(Headline USA) The co-chairman of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign admitted this weekend that he has no idea why the president is hemorrhaging support among Latino voters.
Asked about recent polls that show Biden losing significant ground to former President Donald Trump among this key demographic, co-chair Mitch Landrieu appeared exasperated.
“Well, I don’t know. I think that you got to play this thing out and see actually how it works,” the former New Orleans mayor told NBC’s Meet the Press.
“Latino voters are like everybody else,” he added. “They move around from space to space. You see this with African–American voters as well.”
In fact, recent polls also show Biden losing support among black voters, specifically black men.
Landrieu, however, tried to downplay Biden’s poor poll numbers.
“The point of the matter is, most Americans want a safe and secure country,” he said. “They want a stable president. They want somebody that is fighting for them. And at the end of the day, I think that they’re going to vote for Joe Biden.”
A recent poll from Equis, a research firm focused on Latino voters, found that Trump is quickly closing the gap with Biden among Hispanics, in large part because of immigration. In fact, 41% of Latino voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin said they had more confidence in Trump’s handling of the border compared to 38% for Biden.
When pressed on this finding, Landrieu defended Biden’s immigration record, arguing the border was already in crisis when he took office, and that it has been this way for “the past 20 or 30 years in this country.”
He also blasted congressional Republicans for rejecting a border bill that critics noted would have done very little to actually address the border crisis and may, in fact, have given more money to the Department of Homeland Security to exacerbate it.
Despite claiming to be addressing border security, the president also signed an executive order last week pushing to provide amnesty for half a million illegal immigrants by the end of the summer.
This comes a time where, according to a CBS/YouGov poll on June 19, the majority of Hispanic-Americans support deporting all illegal immigrants.
“Joe Biden on day one sent a comprehensive immigration reform proposal to Congress. They did nothing with it,” he claimed.
Landrieu was also asked about Biden’s upcoming debate against former President Donald Trump and whether the concerns about Biden’s performance were justified.
“Everything that we do is high-risk,” he said. “I mean, every campaign that you have is going to be close, so everything that you do has to work.”
He then previewed Biden’s debate strategy: “It really doesn’t matter how Donald Trump shows up,” Landrieu said. “If he comes in unhinged like he is most of the time, or he sits there and is quiet, people are going to know that he’s a twice impeached felon.”
In 2021, Landrieu was more generous in eulogizing another convicted felon, former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, a Democrat who served four terms despite having his political career interrupted by an eight-year prison sentence for racketeering.
Democrats famously leaned into Edwards’s criminal record in his 1991 race against former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, printing bumper stickers that said “Vote for the crook. It’s important.”
Trump’s defenders have noted that despite his dubious conviction in a Manhattan lawfare trial, Biden was found too incompetent to even stand trial.
