MIAMI (AP) — Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said Tuesday she will work to provide more resources to community banks to facilitate Latino men secure petite business loans during Republican Donald Trump’s economic roundtable Trump, who targeted Latino voters, degenerated into a tirade of insults against his opponents.
Harris said in an interview with Telemundo: “We need to build a strong economy that supports the working class.”
“I know that Hispanic men often have more difficulty securing loans from banks because they have contacts and things aren’t necessarily set up for them to qualify,” she said in an interview in English that was translated into Spanish became. “That’s why I’m focused on figuring out what we can do to provide more capital to community banks that understand the community better so we can make these types of loans to them.”
Responding to Trump’s claims that she is a socialist, she said: “I am a capitalist. I’m a pragmatic capitalist.”
Trump, meanwhile, described Harris as “lazy,” railed against green energy and spoke of “extreme” presidential power during remarks at his golf club in the Miami suburb of Doral.
He stressed that President Joe Biden does not need congressional approval to curb illegal immigration, saying: “As president, you have enormous – they call it extreme power. “You have extreme power.
Trump continued to label Harris as having a “low IQ” and invoked a racist slur, calling her “lazy as hell” for not holding public events on Tuesday. She was scheduled for meetings in Washington and, after more than two consecutive weeks of campaigning, for television interviews with Telemundo and NBC.
“Who the hell is taking off when you still have 14 days left?” he asked.
The Trump and Harris campaigns see an electoral opportunity among Latino men who could influence the outcome in states like Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada as their conventional support for Democrats wanes. Trump believes he has made inroads with Latino men. Harris’ team is trying to shore up support within the same group with the election just two weeks away.
The effort raises questions about whether memories of a Trump presidency or the promise of up-to-date policies under Harris will do more to motivate Latino voters.
“We’re very confident that these policies will resonate because we’ve seen them resonate in speeches and focus groups,” said Matt Barreto, a pollster at Harris. “It particularly speaks to Latino men about being successful and achieving the American dream.”
In 2020, AP VoteCast found that 9% of voters nationwide identified as Latino and 63% of them supported Biden in the election. This race was largely defined by the pandemic that shut down much of the country, while this year’s race highlights issues like the economy, immigration, abortion rights and democracy.
Harris said she will work to double the number of registered apprenticeships. She stresses that she would eliminate college degree requirements for certain federal government jobs and encourage private employers to do the same. Harris also wants to provide forgivable loans worth up to $20,000 each to 1 million petite businesses.
During Trump’s event, he sat after his opening remarks as elected officials and business leaders who are Latino praised the economy during his time in office, particularly thanking him for the tax cuts he signed into law in 2017.
He later claimed that he had recently seen a solar field “that looked like it took up half the desert.”
“It’s all steel and glass and wires. And it looks like hell,” he says. “You see rabbits, they get caught in it.” Trump often rails against wind power, claiming the turbines will “kill all the birds” and confuse the whales.
At the end of the event, Latino faith leaders prayed for Trump, his head bowed while some placed their hands on his shoulders. Guillermo Maldonado, senior pastor of King Jesus International Ministry, said during the prayer that “there is a higher purpose for him to deal with this nation.”
During a rally later in North Carolina, Trump, who has laid the groundwork for challenging the election results if he loses, reiterated his concerns about Harris not holding public events on Tuesday. He expressed this cryptic view: “I think she knows an outcome that we don’t.”
Looking forward to a rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, he said, “We want to end it with a nice bang,” and noted that more campaigns would follow.
Both campaigns struggled to gain an edge among the increasingly diverse electorate in the final weeks of the campaign. Harris has also focused on black men, to whom she also proposed the forgivable petite business loans. She appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast to appeal to younger women, while Trump appeared on podcasts aimed at younger men.
In a tight race, the Harris campaign is betting that Latino men will become more sensitive to political specifics as the election approaches.
Based on focus groups, Barreto said the Harris campaign found that Latino men in particular wanted access to apprenticeships that could give people without college degrees access to financially stable careers.
The latest numbers from the Labor Department show there are 641,044 registered apprenticeships, an raise from the Trump administration, when the number of apprenticeships peaked at 569,311 in 2020. Doubling that number, as Harris has suggested, would bring the total number of apprenticeships over four years to around 1.2 million.
Latino men also expressed the need for access to capital and credit to start businesses, as the Treasury Department reported Oct. 10 that Latino business ownership increased 40% from pre-pandemic levels and continues to rise with better financing options could.
Harris’ candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will appear on Univision’s syndicated radio show “El Bueno, La Mala, y El Feo” this week, while Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff will be interviewed by Univision this week on national broadcast Afternoon radio show “El Free-Guey Show.” Emhoff will also be interviewed by Alex “El Genio” Lucas on Nueva Network Radio.
Trump hopes to convince Latinos that they can trust a business colleague like him even as he calls for the mass deportation of immigrants in the country illegally.
“Hispanic people – they say you can’t generalize, but I think you can – they have a wonderful entrepreneurial spirit and they have – oh, do you have that kind of energy? Just relax a little, okay? “Calm down,” Trump said at an Oct. 12 event. “You have great ambition, you have great energy, you are very smart and you like real entrepreneurs.”
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Boak reported from Washington. Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Associated Press writers Adriana Gomez Licon and Stephany Matat in Miami and Kevin Freking and Alana Durkin Richer in Washington also contributed to this report.
