“Florida is the only battleground that moved in Trump’s direction after both conventions,” writes James Hohmann in the Washington Post. The state used to reflect national trends, Hohmann says, but those days may be over. He set out to find out why things are becoming so dreary in the Sunshine State. Here’s what he found.
- Florida is losing white Democrats — there are 400,000 fewer of them in the state now than there were in 2008. This is because longtime neo-Confederate Dems in the Panhandle finally switched to the GOP during the Obama years sand because recent transplants have been more conservative.
“So now you have a Democratic base which is proportionally much more black and Hispanic, and thus, far more predictable,” explained [Steve Schale, a Democratic Party operative who ran Pres. Obama’s campaign in Florida], who is based in Tallahassee. “In the same way, the GOP base has gotten really white, as new Hispanics are choosing ‘D’ or No Party Affiliation. … Even as you look at a population that is undergoing dynamic change, other cultural and economic factors, as well as white migration into Florida, seems to balance it back out.”
- Trump’s obnoxious behavior actually appeals to voters who elected Gov. Rick Scott twice.
“There are quite a few older white folks in Florida who think the federal government should be closed down, and think that the only thing worse than Barack Obama is Hillary Clinton,” says Curt Anderson, the operative behind Rick Scott’s campaigns. “So when Trump says impolitic things—things that may be detrimental to him in Wisconsin—in Florida there are a lot folks on the golf course early in the morning and at the buffet at 5 p.m. who are saying ‘Damn right!’”
- Many Florida Republicans relate to Trump because, like them, he is elderly and has ties to New York.
- Trump’s strength in the polls is among white men. In the latest Monmouth University poll of Florida voters, Clinton is ahead of him by 9 percentage points, but Trump led among white men by 40 points, 64 to 24 percent.
- Florida has been trending to the right over the past few cycles.
In 2012, Obama won the national vote by 4 points but Florida by just 1 point. In 2008, Obama’s national margin was 7 points, compared with 3 points in Florida. “So we should expect Florida to be a bit more Republican than the nation overall,” says The Post’s in-house pollster Scott Clement. “Virginia, on the other hand, was extremely close to the nation overall in the last two elections. Both were +4 in 2012, and in 2008, Virginia was +6 while the nation was +7 Obama.”
- “Florida is a state, not a place,” says Steve Schale:
The state lacks much commonality or shared experience, and almost everyone has come from somewhere else. “The old saying about Florida is you go north to go south,” he writes. “North Florida feels like the traditional south, with large rural areas, conservative towns like Jacksonville and Pensacola, liberal college towns, etc., while the rest of the state feels like wherever it came from. Go to Tampa, or most anywhere on the west coast, and there is more of a Midwestern feel – as most who got there, came down the I-75 corridor. The east coast can feel more northeastern in attitude, homage to the I-95 corridor that brought them here. There is also a coastal/interior split.”
“Florida isn’t competitive because of its unique nature, like an Iowa,” says Schale, “but it becomes competitive in sum when you add up all of its many parts.”
