Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

Latino voters could make a big difference in battleground states such as Florida, Arizona and even North Carolina today. In general, Latinos are more likely to be supporting Biden than Trump: According to a new NALEO/Latino Decisions poll of Latino registered voters, 69 percent of respondents were supporting Biden, while 26 percent were supporting Trump. (The rest were voting for someone else or undecided.) Another recently released NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll showed Biden with 62 percent support among Latino voters, and Trump with 29 percent support.

But the Latino vote is not a monolith, as Nathaniel Rakich and I wrote in September. Latino voters in Florida are likely to vote quite differently than Latino voters in Arizona or Texas; Hispanic men are likelier to support Trump than Hispanic women; evangelical Latinos are more of a swing group than Hispanic Catholics, who are a strongly Democratic group.

For example, aggregated results from nine weeks of NALEO/Latino Decisions polls of Latino registered voters showed that Biden’s support among Latinos is lower in Florida (57 percent) than in Texas (67 percent) or California (71 percent), and his lead in Florida was narrower in a separate Telemundo poll of the state released last week (48 percent support for Biden, 43 percent support for Trump).

These state-level divides are due, in large part, to differences between various ethnic groups. A plurality of Florida’s Latino population is Cuban, and although this traditionally Republican bloc has slowly been drifting toward the Democrats, there are signs that Trump’s confrontational stance toward Cuba is endearing him to Cuban-American voters in Florida this year. The Latino population in Arizona and Texas, meanwhile, is more heavily Mexican-American, which is a group that tends to lean toward the Democrats.

One macro-level factor to watch among Latinos, though, is enthusiasm. Biden clearly has the edge among the group as a whole, but his campaign has been criticized since the Democratic primary for its lackluster outreach to Hispanic voters. A lack of enthusiasm among Latinos for his candidacy could hurt him — especially if Trump stays relatively strong with conservative Latinos and Hispanic men. So one question this year is whether Biden can match or exceed Hillary Clinton’s support among Latinos in 2016, which in turn fell short of Barack Obama’s support among Latinos in 2012. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in late September and early October indicated that Latinos are less interested in the presidential campaign overall — we’ll soon see how much that affects Latino turnout and support for Biden.

Remember the Hatch Act, which we kept talking about during the Republican National Convention? Well, it’s likely to come up again today, because the Trump campaign has apparently set up a “war room” in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C.

That could be a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activities while on the job. Trump, as president, is exempt from the Hatch Act, but other federal employees are subject to it and presumably would be in violation if they helped with campaign activities while on the clock. The problem, of course, is that the Hatch Act is enforced by an independent agency that doesn’t have much power over political appointees, particularly ones in high places — which is how the Trump administration has been able to get away with repeatedly blurring the lines between governance and campaign activity.

A Washington, D.C., ban on gatherings larger than 50 people nixed Trump’s plans to spend election night at his hotel in that city. But Trump is planning an indoor event at the White House instead, with a guest list that is reported to run upwards of 400 people. This will be the highest-profile event at the White House since the Sept. 26 celebration of Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court. That gathering had … some unintended COVID-19-related side effects. Officials say everyone attending tonight will be tested for COVID-19, but testing is, at best, an unreliable method of preventing the gathering from turning into another White House superspreader event. The key problem: Individuals can be contagious before they test positive.