10. Is Biden really losing Hispanic and Black voters?

0:06Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me Katty Kay and me Anthony Scaramucci. Anthony, we're being very Euro on The Rest is Politics US this week because you're in Greece. I'm in Cannes where I went to it. By the way, you have a big fan. I went to a dinner and there was a member of the British royal family, a princess. And I was introduced to speak and I suddenly heard this gasp of delight. And it was this princess saying, oh, my God, I love the show. I really love Anthony. So I think we're going to upgrade your refuge from America possibilities. See that? They can hide in one of the castles?

0:43Exactly. I'm now going to start a kind of crowdsourcing, but if you haven't got a castle, get to the back of the queue because Anthony has high standards, as we can see from his lovely room in Athens. I do have high standards. I may be more posh than you. Exactly. Remember, when I call you posh, it could be projecting, Caddy. Remember that. Projecting or confession. And there you are on the Athens Riviera, just trying to make everybody jealous. The economy is really coming around here. You know, 12 years ago, obviously, there was a big problem here. They've resolved that for the most part. And it's nice to see they're a very hospitable country.

1:20What are we talking about today? On today's podcast, we are going to look at why Black and Hispanic voters may be warming to Donald Trump, whether Democrats should be worried about that as we head into the November election. And of course, it comes after Joe Biden this week announced a new policy that would protect hundreds of thousands of undocumented spouses of American citizens from deportation, which follows the earlier order earlier this month, shutting the border against asylum seekers. So he's kind of trying to have it both ways, it looks like, on immigration, appeal to progressives, but also appeal to the centrists who are worried about the border.

2:00So we'll talk about all of that. in the second half of the program. I think this is the week to look at presidential debate, right? And what the prep actually looks like. The first debate of the election campaign comes up next week. We want to have a look at what we can learn from history about how important these debates are. But I really want to get into what the preparations are looking like. Joe Biden has flown already to Camp David and is prepping now until the next debate. So we'll get into how the two men go about debate prep. But first of all, let's talk about this coalition, Anthony, this border move that President Biden instituted at the beginning of this month.

2:39And then this week, he follows that up with this move to protect undocumented spouses of American citizens. So people who have come into the country illegally and are married to American citizens are now going to get some respite and won't necessarily be deported. This is clearly a move to appeal to progressives in the Democratic Party who didn't like him shutting down on the border and a way to say to them, look, you know, I hear that you're angry. I don't know if he's trying to have it both ways. I don't know if this looks like the Biden campaign being a little unclear on immigration. What is their position?

3:14Are they trying to shut down the border or are they trying to help people who are in the country illegally? I think what Joe Biden's team is saying is, look, if you're out of the country, we're going to try and stop you coming in. We're going to protect the border. But if you're in the country already and you've been here for a long time, you're married to an American, then we'll try and help you work and live in the country legally. I don't know how it washes with the progressives, and I don't know whether it just looks a bit muddled. What's your reading on it? Yeah, so I want to ask you a question, if you don't mind, because I know you're a great journalist.

3:44Do you think he's gotten a green light from the left, the hard left progressives? Some people in the United States call them the woke progressives, if you will, to tack to the middle. Or do you think he's doing this on his own, not worried about losing them or having them disaffect or not vote? Because he has an issue in Dearborn County. We can talk about Dearborn, Michigan in a second related to the Arab community. But I'm going to tell you why what he did is a brilliant move in my mind. But I just want to understand from your mind, do you think he's been given a green light or do you think he's doing this unilaterally?

4:19So I think Joe Biden's instincts would be to help migrants in the country, particularly people here illegally. When he was in the Obama administration, Barack Obama tried to help the parents of kids who had been born in the United States. The parents were in the country illegally. The kids were born here and therefore were American citizens. The Obama-Biden administration tried to help those people. And I think Joe Biden's instinct is to try to help people who are here. But when he shut down the border, that felt to me like a move to the center and to try and mitigate some of the anger there has been over the US border, but he got blowback from progressives in the country.

5:00Now, are those progressives going to go somewhere else? No. Most of those progressives are going to turn out and vote for him anyway. A few of them may defect to RFK Jr., the third party candidate, Kennedy, but most of the progressives are going to vote for Biden. They haven't got another home to go to. So I think in that sense, you're probably right. He has a green light, but he's still clearly with this move coming just a couple of weeks after the border move felt like appeasement. Okay, so just two comments. And this is always happened. When I sat in on these campaign strategy meetings, and you were tacking to the middle for the purposes of trying to get the independents who are ultimately going to decide the election.

5:37What we found in a lot of these campaigns is some of the people on the hard right, at least again, I was a Republican, so they defected. And I'll give you an example. In the Romney campaign, 2012, the evangelicals did not show up for Mitt Romney. Had they showed up proportionally for like they did for John McCain or for George W. Bush, I'm not saying he would have won the election because he lost by a wide margin, but it would have been a lot closer of an election. So they're always worried about not that they're going to vote for the other side, but they just don't turn out and vote. But I think the move with this exception on marriage is a brilliant one.

6:14And let me explain why. He's going to come into the fall. He's going to say you have one side that wants to deport 15 million people and they want to have a handmaid's tail armored car going door to door, house to house to pull people out. You and I, unfortunately, are old enough to remember the Elian Gonzalez situation with the Clinton administration where they had to unfortunately deport him. The child did not want to leave his aunt and uncle. They had to bring the SWAT team in to pull him out of the house. And I think Joe Biden is trying to tell people with this move, if you're here, we're going to make it work for you.

6:50I think they need to do a better job, however, on explaining what you and I talked about last week or two weeks ago about the economy. The 15 million people that are here are actually helping the economy. They're adding wages. They're adding tax revenue to the base. They're paying your Social Security taxes. they're keeping us from being upside down demographically like most of the Western nations. And so it's not a great argument to make on Fox News, the hard right conservatives, not a great move for them because they are so fearful. They're going to steal our jobs. There's lots of xenophobia in the country and lots of isolationism.

7:26But I think it's a great narrative for his campaign, Caddy, and I think it's going to work for him. Yeah, I think it's something that we could hear more of from Democrats. I think it's something that we could, as I said last week, the business community is not making that case. people who are in favor of immigration could be making more strongly the Democratic case. I want to look, you know, that coalition that the Democrats have always had, is it as solid this time around with black and brown voters as it has been in previous elections? So there are two things you have to do, right, to win an election in the United States.

7:58You've got to, as you've just said, keep your base together. Your base has to show up and vote for you. And you have to reach as many of those people in the middle, the swing voters, as you can. The assumption has been on the Democratic side that their base is solid, that they've got the progressives, that they've got black and brown voters, and so they can focus on those independent voters particularly. There are questions in this election campaign, because of some of the polling numbers, and we can get into that a little bit, about whether Democrats are losing some of those black and brown voters.

8:30And I think the Hispanic vote is particularly interesting because you've got a very different Hispanic vote. When you were running the Romney campaign back in, or working on the Romney campaign back in 2012, the Hispanic vote was a lot of people who had come into the country even then more recently. But since 2012, even in a couple of election cycles, 12 years, the nature of the Hispanic vote is changing. So here's why. Every 30 seconds in the US, a young Latino turns 18 becomes a voting age. The Latino population in America is young, and many of them are people who were born in the United States.

9:10They are third or fourth generation. It's their grandparents who came here in the 1960s. That was the huge big wave when you got people coming into the US. And these are now American born. They speak English as their primary language. They may speak Spanglish at home, right? This mixture of Spanish and English. But when you look at them in terms of issues. These are people who pollsters are saying, and people who are studying this, there's a great book on this, by the way, a guy called Mike Madrid called The Latino Century, and he lays out this argument. You look at these young Hispanics, they are socially liberal on things like abortion.

9:46They're socially liberal on gun rights, for example, gun control. But when it comes to the border, they want the border shutdown. They actually sound more like white Americans than they do like their Hispanic grandparents and great-grandparents. So if you're trying to reach that group of Hispanics, your message has to be, I think, a little bit what the Biden campaign was doing. It's not necessarily true that when the Biden campaign shuts the border like they tried to the other day by limiting asylum opportunities for people coming into the border, that may play well with this young group of Hispanic voters.

10:21It's interesting to me how the Hispanic population, I know that we've always seen it as a monolith that Cubans are the same as Venezuelans are the same as Mexicans, and clearly they're not. They have very different priorities. But you now have a kind of generational thing amongst Hispanic voters, which people who study this are looking at more closely. I want to add a paragraph to what you're saying. I think it's a brilliant analysis, but I want to take it one step further into the African American community or the Black community. The Black community is not omnibus either. You have immigrant Blacks that are coming in from Africa or from the islands.

10:54You have fully assimilated Blacks. You have several generation blacks who unfortunately whose great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents were slaves. And you have a very interesting collection that you can no longer call omnibus. But what you can talk about in our society is the sociology of assimilation. And I'll just tell a personal story. My grandfather on my mother's side, actually born in the United States, they have to go back to Italy because somebody is sick. So he's an American citizen born in the United States. He goes back to Italy for 10 years. He returns to the United States at the age of 10.

11:32And him and my great grandfather, they find the United States to be nativistic towards them. Meaning, you know, at that time it was Italians go back to the country that you came from. At that time, there were signs in the storefronts that said Nina, which meant no Italians need to apply for the job. And so, you know, they ended up doing construction or the day worker jobs and things like that to create money and they weren't fully assimilated. In the mid 1900, the 1905 period, Teddy Roosevelt signed legislation that for immigration purposes, Italian Americans or Italians were to come into the country as non-Caucasian.

12:13So when they were filling out quotas. Okay. So that means non-white, obviously. And so this bothered the Italian American community and especially my grandfather. He didn't like it. He felt he was European. This was at a time where, hey, white and black and all of this racial segregation was in the country. And so it's four generations later for the Italian Americans, they see themselves as white, caddy, and very large blocks of the Italian American community voting for Donald Trump. You know, I'm not saying all of them, but I'm just trying to explain the genealogy and the sociology of American assimilation.

12:48You go one, two, three generations, you think you're American. Which is what we're seeing happen, right? We're seeing this happen with these young Hispanic kids. I had dinner here in Greece last night. One of my friends is with me. He's a Greek American. I said, you know, the Greeks are much more tied to this country than the Italian Americans, the Greek Americans. I said, why is that? He says, I'm a first generation kid. My father was born here in Greece. Was your father born in the United States or was he born in Italy? My father was born in the United States. So was my mom. And so we've lost some of the connectivity to the old world.

13:26And this is happening in the Latin community. And this is very, very important to explain to people why America is different from Europe, why America is different from Asia. You come here to America based on an idea. And you're expecting your family to fully assimilate. And when you do, guess what you look like? You look like the average American voter. And I think the Biden campaign strategy now is, you know what? We got to make this seismic change. We got to start adjusting to how these people see themselves as opposed to the way we see. Yeah. I think it's increasingly with these younger, particularly with these younger Hispanic voters, it's about class, not race.

14:09It's about where do I identify socially? Where do I identify economically? I mean, that figure, you know this. I remember the postmortem that you guys did after Romney lost the election in 2012. And the argument was, we must expand the Republican Party. And that figure I just gave you, every 30 seconds, a Hispanic voter turns 18 and becomes a voter. if those Hispanics were all going to vote Democratic, which is what the Democratic Party used to think, that would be terrifying for Republicans. I mean, that is the end of the Republican majority ever. But then it turns out that actually those young Hispanic voters are more like young white voters.

14:52Some of them are voting Democratic and some of them are voting Republican. Actually, what we're starting to see is that a lot of them are pretty populist. So this was interesting. I went through some of the numbers. Many of the precincts that Trump won, the kind of little micro areas that Donald Trump won in 2016, in the primary campaigns, Bernie Sanders had won them. So these are Hispanic voters who are voting for Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right. But what they're voting for is anti-establishment. We don't like either party. We think the parties are corrupt. We think the system is rigged against us.

15:34And they vote for these populist figures, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump. And I don't know that those young people are necessarily going to look at Joe Biden. And I know historically, Hispanics, even when they've polled as drifting away from the Democratic Party, they've come back in the election to vote for the Democrats. I think this is a new group of voters. It's not voters who used to vote one way and now voting another way. This is a new group of voters who are looking and saying, I don't really like either of these parties. I agree with you. And I think it's going to require a change by both parties eventually.

16:09So this is probably going to get me in trouble. At some point, I'm going to say something. And I'm sure our producers are going to - You like getting in trouble. Yeah. This is what you like. Yeah, I'm sure somebody's going to cut what I'm saying. Yeah, it is my happy place. But I think it's the last gasp of whitedom. So, you know, I like making up words like George W. Bush, you know, like, don't misunderstand me. This is the last gasp of white dumb for the Republican Party. So the Republicans would have been wiser to have adopted some of those things that we discussed in 2012 and made the party look like the beautiful mosaic of the American people.

16:45Less nativist. Less nativist. But this is it. They're going hard. And now they're saying to themselves, OK, if we can get this, if we can win it, we're going to really white-ify the government. Here's our Project 2025. We're going to white-ify the government with our white-dom. And if they don't get it, which I predict that they won't, and we'll discuss why, even though the polls are very close. But if they do get it, I do think it spells trouble for the American democracy. If they don't get it, they're going to have to retrench and they're going to have to recreate that party. They won't be able to be successful in 2028 with this strategy.

17:17But this is why the dream, and you're the predictor, not me, but let's go for it. the dream of the Republican Party would be to have a black or brown Hispanic president, right? So this is the argument for Donald Trump nominating a vice president who is Marco Rubio, Tim Scott. And if they could be the party that has a black or brown vice president, then they feel they can shore up that group. But there's some very interesting polling on black voters, suggesting that black voters who are interested in Donald Trump are less likely to vote for him if he nominates a black vice presidential candidate, which I found super fascinating, but that is not what's going to sway them.

18:04I think the idea of tokenism is not what people are interested when they're these young voters. Let me spell more trouble for you. So, if Barack Obama had a white wife, he would have got elected president of the United States? Well, we've talked about this before, actually. No, I think that's a problem for him. So at some point, I hope this is like a sports podcast where you and I are going through the players and we do like, you know, I go through the vice presidential selections. But there's no way. This guy's going with a white guy. Let me tell you something. He's such a narcissist. He can't pick Tim Scott and then have somebody say to him, well, Tim Scott helped you with the black vote.

18:39And so that's why you won the presidency. No, no, no. You have to understand something. I won the presidency because of me, Donald J. Trump. I didn't win the presidency because of who I picked. I'm going to pick this nondescript backseater. Okay. I'm looking for Mike Pence 2.0. And so we have to go over that at some point. But that's what I honestly think. He may think that Marco Rubio helps him with Hispanic voters. Marco Rubio, of course, is Cuban American. That is very different from being Mexican American. The two have very little in common at this point. So I don't know that it would even help him with the Hispanic vote.

19:14Marco Rubio called Donald. Look, this is Donald Trump's hands, okay? I mean, Donald Trump has microscopic hands. It's weird. When you look at his body and you look at these little tiny hands coming out of those cufflinked shirts, you're like, okay, this is a little weird. The guy's sensitive about it. Marco called it out on the campaign. There is no way he's picking Marco Rubio. There's no way, because he doesn't want that replay on all the liberal media. Which it would be nonstop. Of course, of course. On all of the media. Yeah, he's not going to go with that. We're going to take a break and then come back and talk about debate prep.

19:47I realize we have not really spoken very much about the black vote, which is super interesting. And the polling on black voters is complicated at the moment. Some polling suggests that black men are drifting away from Donald Trump. The Pew Research Foundation, which is the polling I always look to, it really is nonpartisan. It's very thorough. They take much bigger sample sizes, suggests that actually the Democrats still have a huge amount of black support and there hasn't been very much drift in black support. So I know that the Biden campaign is hoping that both Hispanic voters and black voters will come home to the Democratic Party in November.

20:26And they are looking at black men who have a history of being a little bit more Republican. 25 % of black men voted for Richard Nixon. So there has always been a bit more of a Republican streak amongst black men than black women. I think Donald Trump only got 4 % of the black female vote in 2020. So black women are very firmly in the Democratic camp. But they are also pretty confident that the black vote will come home. There's lots to talk about here and we'll do a deeper dive on black voters at some other time. And let's take a quick break and we'll come back and talk about debate prep.

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22:35Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US with me, Cati Kay. And I'm Anthony Scaramucci. And Anthony, in this half, we wanted to talk about debate prep because this is debate prep week, right? We are a week out from the first presidential debate. And this is the time when both candidates, in theory, are holed up doing practice sessions, going through their talking points. Joe Biden is in Camp David. He's come off a busy period. He was at the G7 meetings in Italy. He went to a fundraiser in California. And then his team tell me now it is rest and prep, rest and prep, rinse and repeat. And that is what they're going to be doing until the debate.

23:13Now, historically, debates haven't mattered terribly much. You get somebody who wins, but the data suggests that when it comes to the actual election, they haven't made a huge amount of difference. But my understanding from the Biden campaign is they do think this is a very big moment. that for the American public to see the two candidates up on stage together, this is a choice election. Do you want Joe Biden or do you want Donald Trump? And that's why they were pushing to have this in June. And they think this is the moment that those people who have not really woken up to the election, not woken up to the fact that this is a choice between these two guys are going to wake up to this.

23:47And I spoke to both the Biden and the Trump campaign this week ahead of recording this, and they both sound pretty confident about it. That's what they're telling the press that they think this is a good moment for their guy. What do you think Donald Trump is going through this week? So just a couple of things. The debate is going to be televised on CNN on June 27th. It's 9 p.m. Eastern time on the East Coast of the United States. So we're going to be going live on YouTube immediately after the debate with our feedback and our sort of analysis. Of course, if you're in bed by then, it'll be on our regular podcast feed when you wake up on Friday morning.