MIAMI — With less than two weeks before the presidential election, NBC News and MSNBC checked in with a group of voters in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, where 69% of its residents are Latino. The county was once considered a Democratic stronghold but, in the last midterm election, it voted for Republican candidates for governor and for the US Congress.
The voters we spoke with are a Latina Trump supporter who used to be a Democrat, a Haitian American and lifelong Democrat who wasn’t excited about President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, and a Latino Democrat who used to be a Republican.
MSNBC’s Jose Diaz-Balart first spoke with these voters in April. In the six months that followed, the race changed dramatically, with Biden dropping out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.
The conversation took place as Harris and Trump criss-crossed the country amid an evenly split presidential race, with both candidates appealing to the growing Latino electorate in appearances at separate town halls.
We wanted to know how these voters are thinking about the race now and the issues that matter to them. We had an in-depth conversation with them in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood, where they spoke their minds and had a spirited discussion about several issues. These included Donald Trump’s baseless claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets as well as the issue of abortion rights and the economy. They also discussed the urgent need to find common ground — and lower the temperature of the political rhetoric.