LAS VEGAS — LAS VEGAS (AP) — President Joe Biden is trying to rally support among disaffected voters, which is crucial to his re-election chances. On Wednesday, he will meet with members of a Latino civil rights organization in the uncertain state of Nevada.
Biden will deliver a speech at the UnidosUS annual conference in Las Vegas, where he will announce that starting August 19, spouses of certain U.S. citizens According to the White House, people without legal status will be able to apply for permanent residency and eventually citizenship without first leaving the country. The new program, The measure, first announced by Biden last month, could affect more than half a million immigrants.
Biden is also expected to use the speech to highlight that the unemployment rate among Latinos is near historic lows, that more people in the community have been able to get health insurance and that the federal government has doubled the number of Small Business Administration loans to Latino business owners since 2020.
The visit to Latin American activists comes as Republicans hold their national convention in Milwaukee and as Biden struggles to revive a re-election campaign that has stalled since his poor June 27 debate performance against the Republican nominee 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 strong support from Black and Hispanic voters — two groups that were key parts of his winning coalition in 2020 but whose support is showing signs of eroding — to help him win another four years in the White House.
Biden, in an interview with BET News stressed on Tuesday that he still has plenty of time to motivate voters.
“Whether it’s young blacks, young whites, young Latinos, young Asian Americans, they’ve never focused until after Labor Day,” Biden said in the interview. “The idea that they’re now intensely focused on the election is not there.”
But the headwind for Biden had already been building his flop on the debate stage led to a wave of Democratic lawmakers and donors calling on him to quit the campaign.
Hispanic Americans now have a less positive view of Biden than when he took office. Forty-five percent of Hispanic adults have a somewhat or very positive opinion of Biden, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in June, down from about 6 in 10 in January 2021. In the June poll, half of Hispanic adults had an unfavorable opinion of Biden.
Biden gave a speech in Las Vegas on Tuesday to the annual NAACP convention in which he argued that Trump’s four years in the White House had been “hell” for Black Americans. He slammed Trump for his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, the skyrocketing unemployment rate early in the pandemic and his divisive rhetoric that he said needlessly attacked Americans.
He also mocked Trump for saying that migrants who entered the US under the Democratic administration are stealing “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 cited his nomination of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and his service as vice president under Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president.
The UnidosUS conference offers Biden another opportunity to contrast his approach to immigration with Trump’s. The Republican approach to immigration has included a push for mass deportations and rhetoric that paints migrants as dangerous criminals who are “poisoning America’s blood.”
That new plan from the Biden administration was announced weeks later Biden announced a comprehensive approach at the U.S.-Mexico border that effectively halted asylum claims for those arriving between officially designated ports of entry. Immigrant rights groups have sued the Biden administration on that directive, which officials say has led to fewer border disputes between ports.
Biden is also expected to sign an executive order creating a White House initiative to expand opportunities at so-called Hispanic-Serving Institutions, a group of about 500 two-year and four-year colleges across the country with large populations of Hispanic students.
___
Amelia Thomson DeVeaux, an Associated Press reporter in Washington, contributed to this report.
