Biden vs. Trump: Who would win Florida in November?
ORLANDO, Fla. — Joe Biden, who thumped Bernie Sanders in Tuesday’s Democratic presidential primary, would face a greater challenge in Florida against President Donald Trump and a campaign that has never ceased since 2016.
“It’s a whole new ballgame,” said John Quinones, the first Puerto Rican Republican elected to the Florida legislature. “Florida is going to be ground zero when it comes to potentially deciding the election. And I know local Republicans are very geared up.”
The Trump reelection campaign, which officially kicked off the day he was inaugurated and held its first rally in February 2017 in Melbourne, has raised more than $200 million and had more than $92 million cash on hand in January, according to Federal Election Commission reports. The campaign is also planning huge social media pushes and ad buys.
Biden’s campaign was constantly short of money leading up to the primaries — but it showed a Trump-like ability to win states without much advertising or field operations. If he wins the nomination, he will have the full force of the Democratic Party behind him, including major fundraisers such as Michael Bloomberg, who transferred $18 million of his campaign funds to the party on Friday.
Biden and Trump have key strengths and weaknesses with Florida’s electorate as they prepare for a potential matchup in what could be a decisive state in the Electoral College, experts said.
But Biden’s performance in the string of primaries he’s won since Feb. 29 in South Carolina, including his 62% to 23% win over Sanders in Florida that netted him more than 100 delegates in one state alone, shows that the former vice president is doing well with some key demographics.
“Plusses for Biden, especially out of Florida, is that he had a strength with African Americans that carried down here,” said Matthew Isbell, who runs the MCI Maps website devoted to political mapmaking and analysis. “He’s clearly the Democratic choice for the African American vote.”
Notably, Biden is also doing well with a group that had been trending away from Democrats in the last decade and was a key demographic for Trump - the white working class. According to exit polls, Isbell said, Biden had strong support among those voters in Pasco, Pinellas and Volusia counties in particular.
“A caveat is that primary results are only so predictive,” Isbell said. “We don’t have NPAs (non-party affiliated voters) or Republicans. But all of that’s a good sign.”
Another key demo, said Susan MacManus, professor emeritus at the University of South Florida, is suburban women.
“Biden did well among married women, and many times suburban moms are one of the biggest swing votes in Florida,” MacManus said, adding Biden’s pledge to choose a woman running mate will only help him on that front. “Trump won that vote in 2016, and I think that’s one of Trump’s biggest challenges.”
One potential concern for Biden, however, is the huge generational split in the state. Biden did not do well with Florida’s younger voters, who went for Sanders by big margins.
“There’s a strong progressive left among Florida’s Millennials and Generation Z,” MacManus said. One of Biden’s biggest challenges will be winning them back over and getting them to turn out for him in November.
But Isbell and MacManus both said the most important demographic in Florida in November is Hispanics.
Biden did extremely well in the Latino vote in Florida, MacManus said, compared to western states such as Nevada where Sanders’ strength with mostly MexicanAmerican voters helped propel him to a big win in February.
But unlike in the west, Florida’s Latino population “is so diverse, political, economically and culturally,” she said.
In Tuesday’s primary, Isbell said, Democrats increased their vote total from 2016 by about 25,000 votes, with the biggest all along the I-4 Corridor from Tampa to Orlando to Daytona Beach, as well as in Jacksonville.
But in Miami Dade County, turnout on Tuesday was down by 18,000 votes from 2016.
“We’ve seen in 2018 that (Democrat Andrew) Gillum lost the governor’s race because he didn’t do well in Dade,” Isbell said. “He didn’t do as well his Hispanics as Hillary Clinton did, because a lot of Hispanic voters didn’t show up.”
In Miami, Isbell said, there are two types of Latino voters, Rightleaning older Cubans who always show up to vote, and Democraticleaning younger Cubans other Latinos “who have to be dragged to polls.”
“Without doing everything to drag people out, it’s not going to happen on its own,” he said. “It’s not a foretelling of doom, it just reminds Democrats that the important thing is turnout.”
Bob Cortes, a former Republican state representative from Longwood, said Trump doesn’t need to win Latinos in November - he just needs to chip away at the Democrat’s margin.
“Trump in 2016 was able to pull in the mid-20s (percentagewise),” Cortes said. “We’re seeing numbers that show his Hispanic support has not dropped but actually increased. . If he gets 30%, 35%, I think he’s going to be in great shape.”
Beyond demographics, there is also the relative personal strengths and weaknesses of each candidate.
Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, said that among the plusses for Biden is a Democratic Party “more unified in the presidential election than they were the last time around. . Most of the party is so intent on beating Donald Trump.”
Biden is also seen by the average voter as belonging to the more moderate wing of the party, he said, which could help with independents. And his association with Obama helps with black voters and those looking for a return to a pre-Trump time.
But Biden also “has a history of saying things off the cuff, either things that don’t make sense or offend people,” Jewett said. “It also may play into the perception that he has lost a step with age.”
Trump, despite his own notoriety for inappropriate comments and verbal miscues - and who is less than 4 years younger than the 77-year-old Biden - “is certainly going to try to hammer away on that,” Jewett said.
Biden also has a long legislative history, having served in the Senate beginning in 1973, and votes and quotes on things such as the Iraq War, Social Security and the 1994 Crime Bill could haunt him.
“Sometimes things he did 20, 30 years ago that made sense then may not make sense anymore,” Jewett said.
Trump, meanwhile, also has a united party behind him, “even among Republicans who may not have cared for him (in 2016) and may not even care for him that much right now,” Jewett said.
Recent polls have also shown him to be more popular in Florida than other battleground states in the Midwest. Trump led Biden by 3 points in a March 12 Univision poll and 2 points in a March 7 Florida Atlantic University poll.
But what was once a Trump strength, the strong economy and stock market, has suddenly become a weakness as stocks tumbled this week below where they had been when he took office in January 2017.
The cause for the drop, the coronavirus outbreak, could also endanger Trump if voters fault him for his response to the crisis.
And the social distancing put in place to slow the spread of the disease also has a big effect on one of Trump’s key campaign strategies - holding big rallies in arenas. Already, one rally in Tampa has been canceled and it may be months before any are scheduled again.
In the end, former Republican legislative candidate and radio host Peter Vivaldi said, we may not know what the world will look like next month, never mind November.