GOP Annihilates Obama’s Early Vote Bulwark in Florida

Here we go again.

Florida is again the battleground where Democrats intend to stop a surging Republican candidate for president. It seems like the year 2000 all over again.

Already, more than 5.3 million Florida voters have cast ballots, more than either presidential candidate got in 2012.

Florida is usually a presidential-year target of both parties, but doesn’t usually become the final state that makes or break a presidential candidate.

This year, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton made clear that if Republican Donald Trump loses Florida, he will never be president. Trump knows he cannot lose it.

The stakes are high again.

Much of the focus will be on the “Interstate 4 corridor,” which is shorthand for Central Florida. I-4 stretches more than 132 miles from Daytona Beach through Orlando to Tampa. It’s little more than a two-hour drive but along the way, there are plenty of swing voters in arguably the most important swing state in the nation.

The I-4 strategy and the general targeting of Florida are familiar plots for both parties — they have regularly been down this road since the 2000 recount. Back in 2000, after then-Gov. George W. Bush failed to win Pennsylvania and Michigan on Election Night, it all came down to Florida.

With Gore surging, and before the Florida Panhandle had finished voting (because it’s in a different time zone than most of Florida), some news agencies called the election prematurely. And they called it for Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat. Later that night, on Nov. 7, 2000, news agencies, including CNN, had to walk back their call.

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Bush’s vote total steadily rose as the night went on. The state had earlier started to trend Republican, in the 1990s. In 1998, it elected Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush, as governor. Since then, Florida has not elected a Democratic governor.

George W. Bush knew this and his campaign argued they would not lose Florida.

At 2:30 a.m., Nov. 8, 2000, NBC News called the election for Bush. When Bush’s vote total dropped to about 250 votes, statewide, news agencies had to say no winner could be declared while state authorities had to kick in its recount procedures.

A month later, Bush eventually won after leading all counts and then winning in the U.S. Supreme Court to get further recounts stopped. He became president.

Democrats never forgot their loss in Florida. They have targeted the state ever since, knowing that the GOP’s Electoral College math gets weak without the Sunshine State.

But in 2004, so many Republicans had moved to the state since 2000, it wasn’t close. President Bush beat Democrat John Kerry by almost 400,000 votes.

In 2008, with the economy tanking, then-Sen. Barack Obama won Florida by 246,000 votes.

It wasn’t until President Obama was on the ropes with a poor recovery, in 2012, that the Republicans made a true bloodied contest of the race again, for the first time since 2000.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney targeted the state and the I-4 corridor, as did Obama. Romney swooped into Ormond Beach along the Atlantic Ocean early, then came back with vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan for a rare joint appearance in mid-October 2012, along Daytona Beach’s shoreline.

[lz_table title=”Florida early voting” source=”State of Florida website”]
As of Nov. 7

|Republicans
Voted by mail, 1.05M
Voted early, 1.43M
|Democrats
Voted by mail, 980440
Voted early, 1.6M
|No Party Affiliation
Voted by mail, 458000
Voted early, 780000
[/lz_table]

Romney saw that Florida had been trending more Republican. He likely noticed that in 2010 the state elected its third consecutive GOP governor, Rick Scott. In the 2014 election, Florida maintained a GOP supermajority in the Florida House of Representatives and a majority in the state Senate.

But in late 2012, Obama and the Democrats had been working the new Orlando-area residents from Puerto Rico. The state had seen an influx of Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens, as their Caribbean economy stalled.

So while Romney flipped two Florida counties from Obama’s column — Volusia (Daytona Beach) and Flagler (Palm Coast), both in Central Florida — he nonetheless came up short. With so many new Democratic voters signed up in the early fall, Obama stunned Romney by winning with less than a 1-percent margin, or about 75,000 votes out of a total 8.4 million votes cast.

Along I-4, the crucial region usually accounts for 43 percent of Florida voters, according to the Tampa Bay Times. That’s a big offset to the area of Miami and Palm Beach, where the lion’s share of Democrats are.

But the Times notes that because Florida’s white voters have been abandoning the Democrats, “Trump stands to win this diverse, mega-battleground state.”

Yet Democrats have been cranking out Hispanic early votes in the Sunshine State, encouraging them to be angry at Trump for his immigration rhetoric. Already, more than 5.3 million Florida voters have cast ballots — more than either candidate got in 2012.

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Bill Dunn, the Republican National Committee’s director of early and absentee voting, told reporters on Monday that Republicans have 1.5 percent more of the early-vote share compared with four years ago. Democrats, meanwhile, have 5 percent less, he added.

The vote-by-mail numbers also favor the Republicans, Dunn said, almost wiping out that 75,000-vote margin that Obama won.

Another problem for the Democrats is that Florida steadily grows every year. In 2015, the state surpassed New York for the title of third largest state, after California and Texas. And in 2015, the state added a net total of 202,510 people coming in from other states.

Many of these new residents are Republicans who have fled high-tax states such as New York, Connecticut, and Illinois. And many of them have settled in Central Florida.

It will be known soon enough, but Florida’s I-4 corridor may well hold the key to the White House.