Hillary Clinton is a very happy candidate today as she wakes up to a sweeping victory in all five states that held primaries last night. Florida was the prize of the night, being the most diverse and the biggest delegate count. Clinton won the sunshine state with over 65% of the vote and Latinos played a massive part in her landslide victory.
Florida’s large Latino community showed Clinton’s strength with the critical voting bloc as she carried seven out of ten Latino voters in Florida compare that to Bernie Sanders three out ten. She performed amazingly well across the diverse Latino community in Florida receiving 72 percent of non-Cuban Latino population such as Puerto Ricans and South Americans. Most importantly she received 74 percent of the Latinas support which will be essential in taking the state in November.
Florida was always going to be difficult for Sanders, with an older population and demographics. While he had great support in Nevada in which younger Latino make up 50 percent of the eligible voters at 18 to 35 years old, that figure was only 35 percent in Florida.
“They are older Cubans and older Puerto Ricans,” said Pew Hispanic’s Mark Hugo Lopez. Adding, “They’re not recent immigrant communities.”
Now that the nomination seems all but certain Clinton is turning her attention to Trump. She dedicated a fair amount of time in her victory speech to him saying that deporting 12 million people and banning Muslims from the U.S. which he has proposed is not “strong” but “wrong.”
At the famed Versailles in Little Havana, the self-proclaimed “world’s most famous Cuban restaurant,” Trump was on the mind of Clinton voters, too.
Luisa Benjabib, an American citizen from Peru who was once undocumented, stood away from the crowd enjoying strong Cuban cafecitos and pastelitos de guayaba y queso. As she was wearing an “I Voted” sticker was hesitated to say who she had voted for, but in a low whisper she said, “Hillary.” Adding, “Trump will take away my citizenship and send me back to Peru,” she joked in Spanish, even though she is a citizen. Throughout its history, the United States has been a “country not just for white people but also for immigrants,” she said.
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