For most American voters, the sight of a man dressed in red carrying the American flag and screaming in Spanish through the parking lot of a polling place in Hialeah — "Viva Trump" and "Down with socialism" — is easy to dismiss.
Florida wacko taunting voters, you say.
Loco!
But to Hispanic voters in Miami-Dade, particularly Cuban and Latin Americans who fled dictatorships, he's echoing a deep-rooted fear that Democrats lean socialist/communist that's been planted and pounded by the state's GOP.
A shrewd Donald Trump capitalized on that fear, promising and, as president, delivering hard-line policy toward Cuba and Venezuela.
In battleground Florida, the Cold War rages on.
Dismiss that fact at your peril. Democrats should have learned the lesson after Florida's midterm elections in 2018. That's when Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott squeezed out wins using the same socialism-as-boogieman strategy.
The results of this presidential election in Florida prove that the socialism disinformation campaign is a winner.
Joe Biden's campaign underestimated the damage it would do to ignore the issue.
It's a vile lie to say that Democrats embrace socialism and communism and to portray Trump as the savior he's not.
In fact, it is Trump who has proven to be a threat to our democracy and Constitution.
COSTLY CAMPAIGN MISTAKE
But Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, needed to make that case with conviction in Miami and back up the talk with policy proposals for the Americas.
They didn't.
Centrist Biden stuck to general election talking points in the cradle of faithful exiled voters, and although he won Democratic-leaning Miami-Dade, it was by too low a margin to offset conservative Florida.
Like Democrats outside Miami who dismiss the socialism issue as ridiculous, Biden did little to quash it as it loomed even larger when Republicans, for example, cast Black Lives Matter as Marxist-inspired.
He didn't take the socialism rap seriously — and lost a state where most roads to statewide office run through Miami-Dade, the most populous county.
It was a costly mistake, an epic fail.
Biden's lackluster performance dragged down with him Democratic state lawmakers and two Democratic congressional incumbents, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala.
They lost to candidates with name recognition, termed-out Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez and former television journalist Maria Elvira Salazar, who threw their full support behind a seemingly unpopular Trump.
They, too, played the socialist card in disturbing ads and were endorsed by the president, who was an ever-present campaigner in Florida.
The gamble paid off for them.
BIDEN DIDN'T DO MIAMI RIGHT
Local Democratic operatives worked hard, but the Biden campaign didn't do right by Miami.
"There is no substitute for maintaining a constant presence in a key state and building strong relationships with decisive communities," Carlos Curbelo, a former one-term Republican congressman who lost his seat to Mucarsel-Powell and left the party over its unequivocal support for Trump, tweeted Wednesday.
The Biden campaign, he said, outsourced Florida to Michael Bloomberg, and it didn't work.
"Poor ROI," he said. Poor return on investment.
He's right.
The Republican ground game in Miami-Dade County has been a year-round performance for years, starring the entire cast of state GOP leaders.
They don't assume, as Democrats often do, that the Latino vote is a shoo-in. They make community connections and high-level Hispanic appointments.
The nation's Latinos may lean Democratic and be predominantly Mexican, but Florida's Latinos are diverse in myriad ways. They're bound, however, by deep attachment to homelands left behind, both by way of geography and affection.
Foreign policy matters.
MIAMI-DADE NOT BLUE ENOUGH
Miami-Dade Democrats did push hard against the GOP socialist label — and were rightfully angry at pundits who, after Biden lost Florida, quickly blamed Cuban Americans, forgoing other factors such as the Trump campaign targeting Black communities to keep them from voting.
"From my Twitter feed you would think that every single voter in Florida is Cuban. How about you hold your own damn people accountable and we'll do the same for ours? Also ask the party why their field game was non-existent and how the GOP disenfranchised 775k ex felons," tweeted Carmen Pelaez, a volunteer with Cubanos for Biden.
"How about you look at Dem counties with low turnout," she added. "Or you could just crap all over the work I and other Cuban Dems did in a cutthroat atmosphere with no real support. That's easier."
It's true that voter disenfranchisement by the GOP also played a role in Trump's win.
Not only of the felons.
The disinformation campaign in general was brutal, particularly in some Spanish-language media and blogs, where QAnon conspiracy theory is treated as fact.
TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE
Biden could have, should have earned a bigger share of the Hispanic vote in Florida, especially this year when Democrats in once ruby-red cities like Jacksonville, which favored Biden by 51%, made gains.
But by the time Biden and Harris made it to Miami, by the time Bloomberg financed powerful ads in Spanish by a Bay of Pigs veteran and a prominent writer denouncing the socialism and communism label and backing Biden, the GOP had their votes in the bag.
Biden certainly didn't take my advice back in September that he not only come on down, but look Cuban Americans in the eye.
When he made it here, he didn't convincingly speak our language, and I don't mean Spanish.
He needed to present solutions to the strife in Cuba and Venezuela. He needed to talk economy, not with his national script in mind but in immigrant Miami-speak, where the dream is business, homeownership and entrepreneurship.
He and Harris both needed to show more flash, more pizzazz, more connection to place.
He needed not only to say it, but be the uniter in chief in broken Florida.
He may still get the chance.
As of this writing, Biden continued to sustain his lead over President Trump, but only by a handful of Electoral College votes.
An anxious, divided nation waits, because, for Biden, the road to the White House didn't run through Florida.
It stalled in Miami-Dade.
