TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — In the wake of an election that yielded broad Republican gains up and down Florida's 2020 ballot, progressive organizers are retooling their approach to winning over the state's diverse and increasingly influential Hispanic electorate.

What You Need To Know

  • Progressives look to make gains among Hispanic voters in 2022

  • In 2020. GOP found success tying Democrats to a slide toward socialism, organizers say

  • The strategy also held down voting by Hispanics friendly to Democrats

  • Democrats must engage Hispanics now to be successful, Alianza says

Former President Donald Trump's resounding 3.4-percentage point victory in Florida owed in large part to his campaign's microtargeting of Venezuelan-Americans and Cuban-Americans, Hispanic communities that appeared to be moved by the Trump campaign's warning that a vote for the Democratic Party could usher in a slide toward socialism.

Speaking during a virtual presentation this month, Samuel Vilchez Santiago, a political data analyst with the progressive Florida organizing group Alianza for Progress, said the GOP's tailored messaging proved highly successful in 2020.

"As a Venezuelan-American, I got calls from family members in Venezuela, telling me that I needed to vote against Joe Biden because he's a socialist, a communist, et cetera, et cetera," Santiago said. "So, they were, in a way, on the right, they were able to mobilize different tools that we didn't even know."

The Trump strategy also served to suppress turnout by an outsized number of Hispanic voters traditionally aligned with Democrats, organizers said. The Biden campaign, they suggested, failed to deliver a compelling Hispanic voter outreach message in Florida.

"We cannot talk to, you know, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Venezuelans, Cubans in the same way, and we see a lot of campaigns do this," Alianza Political Director Ruben Lebron said. "We need to level with them and talk about the kitchen-table issues that they care about."

A new analysis of the 2020 election results by the Alianza shows that Biden won record numbers of votes from Puerto Ricans in six of the seven counties along the I-4 corridor, where Hispanics make up a large percentage of the electorate.

Mobilizing more of those voters, Alianza leaders said, could significantly improve Democrats's prospects of capturing the governor's mansion in 2022, but the effort must begin now.

"We cannot, we must not, try to engage folks, especially people of color, a month or two before an election," Lebron said. "We need to make sure that their voices matter, we need to engage them early on."