‘Trump is our Bolsonaro’: how Brazilians who helped President win in...

• Ricardo Senra – @ricksenra
• BBC News Brasil special envoy to Miami

While most polls showed Joe Biden with a slight advantage over Donald Trump in Florida, one of the most coveted places of these US elections, Brazilians who have lived in the state for years were betting on the opposite opposite during Tuesday afternoon (3), voting day, on the outskirts of Miami.

“I believe, from what I’ve seen, that Trump has an advantage,” said businesswoman Patricia Brito, who has lived in the United States for 23 years, 13 of them in the state of Florida. She says she is “delighted” with the Republican’s immigration policy.

“It’s not that he can win, Trump has to win,” said Carlos Alberto Soares, who has been in the United States for 18 years and lives and works in the Pompano Beach region, an important stronghold of Brazilians north of Miami. For him, Trump “saved” the US economy.

Aged 36 in the USA, Sergio (who chose not to give his last name) owns a commercial room in a shopping center in the same area. “The election here will be complicated,” predicted the Brazilian, who defends the American president’s response to the pandemic of the new coronavirus, in an interview with BBC News Brasil. “But Trump will win.”

Similar impressions were shared with BBC News Brasil by more than 10 Brazilians living in the Miami region (only one couple preferred to abstain: “We prefer to do ours”, “we don’t care about politics”, they said).

Opinions reveal how some key points in Trump’s rhetoric – migration, race relations, religion, economics and the pandemic – resonate among conservative Brazilians who rebuilt their lives in the U.S. and today have dual nationality.

Until the publication of this report, with 96% of the votes cast in Florida, Trump had declared himself the winner in the state with 51.2% of the votes, against 47.8% of his opponent, Joe Biden.

The Republican’s hard-line policy towards those who live without documents in the USA is the one that most appeals to those who, one day, arrived in the country as immigrants.

“As much as I am an immigrant, I agree,” says Patricia Brito, owner of Feijão com Arroz, a kilo restaurant very popular with Brazilians in the Miami area.

For her, “the United States has changed a lot” and the arrival of undocumented foreigners increases the risk of “terrorism” and creates “unfair” situations for entrepreneurs and employees.

“People who do business, are in commerce, know a lot of people, we see them. People in the middle class are losing purchasing power, losing independence. That American dream no longer exists. Why? A person to deliver a child spends US $ 15,000. An undocumented person will not pay anything. Who is paying? The middle class “, he says.

“Today having a small business (small business) is very difficult. The fixed costs are very high. This system (created) to keep this part informal is not fair to the people. The American is paying the bill and we feel it. “

In the USA, as in Brazil, even people without documents pay certain taxes – embedded in the final price – when they buy any product or service.

While Trump raised the tone against immigrants in both campaigns and during his 4 years at the White House, his predecessor, Barack Obama, had already broken deportation records.

According to a Washington Post survey, 1.18 million people were deported in Obama’s first 3 years, compared to around 800,000 in the same period under Trump. In 2012 alone, the Democratic government had deported 409,849 people. According to the survey, the maximum number of deportees in a year under the Trump administration would be 260,000.

“The pandemic, everyone knows, is an invention. I had the virus, I know it is there, it kills, but it covid who dies,” says Sergio, a veteran in the USA with more than three decades in the country .

“In the United States, two hundred and one thousand people died,” he says.

The report says there were 232,000 deaths, according to official data compiled by Washington’s Johns Hopkins University. “That there are 300 thousand people. In relation to 330 million inhabitants (approximate population of the USA), this is nothing. It is nothing.”

The Brazilian echoes the narrative of the American president, who blames China for the pandemic and for what he calls the “Chinese virus” – a classification seen as pejorative by the Chinese community and part of the international community.

“If it were a hyper contagious and hyper fatal disease, we would have millions of people”, says the Brazilian, while unloading cardboard boxes from a black car. “I think this virus was created, China is very well known.”

Like other Brazilians heard by the report, Sergio says he already hoped that something like the pandemic could happen.

“This is biblical. We are at the beginning of the pains, it is written in the book of Revelation, take any bible, go there and read. There will be pests and plagues and we are getting there. It is of no return. There is no point in curing a pandemic. return and will arrive at the end “, he says.

The report asks what happens in the end.

“The book of Revelation will be fulfilled.”

Many of the respondents referred to the Bible in their defense of Donald Trump.

For a pair of waitresses who work in a cafeteria frequented by Brazilians in Miami, Trump “brought religion back” to the daily lives of Americans.

“He is a Christian and has put a Christian judge to ban abortion,” says one. She refers to Trump’s appointment to the Supreme Court of Catholic Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the seat left by progressive Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died this year.

Since 2017, Trump has appointed three judges to the Supreme Court, in addition to more than 200 judges to federal courts with lifelong positions.

“Trump is our Bolsonaro,” added the co-worker, in reference to their conservative rhetoric.

“I agree with Trump a lot, especially on family issues,” said businesswoman Patricia Brito. “The Christian people are very connected in this issue of the destruction of the family cell. A knows the direction these things are taking. Trump’s proposal is to reverse this situation.”

According to her, a Biden government would mean “a misrepresentation of the family principle”.

The report asks if the comment has to do with gay marriage. “I think the choice is theirs and they live the way they think it is right. Only then, bringing this to school, you start to bring relative values ​​to the children. I live a lot with teenagers and they are lost today”, he says .

The Brazilian continues: “It is complex for me to say this, I do not have a strong background in psychology, but I would say that 2 or 3% of the population really has this choice based on problems of the past, situations they lived, traumas, issues, genetics , issues of chemical problems. But the great mass is being influenced “.

The information has no medical, sociological or scientific support.

Driving the economy would be one of Donald Trump’s strengths among the electorate, according to polls released throughout the electoral period.

For many Americans, the Republican would have more capacity than the Democratic rival on economic issues.

Days before the election, the US Department of Labor reported a record high in the US gross domestic product in the third quarter of this year, compared to the previous three months.

During the period, according to the official US statistics office, GDP grew 33.1%, a record in the historical series of the indicator, against estimates of 31%.

In the second quarter, the American economy had shrunk by 31.4% – the biggest drop since the 1929 crisis.

“If Trump made it easier for the covid, the US economy would be down there. He didn’t let that happen. And while he was there, the economy was very good. He received the economy shattered by Biden and Obama,” says Carlos Alberto Soares, who owns an optician.

The view matches that of fellow countryman Sergio.

“(Trump) is a president who has a very big ego, because he is a very rich guy, with a lot of power, he conquered everything in life, so he ‘thinks he’s the guy’,” he says.

“The president, to be a leader, must have integrity and must know business, must know business. He must understand how to negotiate, foreign policy is business”, continues the Brazilian. “Trump is a good president for being a good businessman and being direct. I think he is honest.”

During the first three years of the Trump administration, the U.S. recorded an average annual economic growth of 2.5%. In the last three years of the administration of its predecessor, Barack Obama, the US saw a similar level of growth (2.3%), along with a significantly higher rate (5.5%) in mid-2014.

Until the beginning of the pandemic, Trump claimed to have delivered the lowest unemployment rate in half a century. This is correct: in February this year, the rate was 3.5%, the lowest in more than 50 years.

Obama also added more jobs to the economy, comparing similar periods: under Trump, in the three years before the pandemic, 6.4 million additional jobs were registered; in Obama’s past three years, 7 million jobs have been created.

All of that changed dramatically with the pandemic: according to the US Department of Labor, more than 20 million people lost their jobs and, in a single month, the country lost the equivalent of a decade of job gains.

Florida was considered by the Trump and Biden campaigns to be one of the most important states in the electoral dispute. It is one of the so-called pendulum states: where there is no clear preference for one party or the other in the electorate.

Since 1900, Democrats have won 17 times in Florida, against 13 Republican wins.

Between the 2000 and 2016 elections, the last five elections, the Republicans won 3, the Democrats 2.

Along with New York, Florida is the third largest electoral college in the United States – after California and Texas.

From the State, 29 out of the 270 votes needed in the electoral college for one of the candidates to become president.

The state is marked by diversity. In 2020, of the state’s 5.7 million Hispanics, more than 2.5 million registered to vote – almost half a million more than in the 2016 election, according to state government data analyzed by the Pew Institute.

Latinos traditionally vote for Democrats in the US: 7 out of 10 Latinos in the country voted for Obama in 2012; then 66% voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But the state has the highest concentration of Cubans in the United States – in greater Miami, Cuban Americans are the majority in the population.

According to the latest edition of an annual survey conducted 29 years ago by the International University of Florida (FIU) on the political profile of Cubans in the city, Cubans in the region voted Trump – 59% preferred the Republican, against 25% who said they would vote for Biden.

There is no specific outline on how Brazilians vote in Florida.

On a national scale, according to a survey by Instituto Ideia, it was expected that 71% of Brazilians who live in the United States and have the right to vote would vote for the Democratic candidate, while 27% said they preferred Republican Donald Trump.

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