Biden seeks to end voter disenchantment as he courts Latinos at Las Vegas conference

US President Joe Biden is seeking to consolidate support among disillusioned voters, key to his re-election chances, as he meets with members of a Latino civil rights organization in the crucial state of Nevada on Wednesday.

Biden will deliver a speech at the UnidosUS annual conference in Las Vegas, where he will announce that starting August 19, spouses of certain U.S. citizens without legal status will be able to begin applying for permanent residency and eventually citizenship without having to first leave the country, as the White House had announced. The new program, first announced by Biden last month, could affect more than half a million immigrants.

Biden is also expected to use the speech to highlight that the unemployment rate among Latinos is near a historic low, that more people in the community have been able to obtain health insurance and that the federal government has doubled the number of Small Business Administration loans to Latino business owners since 2020.

The visit with Latino activists comes as Republicans are holding their national convention in Milwaukee and as Biden struggles to stabilize a reelection campaign that has been reeling since his disastrous June 27 debate performance against Republican nominee Donald Trump. The campaign has been further complicated by a failed assassination attempt on Trump by a 20-year-old gunman on Saturday in Pennsylvania.

Biden has strong support from Black and Latino voters, two groups that were key parts of his winning coalition in 2020 but whose support has shown signs of weakening.

The president, in an interview with BET News On Tuesday, he insisted he still has plenty of time to energize voters.

“Whether it’s young black people, young white people, young Hispanic people or young Asian Americans, they never concentrate until after Labor Day,” Biden predicted in the interview.

But headwinds for Biden had been mounting even before his failure on the debate stage that led a wave of Democratic lawmakers and donors to call for him to abandon the campaign.

Hispanic Americans have a less positive view of Biden now than when he took office. Forty-five percent of Hispanic adults have a somewhat or very favorable opinion of Biden, according to a poll by AP-NORC conducted in June, down from about 6 in 10 in January 2021. In the June poll, half of Hispanic adults had an unfavorable view of Biden.

Biden delivered a speech in Las Vegas at the NAACP’s annual convention on Tuesday in which he argued that Trump’s four years in the White House were “a living hell” for Black Americans. He lashed out at Trump for his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, soaring unemployment at the start of the pandemic and divisive rhetoric that he said unnecessarily tore Americans apart.

He also mocked Donald Trump for saying that migrants who have entered the US under the Democratic administration are stealing “black jobs.”

“I know what a black job is. She’s the vice president of the United States,” Biden said of Vice President Kamala Harris, who he said “could be president.”

Biden also highlighted his appointment of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and her service as vice president under Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president.

The UnidosUS conference gives Biden another chance to contrast his approach to immigration with Trump’s proposals. The Republican’s approach to immigration includes a push for mass deportations and rhetoric that portrays migrants as dangerous criminals who “poison the blood” of the U.S.

That new Biden administration plan was announced weeks after Biden unveiled a sweeping crackdown on the U.S.-Mexico border that effectively halted asylum claims for those arriving between officially designated ports of entry. Immigrant rights groups have sued the Biden administration over that directive, which administration officials say has led to fewer border encounters between the ports.

Biden is also expected to sign an executive order establishing a White House initiative to advance opportunities at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, a group of about 500 colleges and universities that have prominent Hispanic populations.

[Con información de The Associated Press]

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