How Normalizing Relations With Cuba Could Reshape Florida Politics – NationalJournal.com

“Over a third of Cubans that live in Miami right now came after 1995,” Guillermo Grenier, a Florida International University sociology professor who surveys Cuban-American attitudes, told National Journal. “These are the folks that have direct and lasting contacts with the island, and with people on the island. They’re not in any way exiles in the typical sense of the word. They’ve come for a variety of reasons; sometimes they don’t like the politics, but most times they don’t like the economic situation. They don’t have much in common with the earlier group of Cubans.”

According to a FIU Cuban Research Institute poll this year, 88 percent of Cuban-Americans aged 18-29 in Miami-Dade County favor diplomatic relations with Cuba. That number declines with age, with only 41 percent of those 65 and older favoring relations.

In Florida, the Cuban-American vote is vital for politicians’ hopes, both within the state and nationwide. Older Cubans who came to the U.S. in the years immediately after the country’s 1959 revolution tend to stick to a harder line, Grenier said—and on the whole, they’re the ones who go to the polls. But as the younger generation gets older, it’ll make more of a difference in elections. Democrats are counting on that, Grenier said, as an opportunity for the party to capitalize on the younger generation’s different beliefs.

More than half of younger Cuban-Americans already lean Democrat, according to Pew Research Center data. Only 39 percent of those over 50 lean Democrat, though that number has increased in the last 10 years. Among a community that already supports normalizing relations, Democrats could use Wednesday’s historic announcement as a way to rally the younger generation of Cubans, who don’t currently vote in high numbers, to the polls.

via How Normalizing Relations With Cuba Could Reshape Florida Politics – NationalJournal.com.