Home » News » Trump vs Biden: 4 Factors That Can Alter Florida’s Choice and Define Who Will Be the Next US President

Trump vs Biden: 4 Factors That Can Alter Florida’s Choice and Define Who Will Be the Next US President

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Trump was victorious in Florida in 2016.

When it comes to defining the winner of the United States elections, no region of the country tends to generate as much drama as Florida.

Winning here is central to Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s efforts to win the presidency.

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The political polarization that affects the nation reveals its most extreme dimension in this state. Florida’s electorate is often divided into nearly identical halves, which makes the end result of their elections so difficult to predict.

It is enough to recall how in 2000 the then Republican candidate, George W. Bush, in Florida outscored his Democratic rival, Al Gore, by just 527 votes. That microscopic advantage, in a state that today has 21 million inhabitants, gave the White House to Bush.

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The vote in Florida can define who will be the president.

And since just a few hundred votes can tip the balance in Florida, any adherence by one constituency group to one side or the other can have a crucial impact in deciding the election.

This year, analysts are watching the behavior of at least four groups of voters that can alter the result of the vote in Florida and define the presidential succession.

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These factors include Trump’s growing popularity among Miami Cuban-Americans; the impact of a series of judicial decisions regarding the right to vote for ex-convicts; the opinion that retirees have of the president, who constitute an important part of the population in this “paradise of the third age”; and finally, the degree of adherence to the current president of the inhabitants of the white middle-class neighborhoods.

1. Are Cubans returning to the Republican fold?

A first factor that can unbalance the election in Florida is given by the electoral behavior of its main metropolitan area, Miami.

And within that metropolis, the population of Cuban origin, which constitutes about a third of the total in the county, is the electoral key of the city.

The Cuban community in Miami is probably the most conservative among Latinos in the United States. Since the 1960s, they began to vote Republican while the vast majority of Hispanics in the rest of the country leaned toward the Democrats.

However, in recent years, analysts have warned of a generational shift, with young Cuban-Americans moving closer to the left.

That helped Miami County to have voted massively for Barack Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. In that year, the Democratic presidential candidate outstripped Trump by 290,000 votes, or almost thirty percentage points, as she tells the BBC. Mundo Fernand Amandi of the local survey firm Bendixen & Amandi.

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Trump is popular with the Cuban community in Miami

But the orientation of the Cuban vote in Miami appears to be transforming again. Or actually, reverting to its original state of devotion to conservatives.

73% of Cuban-Americans in Miami today have a favorable image of Trump while only 32% of that community has a good image of Biden, according to the most recent survey by Bendixen & Amandi.

The analyst recalls that, to win in Florida, Biden needs to collect a lot of Latino votes in Miami to make up for the defeat he will almost certainly suffer in the upstate, the most rural and conservative area, where Trump will undoubtedly gain a great advantage.

So the president’s advance in Miami can have devastating effects for Biden.

“Clearly, the Republican strategy of creating fear and accusing all democrats of being quasi-communists is having an impact,” Amandi told BBC Mundo.

The expert alleges that the Democratic Party simply did not campaign enough in the region. That campaign “should have happened months and years ago.”

“We are reaching a point where it may be too late,” says Amandi.

2. Will Florida ex-convicts be allowed to vote?

On the afternoon of September 11, a US federal court issued a ruling that left many Florida Democrats heartbroken.

The court’s decision called into question the right to vote for 1.4 million ex-convicts in Florida, equivalent to nearly 10 percent of all registered voters in the state.

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A number of court cases have examined the right to vote of Florida ex-convicts

Until 2018, Florida was one of just four states in the country that totally banned voting for ex-convicts. A referendum held that year in Florida gave them the right to participate in the elections.

But months later, the state legislature, controlled by the Republican Party, passed a law regulating the vote of ex-convicts, adding a crucial detail: pIn order to restore their right to participate in the elections, they had to pay all the fines and coasts associated with your conviction, obligations that in many cases amounted to thousands of dollars.

That, in practice, left many of them out of the elections.

Where some saw a purely legal discussion, others sensed an openly political struggle.

“Many of these ex-convicts are black. And the black vote is extremely democratic. 90% of African Americans vote for Democratic Party candidates,” Kathryn DePalo-Gould, professor of political science at FIU Miami University, told BBC World. .

Therefore, it is not surprising that Democrats were very much in favor of extending the vote to ex-convicts and Republicans were against.

A series of court rulings in 2019 and early 2020 initially called Florida’s requirement on ex-convicts to pay their fine money before they could vote as unconstitutional, giving Democrats hope.

But the most recent court decision, dated Sept. 11, reaffirming the legality of the requirement to pay fines before you can vote, seems to bury the hope of running for election for many Floridians with criminal records.

And unless a new last minute judicial decision and in the opposite direction occurs in the next few days, that prohibition is another factor that gives Trump an advantage in the electoral race in this crucial state.

3. Will the pandemic change the vote of retirees?

One of the many nicknames the state of Florida is known by is being “heaven’s waiting room,” because of its large elderly population.

In 2018, the federal census bureau estimated that 4.9 million residents of this state, or nearly one in five residents, were over 65 years of age. Along with Maine, it is the state with the highest percentage of seniors in the country.

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The impact of the pandemic may have changed the electoral preferences of many retirees in Florida.

Older adults are, of course, one of the population groups most at risk from the coronavirus.

That’s why Democrats hope this crucial electoral bloc in Florida will charge Trump for what the president’s opponents call his administration’s mishandling of the pandemic.

A poll published on September 8 by the US network NBC pointed in that direction.

According to the poll, 49% of seniors in Florida supported Biden, compared to 48% for the current president. In 2016, by contrast, Trump broadly defeated Hillary Clinton among voters over 65, garnering 57% of the vote versus 40% for the Democrat.

4. Will the white middle-class suburbs continue with Trump?

The dormitory neighborhoods that surround large American cities, the “suburbs” as they are called here, are the great bastion of the white middle class in the country and one of the fiercest electoral battlegrounds in Florida.

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Florida is seen as the top prize in the US elections.

In 2016, suburban voters, particularly women, overwhelmingly favored the current president. To seek a vote for him again in 2020, Trump has oriented his speech to saying that a vote for Biden would bring social chaos in those quiet neighborhoods with immaculate gardens.

Among his arguments, Trump says that Biden would favor the construction, in those prosperous communities, of subsidized state housing for the poor: an accusation that the president’s detractors describe as a thinly disguised way of complaining that in a Biden administration they would get to live blacks and Latinos to these now predominantly white neighborhoods.

For all the above, some say that the largest belt of dormitory communities in Florida, the one that surrounds Interstate 4 (I4), connecting the cities of Tampa and Orlando, may be the most precious electoral territory in the entire nation. .

What its inhabitants decide on November 3 will, in all probability, have an impact on the rest of the country and the world.

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