Why did Trump pick Orlando?
Announcing 2020 campaign in city could be a key to winning Florida, experts say
There are only a few key battleground states in the 2020 presidential campaign, and much of the focus so far has been on places such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where President Donald Trump pulled shocking upsets over Hillary Clinton three years ago.
But when Trump kicks off his 2020 reelection campaign on Tuesday, he won’t be in any Rust Belt town or coal mining community – he will be right here in downtown Orlando, holding a rally at the 20,000-capacity Amway Center.
Trump’s choice of that location may be surprising to those who look at an election map of Florida and see Orange County colored in solid Democratic blue. But experts say Florida is the true key to victory next November, and the red, GOP-leaning suburbs in Central Florida are imperative to winning the state.
“It isn’t so much Orange County,” said Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy director Brad Coker. “It’s the counties around Orange County that are important to him.”
Aubrey Jewett, a University of Central Florida political science professor, said Florida “is the most important state in the presidential election. It’s the largest swing state with 29 electoral votes, and it’s gone for the winner in the last six elections – three times for the Democrat, three times for the Republican.”
The average margin of victory in Florida over those six elections, going back to President Bill Clinton’s victory in 1996, has been just 2.6%, Jewett said.
The past few elections have been even closer, with President Barack Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 winning by about 1%.
“Without Florida, he can’t win. Period,” Coker said.
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
The truest swing area of Florida, Coker said, tends to be the area around Tampa Bay, where Trump flipped Pinellas County from Democrat blue to Republican red in 2016.
Other than Seminole County, where Trump got fewer votes than Mitt Romney did in 2012 and outpolled Hillary Clinton by just 1.6 percentage points, Central Florida counties leaned either heavily Democratic or Republican in 2016.
Clinton won both Orange and Osceola counties over Trump by 60% to 35%, and won the precincts surrounding Amway Center by 72% to 28%.
Trump won in Lake, Seminole, Volusia, Brevard and Polk counties with an average of 54% of the vote. Trump won Sumter County, home to parts of The Villages retirement community, with 68% of its vote.
The Amway Center – owned by the city of Orlando, not the politically connected DeVos family that owns the Orlando Magic – is the most convenient large, indoor arena for supporters from these important counties, Coker said.
“Orlando is really the most central location along the I-4 Corridor,” he said. “People from Polk County can get there, people from Volusia, The Villages. … Those are big counties for him. He has to run up his numbers and fire up the base.”
Trump overperformed in those counties in 2016, Coker said, “not percentagewise so much, but in pure, raw numbers in getting people to the polls. And Trump has always been a pure politician [in caring about] turnout, turnout, turnout.”
On Wednesday, Trump tweeted that there have been “74,000 requests for a 20,000 seat Arena. With all of the big events that we have done, this ticket looks to be the ‘hottest’ of them all.”
Trump has held multiple rallies in the Central Florida area, including events in Ocala, Kissimmee, Lakeland and Sanford in 2016 and Melbourne in 2017.
And Trump has held two rallies in Orlando itself, both at the Central Florida Fairgrounds, both before and after the election in 2016.
“Outside of Florida, Orlando is a symbol of Florida,” said Susan MacManus, a retired political science professor at the University of South Florida. “And nearly everyone has a Florida connection.”
The region also is unique demographically, MacManus said, with “a burgeoning Hispanic population that’s key to Republican victories in Florida and the Republican Party’s future in the state.”
Finally, despite Orange County going heavily for Clinton, Trump got more than 195,000 votes in the county in 2016, and there are currently more than 215,000 registered Republicans there.
“It’s not only percentages, it’s the number of people,” Jewett said. “There are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of supporters of President Trump – a lot more than the lowest [population], most Republican counties in Florida.”
Orange County GOP Chair Charles Hart said the Republican ticket underperformed in the county in 2016 compared with past elections, including 2012 when Romney lost the state.
But, he said, Gov. Ron DeSantis got a larger percentage of the Orange County vote in 2018, almost 37%, than Donald Trump’s 35% in 2016.
DeSantis defeated Democrat Andrew Gillum by about 30,000 votes statewide.
“There is a resurgence of the Republican Party here in the county, and it’s being noticed,” Hart said. “If we can perform, if we can fight hard enough, we really can make a significant difference. If we [get] 40%, if we get 45% of the vote, we win. And Donald Trump is the next president.”