Joe Biden, in first Florida trip as nominee, aims to shore up Latino support

Joe Biden on Tuesday made his first trip to Florida as the Democratic presidential nominee, facing a tight race in the state and a challenge consolidating support among its Latino voters that he moved to address as he campaigned along the increasingly Democratic I-4 corridor.

Against a backdrop of polls that showed Biden both cutting into traditional Republican constituencies and sometimes underperforming Hillary Clinton’s 2016 showing with Latino voters in Florida, he sought to engage a broad range of voters with stops in Tampa and then in Kissimmee, where he attended a Hispanic Heritage Month event.

His campaign also unveiled a plan focused on supporting Puerto Rico. The rollout came as Biden has faced urgent calls to shore up his standing with Puerto Rican voters in Florida, a critical constituency, and he described the plan at the heritage event on Tuesday night near Orlando, in a region with a significant Puerto Rican population. He said he believed that statehood “would be the most effective means of ensuring that residents of Puerto Rico are treated equally, with equal representation at a federal level.”

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“But the people of Puerto Rico must decide, and the United States federal government must respect and act on that decision,” Biden went on.

The plan also called for accelerated access to reconstruction funding, investments in Puerto Rican infrastructure after devastating hurricanes, expanded health care and nutrition assistance, and efforts to “reduce its unsustainable debt burden,” among other proposals.

Throughout his remarks, Biden toggled between celebrating Hispanic Americans and the diversity of the nation, and lashing President Donald Trump’s messaging and policies toward Puerto Rico, casting that approach as callous toward U.S. citizens.

“Donald Trump doesn’t seem to grasp, doesn’t seem to grasp, that the people of Puerto Rico are American citizens already,” Biden said. Jabbing at the president’s actions after Hurricane Mariain 2017, he continued, “I’m not going to throw paper towels at people whose lives have just been devastated by a hurricane.”