WASHINGTON– In a state famous for its close election results, Tuesday’s presidential vote in Florida wasn’t all that competitive. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was dealt with handily by Republicans who successfully mobilized hundreds of thousands of conservative voters and electrified the Hispanic vote behind a false Biden socialist narrative.
But the real story in Florida is in the margins of victory in key counties.?Democrats have to run up the votes in blue counties like Miami-Dade and Orange County to be able to make up for the reality that 55 out of 67 Florida counties voted for President Donald Trump on Tuesday, most of which went for Trump by margins well into the double digits.
“So much of the election depends on the voting margins in Florida counties,” said Richard Mullaney, director of the Public Policy Institute at Jacksonville University. “The margins need to be big enough in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach to offset the dominance of Republicans in suburban and rural counties.”
Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, the three most populous and most Democratic counties in the state, all stayed Democratic, but by smaller margins; each county’s Republican total was two percentage points or more higher this year compared with 2016. Several counties that historically vote conservative did so at higher rates this year, too. Hendry County is a South Florida area that saw a 4-point increase in its Republican majority vote this election.
Florida is a swing state with 29 electoral votes that oscillates between parties. This year pollsters predicted that Florida would shift left, but instead Trump won the state by almost 400,000 votes or 3.4 points more than Biden, a much wider margin than in 2016, when his margin of victory was only around 100,000 votes or 1.2 points. The state voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Even when three counties—Duval, Seminole and Pinellas—flipped to blue this year, Democrats did not run up the margins in big Democratic counties for these flips to really matter, especially because the Democrats lost some of their advantage in conservative districts.
Miami-Dade County, the largest county in the state with a population of 2.717 million, is the best opportunity for Democrats to run up the vote margins because of its size and historically blue tilt.
On Tuesday, Biden still won the county easily with 53.7% of the vote, but lost significant ground compared with Clinton’s 65.1% of the vote four years ago. That added up to Trump winning 200,000 more votes in Miami-Dade County than he did in 2016.
Biden especially struggled in Miami-Dade County precincts with majority Hispanic populations. For many Cuban and Venezuelan-Americans, Trump’s label of Biden as a socialist struck a chord due to their personal or family history with socialist regimes in Latin America.
“The reality is that the Republican message that Democrats are socialists worked very well,” said Eduardo A. Gamarra, professor of political science at Florida International University. “Many Hispanic people have the perspective of coming from countries that were devastated by socialist regimes.”
While Biden is not a socialist, Trump was able to use progressive figures in the Democratic Party like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to push forward the narrative that Biden was just a figurehead for radicals.
“Joe Biden and the radical left are trying to impose the same system — socialism plus — in America. Biden is a puppet of Bernie Sanders, AOC and the militant left,” said Trump at a Florida rally.
Democrats may continue to struggle with Florida Hispanic voters if the party keeps shifting left.
“If the Democratic Party continues to march towards a more liberal, more socialistic agenda, they’re going to lose a big chunk of the Hispanic vote. There’s just no two ways about that,” said Juan Gonzalez, a Cuban-American attorney and voter living in Miami who considers himself a political moderate.
In the statewide picture, Republicans were able to get their message out so effectively because of a mobilization effort that began after the 2016 election and lasted until Election Day 2020.
The Trump campaign organized massive voter registration initiatives across Florida, resulting in the gap between registered Democrats and Republicans dropping to the slimmest margin in decades— 134,000 voters compared to a gap of 327,000 in 2016.
“The Republican Party of Florida, even during the pandemic, never stopped old-fashioned knocking on doors,” Mullaney said. “They knocked on apparently tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of doors around the state, including many in South Florida.”
When registration ended in Florida 29 days before the election, Republican efforts largely turned to making sure conservative voters showed up at the polls — and they did. Trump earned 5.6 million votes in the state and increased his percentage of the overall Florida vote from 48.6% in 2016 to 51.2% this year.
Lucy Leyva, a 29-year-old Cuban American who immigrated to Miami two decades ago, is a newly registered voter who was galvanized by Republican efforts and rhetoric.
“This year will be my first time voting,” said Leyva. “And it’s because Trump has inspired me to vote. He has been constantly pushed and criticized… but he still looks like a champion.”
There were only three Florida counties, in the central and northern part of the state, where the winning party actually switched — all from Republican to Democratic. Each is an urban center surrounded by great swaths of rural territory: Duval County encompassing Jacksonville, Seminole County holding part of the Orlando metro area, and Pinellas County including Tampa.
But even though the Florida map turned bluer with these counties in 2020, the margins of these wins for Biden were just not enough to flip the entire state.
Pinellas County has been viewed as a “bellwether” in Florida, according to University of Central Florida political science professor Aubrey Jewett. As a coastal county incorporating parts of Tampa, Jewett said, its demographics tend to match Florida as a whole and can indicate how the vote will lean. But not this year. By turning blue, Jewett said, the county wrongly predicted the outcome of the state.
Both Duval and Seminole Counties have been reliable Republican strongholds for decades. In this election, the counties switched from red to blue, but for different reasons.
As the first time Seminole County has voted Democratic since President Harry Truman in 1948, the area’s vote for Biden was historic. But this year, the county voted for Biden by a margin of 2.9 percentage points compared to Trump’s moderate win in the area in 2016 by just 1.5 points.
In Duval County, the flip to blue was more expected because the area has been trending in that direction for years. As home to Jacksonville, one of Florida’s biggest cities, Mullaney said this shift was largely due to the growth of the minority and especially Black voter populations in the city over the last few decades. The county voted for Biden by 3.8 points in 2020, significantly more than the 1.4 points that allowed Trump to win the area in 2016.
All three of these counties are surrounded by deeply conservative districts that tend to vote Republican by huge margins. In the five counties that share a border with Duval County, Trump beat Biden by margins of 27 to 70 points.
“Even though they’re less populated, what would you rather have?” Mullaney asked. “A 20,000-vote margin in Duval County, which is big, or a 26,000 margin out of Nassau County, which is small?” This Republican strategy of concentrating on the rural and suburban areas as their core base paid off.
With the margins of Democratic wins thinning in Hispanic strongholds like Miami and other urban centers across the state, a bluer Florida map masks the underlying reality that more voters across the state are leaning Republican. With rural areas becoming more conservative and urban areas losing their liberal edge, the election could be a sign that Florida is no longer the swing state that it used to be.
But experts aren’t convinced Florida has changed.
“The governor’s race in 2018, Ron DeSantis versus Andrew Gillum, was decided by 33,000 votes,” said Mullaney. “So Florida remains a purple, competitive state, and I predict Florida will remain a competitive battleground state in future elections.”