President Trump’s announcement that Republicans would cancel the portion of the Republican National Convention that was being hastily thrown together for Jacksonville, Florida, might as well have been a symbolic sign of his hopes of winning the crucial swing state.
What was once a bright spot in Trump’s electoral map is now widely considered a trouble area, despite his campaign insisting that unnoticed figures paint a rosier picture.
On Friday, election forecasters at the Cook Political Report announced that they had moved Florida’s 29 electoral votes from “toss-up” to “lean Democrat.”
The major driver of the polling slip, the election forecaster said, appears to be the coronavirus pandemic and voters’ impression of how Trump handled it.
A few months ago, Republicans scoffed at those who warned that the state was set to be the next coronavirus hot spot, and Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proceeded with opening the state. The seemingly promising outlook, plus a Republican gubernatorial administration that would be more welcoming to hosting the convention than North Carolina’s Democratic governor, prompted the RNC to move the convention from Charlotte to Jacksonville.
But confirmed cases in the state spiked in late June and through July. More than 5,500 people have died from the virus. Trump, when canceling the Jacksonville portion of the convention, said that “the timing for this event is not right” due to the pandemic.
A Quinnipiac poll of registered Florida voters conducted July 16-20 found that Biden had a 13-point lead over Trump, 51% to 38%. Fifty-eight percent of Florida voters found that Biden would do a better job handling the coronavirus, while 38% said Trump would be better.
That gives the Democratic nominee a 7-point lead in the RealClearPolitics average of Florida polls.
In a press call on Friday, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien criticized public analysis about the election and called into question the accuracy of polls. (Poll analysts say that the Trump campaign criticisms about sampling, if true, would not result in such a dramatic lead for Biden.)
Stepien said that while Democrats in Florida had a voter registration advantage of 550,000 in 2012, the last time the party won the state in a presidential election, it has been “cut in half” to 276,000 voters. He noted that Biden’s numbers with key demographics do not match the 2018 numbers for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, who lost his bid.
“It paints a really troubling picture for the Biden campaign,” Stepien said. “These trends are going to go unnoticed until election night, but we’re right, and they’re wrong,” he added, taking a swipe at forecasters who have put Florida in Biden’s court.
Absent from Stepien’s analysis was how the coronavirus is playing a role in the political preferences of the electorate this year.
The Trump campaign has 186 staff members in Florida, while Biden’s campaign only unveiled its leadership team in the state this month.
But the Trump campaign manager acknowledged that Florida, considered critical for a path to victory for either Biden or Trump, will be a nail-biter. Trump won the state by just 1.2% in 2016.
“Every election in this state is close,” Stepien said. “That’s the nature of the state.”
