HIALEAH, Fla.–At his rally here, former President Donald Trump attracted one of his biggest–and most unusual–crowds of the 2024 campaign season.
Between 10,000 and 11,000 people came to Ted Hendricks Stadium, which usually holds football and soccer fans, police Maj. Fernando Villa told The Epoch Times. That’s President Trump’s biggest audience since July 1, when 50,000 people flocked to tiny Pickens, South Carolina.
But unlike Pickens and many of his other rally venues, Hialeah is home to very few white, non-Hispanic people. Nearly 96 percent of this Florida city’s 220,000 residents are Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
And the turnout at President Trump’s Nov. 8 rally in Hialeah did seem to be largely Hispanic. It also reflected the city’s status as an oasis of Republican red in Miami-Dade County’s ocean of Democrat blue.
But Hialeah could be getting more company. Polls show rising percentages of minorities, including Hispanics, shifting toward the former president. Last week, The New York Times/Siena College poll reported 43 percent support for President Trump among Hispanics in six battleground states–14 percentage points higher than in 2016.
Rally attendee Elmer Melendez, 41, of Hialeah, told The Epoch Times that some fellow Hispanics keep their allegiance to President Trump secret because they want to avoid “conflict.” However, he said that he proudly wears a hat with the acronym “MAGA”—short for President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan—everywhere he goes.
“We see in Cuba how the communist regime says you can’t speak,” Mr. Melendez, whose father emigrated from that communist island nation off the Florida coast. “But, no, I’m going to express my freedom of speech here in America, whatever it is.”
As a married father of two children, he said that he likes President Trump’s policies on the economy, immigration, and “the protection of our people; our people do come first,” he said.
Comparisons to Cuba
About four minutes into his wide-ranging, 80-minute speech, President Trump acknowledged the large contingent of Cuban Americans in the crowd and claimed, “Crooked Joe Biden and the radical left Democrats are turning the United States into communist Cuba.”The former president accuses President Biden of employing some of the same tactics that dictators use to squelch opposition. President Trump has never conceded the 2020 election and calls it “rigged.”
“Just like the Cuban regime, the Biden regime is trying to put their political opponents in jail, shutting down free speech, taking bribes and kickbacks to enrich themselves and their very spoiled children,” said President Trump, who protests that the 91 criminal charges against him were manufactured as “election interference.”
President Biden, who has denied influencing the prosecutions of President Trump, faces an impeachment inquiry over millions of dollars that flowed from foreigners into his family’s bank accounts.
Also, although President Biden is Catholic, President Trump accused the Biden administration of “targeting Christians and Catholics,” a statement of particular interest to his Hialeah audience. Many Hispanics are Catholic.
Promises and Gratitude
Esteban Bovo, the city’s mayor, joined President Trump onstage at the rally and told him, “You always kept your promises to this great nation.” And that’s why a street in Hialeah should be named in his honor, Mr. Bovo said.The mayor, who posed with President Trump holding a street sign reading “President Donald J. Trump Avenue,” said he intended to ask the city council to approve renaming Palm Avenue. The next meeting is set for Nov. 14.
That would be a first for Hialeah, where no street is named after a U.S. president, the Miami Herald reported.
Mr. Bovo estimates that 75 percent of his fellow Cuban Americans support President Trump. In a post-rally interview with The Epoch Times and other reporters, he explained why many Hispanics favor the former president.
In 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump promised that, if he were elected, he would reverse President Barack Obama’s policies normalizing relations with Cuba, which is still under a dictatorship. After winning the election, President Trump did something “that you rarely see in politics,” Mr. Bovo said: He did what he promised to do.
“We appreciated that, and we haven’t forgotten,” he said. “And then, in this community, we’ve witnessed communism and socialism, and what it does, and having him stand up against that, in a forceful kind of way, speaks to my community. ... We want him back in the White House.”
Mr. Bovo said that he loves Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running a distant second to President Trump. But he also cited a cultural value that may help explain why more Hispanics favor the former president over Mr. DeSantis.
Hispanics, especially Cuban Americans, value the principle of “agradecimiento,” Spanish for “gratitude,” he said.
“That means that you need to be grateful for those [who] support you,” Mr. Bovo said. “And Donald Trump not only supported me, but he also supported Ron DeSantis to be governor. He wouldn’t have been governor without that support.”
Debates Inconsequential?
While President Trump was in Hialeah courting Hispanic voters, Mr. DeSantis and four other Republicans participated in a debate 11 miles away in Miami. By all accounts, interest in that debate was low; viewership of the three GOP debates has slipped continuously.The former president held alternative events instead of participating alongside his lower-ranked challengers. A fourth debate is set for Dec. 6 in Alabama.
It’s a safe bet that President Trump will skip that one, too. He has been calling for the Republican National Committee to discontinue the debates. Leading the field by about 50 points in most polls, President Trump said that Republicans’ money, time, and effort would be better spent on efforts to win the 2024 election.
Asked to comment on the Miami debate, Kari Lake, a U.S. Senate candidate from Arizona who attended the Hialeah rally, took a dig at the lower-ranking Republican candidates for bickering over topics such as whether it’s wise to use TikTok. That made the Miami debate the equivalent of “the children’s table” at a Thanksgiving meal, Ms. Lake told reporters, while the Hialeah rally represented “the adults’ table.”
“And I’m encouraged and confident that President Trump can do it. We already know he’s done the job before. And I’m really excited to have somebody who’s already done the job, get back on the job and get it done.”
However, this election cycle presents unprecedented complications for both of the major parties’ candidates.
Trending Upward
While President Trump battles to fend off criminal and civil court cases, President Biden faces influence-peddling investigations and age-related concerns in the wake of embarrassing public gaffes. He turns 81 later this month. And both are confronting an independent challenger, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Regardless, President Trump’s fans remain optimistic about his chances to win the Republican nomination and regain the presidency next year.
Support for him and other Republicans has been growing since his first presidential run, as Florida figures show.
In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton trounced then-candidate Donald Trump by 29 percentage points in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, which includes Hialeah. But he still won Florida–and the presidency.
By 2020, the picture had changed significantly. President Trump drew up to 73 percent of the votes in and around Hialeah. In other parts of Miami-Dade County, as little as 6 percent of the votes went to President Trump. That caused him to lose Miami-Dade. Even so, the county had shifted 22 percentage points into his column, helping him to win the state by a wider margin than in 2016.
For 2024, new waves of support from Hispanics and other minorities could play a key role.
President Trump touted polls showing him beating all of his Republican challengers and President Biden, too. “These great numbers are led by surging support from Hispanic Americans, African Americans, and young people,” he said.
Thunderous Reaction
However, the biggest crowd reaction of the night came after he vowed to “terminate every open-borders policy of the Biden administration” and begin the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. People roared, clapped, and stomped their feet on the metal bleachers to show their approval.Later, Mr. Bovo provided this context for that response: People in places such as Hialeah feel the impact of illegal immigration–and resent it.
“This is an immigrant city. But it’s based on legal immigration,” Mr. Bovo said. “I support immigration, but you got to do it right.”
He said open-border policies create security problems, as unvetted enemies of the United States can enter and cause harm. The situation also “creates an economic nightmare for cities like mine,” Mr. Bovo said. “And so if New York can’t handle it, how do you expect a city like ours to handle it?”
As illegal immigrants add to the demand for places to live, the cost of renting a house or apartment goes up “an insane amount,” he told reporters.
“I’ve got folks that have been living in apartments for a long, long time, paying $1,000 a month,” Mr. Bovo said. “All of a sudden, that gets spiked to about $2,000 a month.
“Any one of us that gets that kind of increase in our mortgage could literally put us out of our homes.”
People in his community know that, under U.S. capitalism, legal immigrants “have the full backing of this country,” which allows them to “create and achieve anything,” Mr. Bovo said.
In contrast, he said, “When you’re illegally in this country, you are ‘behind the eight ball’ for the rest of your life.”
The Arizona Angle
Ms. Lake, who lives in Arizona, another state with a large Hispanic population, shared her insights about President Trump’s appeal to that group–and others.“Some of the hardest-working people I know, the most loyal, loving people I know are in the Hispanic community; my husband and my children are Latino,” Ms. Lake told The Epoch Times after the rally.
Hispanics and others are contrasting their lives now with what they remember happening during President Trump’s 2017–2021 tenure. “I think they’re realizing that their lives were so much better; their families were safer, just like any other family,” she said.
Serious “survival-type” issues are worrying them, Ms. Lake said. They’re wondering: “Can I afford to feed my family? Can I afford the rent?”
Watching rally-goers as they exited, she said: “Many of the people here left a communist socialist nation, and they’re realizing that what they’re seeing happening looks a lot like that country that they left. And so I think they’re really concerned about that.
“But they’re also realizing, ‘Wow, maybe we are indeed conservative.’ Maybe they thought they were Democrat, but they’re realizing, ‘OK, the conservatives, the Republicans and President Trump, care about a strong economy. They care about gas prices that people can afford, and have strong energy policies, a strong border.’
“A lot of messages in the Make America Great movement actually appeal to the Hispanic population, the black population, the Asian population, frankly, just the American population.”
