LAS VEGAS (AP) — President Joe Biden is trying to secure the support of disaffected voters that is critical to his re-election chances as he meets with members of a Latino civil rights organization in the swing state of Nevada on Wednesday.
Biden is expected to speak at UnidosUS’ annual conference in Las Vegas and announce that spouses of certain undocumented U.S. citizens will be able to apply for enduring residency and eventually citizenship without leaving the country starting Aug. 19, the White House said. The novel program, which Biden first announced last month, could affect more than half a million immigrants.
Biden is also expected to employ his speech to point out that the unemployment rate among Latinos is near a record low, more people in the community have been able to obtain health insurance and the federal government has doubled the number of Small Business Administration loans to Latino entrepreneurs since 2020.
The visit to Latino activists comes as Republicans hold their convention in Milwaukee and Biden tries to get his re-election campaign on track, which has stalled since his dismal performance at the June 27 debate against Republican candidate Donald Trump. The campaign was further complicated by a failed assassination attempt on Trump by a 20-year-old gunman in Pennsylvania on Saturday.
Biden is counting on mighty support from black and Latino voters – two groups that formed a key part of his winning coalition in 2020 but whose support is showing signs of weakening – to win four more years in the White House.
In an interview with BET News on Tuesday, Biden stressed that he still has enough time to mobilize voters.
“Whether young blacks, young whites, young Hispanics or young Asian Americans, they were never focused before Labor Day,” Biden said in the interview. “The idea that they are now intensely focused on the election is nonexistent.”
But the headwinds for Biden had already been building before his flop on the debate stage led to a wave of Democratic lawmakers and donors calling for him to drop out of the campaign.
Hispanics have a less favorable opinion of Biden today than when he took office. According to an AP-NORC poll conducted in June, 45 percent of Hispanic adults have a somewhat or very favorable opinion of Biden, compared with about 6 in 10 in January 2021. In the June poll, half of Hispanic adults had an unfavorable opinion of Biden.
Biden delivered a speech at the annual NAACP convention in Las Vegas on Tuesday in which he argued that Trump’s four years in the White House had been “hell” for black Americans. He criticized Trump for his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, skyrocketing unemployment at the start of the pandemic and his divisive rhetoric that he said needlessly hurt Americans.
He also mocked Trump’s statement that migrants who came to the United States under the Democratic administration would turn their backs on “black jobs.”
“I know what a black job is. It’s the vice president of the United States,” Biden said of Vice President Kamala Harris, adding that she “could be president.”
Biden also referred to the appointment of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court and his service as vice president under Barack Obama, the country’s first black president.
The UnidosUS conference offers Biden another opportunity to differentiate his approach to immigration from Trump’s. The Republican approach to immigration includes mass deportations and rhetoric that portrays migrants as perilous criminals who “poison the blood” of America.
This novel plan from the Biden administration was announced weeks after Biden announced a sweeping crackdown on the U.S.-Mexico border that effectively halted asylum claims from people arriving between officially designated ports of entry. Immigrant rights groups have sued the Biden administration over this policy, which administration officials say has led to fewer border encounters between ports.
Biden is also expected to sign an executive order launching a White House initiative to improve opportunities at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, a group of about 500 two- and four-year colleges across the country with high Hispanic populations.
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Associated Press writer Amelia Thomson DeVeaux in Washington contributed to this report.
