At a meeting at The White House in the final days of the Obama Administration, a senior adviser to the 44th president shared a remarkable observation: members of the incoming Republican administration believed that Donald Trump won Florida’s 29 electoral votes because of his 180° turn on U.S.-Cuba policy. Apparently, even President Trump believes it. Problem is: it isn’t true. Not even close.Sopo argues that Trump is being ill-advised on Florida's Cuban American politics and that the Cuban vote was "not decisive" in the election. "Not only did Trump not perform well with Cuban-American voters, his changing position on the issue did not help him one bit. And one more thing: the Cuban-American vote did not determine the winner in Florida," argues Sopo.
To argue his point, Sopo drew from election data from Miami-Dade County and several polls:
An overview of the actual election results in Westchester, Hialeah and West Miami (the neighborhoods with the highest concentration Cuban-American voters in the country) shows that Donald Trump edged Hillary Clinton by just two points (50 to 48 percent). These suburbs have historically been GOP strongholds. In fact, in 2005, Hialeah was ranked as the fourth most conservative city in the United States; yet, in La Ciudad Que Progresa (The City that Progresses), Trump and Clinton tied at 47 percent.This article appears to be based on research by Sopo and Guillermo Grenier, a sociologist from Florida International University. It is also consistent with other studies that concluded that Hillary Clinton's performance with Florida Latinos was better than Barack Obama's in 2012.
In his article, Sopo is pessimistic that the Trump White House will change its course on its apparent decision to overhaul the nation's foreign policy to Cuba. "[P]erhaps as a result of a lack of engagement by moderate Cuban-American leaders and inaccurate claims by hardline exiles, the Trump campaign shifted course," said Sopo.
