draw attention to Facebook's role in the spread of dangerous misinformation as calls mount for the social media behemoths to be regulated or even broken apart as an antitrust action. This comes in an already bad press week for Facebook after Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist for the company, published a 6,600-word internal memo detailing how the social network knew leaders of countries around the world were using the website to manipulate voters but refused to intervene. I say let's keep

the pressure up on the zuck. Like the tagline for the social network says, you don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies. Well, Mark, this week, I think it's safe to say you've made several more. Yeah, you know what's cooler than a billion dollars? Not upending democracies.

And those are the headlines. That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, take a break from posting thirst traps to your Instagram story and tell your friends to listen. And if you like the show make sure you subscribe leave a review take a break from posting thirst traps to your instagram story and tell your friends to listen and if you're into reading and not just internal memos calling for the downfall of facebook like me what a day is

also a nightly newsletter as we head into the home stretch of the election the newsletter is gonna have you covered on the state of the race and all the contacts you need to get actively involved it's written and curated by our very own Sarah Lazarus. She's hilarious. So if you haven't already, check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And live from New York, it's been What A Day.

What A Day is a Crooked Media production. It's recorded in Next by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tan is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our senior producer is Katie Long. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.