Trump’s Sloppy, Vote-Depressing Outreach Effort In Little Haiti May Actually Work
MIAMI — When Donald Trump’s motorcade left Little Haiti last month — speeding past protesters and gawkers in this historic Miami neighborhood — it seemed like just another day in his campaign’s ham-fisted minority outreach efforts.
Trump had just wrapped up a meeting at the Little Haiti Cultural Center. His campaign had billed the event as an opportunity for the Republican nominee to learn about the Haitian community’s needs. But instead of the standard collection of local business owners, community members, and activists gathered for a well-staged roundtable discussion common to these sorts of campaign events, the vast majority of Little Haiti residents didn’t even know it was happening. In fact, staff working at the center didn’t know the campaign had rented a room there until that morning.
Instead, the crowd was stacked with businessmen and political figures hostile to the Clinton administration, almost all of whom came from outside of Little Haiti. Local leaders were never informed about the event.
In the month since the meeting, Trump and his running mate Mike Pence have made Haiti a standard part of their stump speeches and the campaign has begun running ads targeted at the community. And when Trump brought up his visit in the last presidential debate and attacked Hillary Clinton’s reputation in the Haitian community, it seemed an odd turn.
On its face, trying to make inroads in the Haitian community doesn’t necessarily make sense for Trump. His anti-immigrant rhetoric has angered many in the community, and his calls to build a wall across the United States’ southern border — where increasing numbers of Haitians are crossing into the country illegally — has not won him many supporters.
But even with the sloppily put-together event, Trump’s focus on Little Haiti has made an impression among those living here. Haitian anger with the Clintons is real, and potent to the point that even the most insane rumors from the internet’s fever swamps — including accusations that the Clintons are drug runners and money launderers — are openly discussed as fact.
The estimated 370,000 Haitians make up just 2% of Florida’s population, but every vote counts in Florida.
Interviews with nearly a dozen Republican operatives, Haitian-American journalists, activists, business owners, and residents of Little Haiti show anecdotal evidence of a new strategy spearheaded by Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, according to a Republican operative: convince Haitian-Americans to stay home on Election Day.
According to Marlene Bastien, who runs the Haitian Women of Miami, Trump’s targeted comments about the Haitian community’s conflicted feelings about Clinton and her husband were a stroke of genius.
“There are issues that the Haitian community in Haiti and the diaspora have with the Clintons,” Bastien said. “And a true politician, a good politician, he’s taking advantage of that.”
It’s difficult to tell just how big of an impact the campaign’s efforts are having on the Haitian community. But the fact that anecdotal evidence suggests it’s working is particularly remarkable given the relatively small amount of effort the campaign has put into it.
A Republican strategist not working on the campaign said that in many ways, Trump is the only Republican candidate who could even attempt something like this. “A generic Republican candidate would do it. And can you imagine Mitt Romney going to Little Haiti?” the source said.
According to two Republican sources with direct knowledge of the plans, the marriage between Trump and Little Haiti is part of a bigger strategy by the Trump campaign (and reported in depth last week by Bloomberg) of convincing traditionally Democratic blocs — like young women and black voters — to sit this election out. And the Haitian community became one of the campaign’s main targets.
