In Florida, Joe Biden is Breaking through with Seniors
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)
By: Logan Phillips
Date: August 17th
No state has loomed larger in American politics over the last twenty years then Florida. In every election this millennium, the winner of Florida’s 29 electoral votes has gone on to win the election.
It should surprise very few, then, that in the Race to the White House Forecast, Florida is the single most consequential state. I ran fifty thousand simulations, and found that when Donald Trump takes the Sunshine State, he almost triples his chance of re-election, but a Biden win almost always sets the sun on the Trump era of American politics.
The real surprise in the Sunshine State is a dramatic shift in the electorate that could upend the playbooks of both parties. Using the same approach I used to create the Race to the WH polling average, I used nine Florida polls to determine how Biden is performing with different demographics groups, and compared them to the 2016 Exit Polls. Here’s what I found:
1. Democrats Have Lost Ground with Latino Voters:
If there is one linchpin to the Democratic strategy in Florida, it’s to run up the score in places like Miami by turning out as many Latino voters as possible, and to win their support by wide margins. You might expect Biden would have at least made modest gains with Latinos over Clinton, given his current lead in the polls, but he’s actually underperforming her by seven percent.
One possible reason is that the Trump campaign is spending more on Spanish language advertisements then they did in 2016. Additionally, the Latino vote is not a monolith, and while most Latinos may lean Democrat, Cuban Americans are much more open to supporting Republican candidates. Donald Trump has made a full court press for their support over the last four years. He’s waged an effort to demonize the Democratic party as socialist, borderline communist, and authoritarian. While these types of exaggerated attacks may elicit eye rolls from most swing voters, they are taken very seriously by more than a few Cuban Americans, many of which came to the United States to escape authoritarianism from the Communist Castro Regime.
2. The Senior Vote is actually in play
Joe Biden is doing dramatically better, (16%+!), with Senior voters then Hillary Clinton. Just like the Latino vote for Democrats, older voters are the bread and butter for the Republican party. Even as Florida’s population continues to diversify, Republicans have remained just as competitive because millions of older Americans move to Florida to retire, especially from the red leaning parts of the country.
In 2016, Donald Trump won them by seventeen percent. Now, he’s up by only one point. The clearest explanation for this is the Coronavirus, which is particularly deadly for older Americans. This isn’t just changing the vote of those that have fallen ill, or that have seen their friends die. Even more fortunate Seniors have been forced to take even greater measures then most to socially distance, stay at home, and avoid the virus. Many folks just want to get back to a normal life and see their family again.
The Biden campaign is looking to take full advantage of this with a massive ad buy centered on a Senior couple from the conservative Villages, lamenting how much they miss actually seeing their grandchildren in person.
The second reason is that Biden has long been a much more palatable Democrat to older voters, even before the virus took off. The former Vice President has emphasized the important of returning politics back to civility, where every single fight doesn’t have to be a blood sport against a mortal enemy. This is an attractive message to these voters, who have expressed wariness over how the President conducts himself personally.
Conclusion:
Very few could have predicted that four years of Trump would lead to waning Latino support for Democrats, and a split in Senior support for Republicans, but the past four years have been anything but conventional.
While Democrats have the edge in Florida right now, the last thing activist or voters should do is take this lead for granted. Anyone that has followed Florida from 2000 to 2018 knows that the state has a tendency to bedevil early expectations. In 2018, Democrat Gubernatorial Candidate Andrew Gillum and Senator Bill Nelson had similarly strong leads even a month before election day, but Republicans managed to win both elections by the skin of their teeth. Florida voters have a tendency to break late, so a keep a close eye on the Sunshine State in the months to come.
There’s a certain logic to a high risk, high reward strategy to change the contours of a race that has not been kind to Donald Trump. However, Trump could easily start looking a lot more like the arsonist gleefully pouring gasoline on the political pyre then the fireman quenching the flames .