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'Undecided Voter' at NBC Town Hall Informed Producer He Would Vote for Biden

Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden participates in an NBC Town Hall event hosted by Lester Holt at the Perez Art Museum in Miami, Florida on October 5, 2020. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP) (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)
October 15, 2020

A committed Joe Biden supporter who was wrongly presented by NBC News as undecided said he was clear with the network about his intention to vote Democrat before the town hall.

"I was very unequivocal," Peter Gonzalez, a lawyer from Coral Gables, Fla., told the Washington Free Beacon. "In my communications with MSNBC in late August and then again recently with NBC, I was very clear, number one, on my voting record, and number two, that I didn't think Trump was acceptable to vote for."

The Free Beacon reported Gonzalez and Ismael Llano were invited to the Oct. 5 town hall in Miami and presented as among a group of "undecided" Florida voters, even though both men told NBC's cable arm MSNBC on Aug. 21 that they were voting for Biden. A producer reached out to them after their MSNBC segment and invited them to the town hall.

Gonzalez, a longtime Republican voter who is supporting a Democrat for president for the first time, asked whether Biden could assure Cuban- and Venezuelan-Americans he would not govern as a radical leftist. He told the Free Beacon that NBC News should have properly identified him as a Biden voter.

"If I could go back in time ... [moderator] Lester Holt should have made it clear, at least when he introduced me," he said. "Fortunately, he didn't refer to me as an undecided voter specifically, but I could understand how some people would infer that I was undecided, because at no time did they make it clear that I had already made a decision to vote for Biden or I guess, better said, to vote against President Trump."

Gonzalez could not provide the name of the producer who invited him to the town hall. Llano was not available for comment, and NBC News did not respond to a request for comment.

Other "undecided" voters at the town hall had strongly anti-Trump or pro-Biden social media histories, including one who had several Facebook cover photos featuring the Biden-Kamala Harris ticket.

While Holt only introduced Gonzalez by name, he twice referred to the audience at the event as one of exclusively "undecided" voters. MSNBC anchors also repeatedly described it that way in the days leading up to the town hall, as did NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell while recapping it for Today on Oct. 6.