President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign took the unusual step of publicly releasing a strategy memo, contending Florida “is a winnable one for President Biden, especially given Trump’s weak, cash-strapped campaign, and serious vulnerabilities within his coalition.”
The memo is not entirely convincing. Without polls that show Biden ahead of or tied with Donald Trump in the Sunshine State, any argument about winnability will be based on hypotheticals. The memo acknowledges, “Florida is not an easy state to win.” And as Politico Playbook rightly notes, “We’ll believe the Biden campaign believes this when it runs its first TV ads in Florida, which was not included in its recent $30 million ad buy.” (The press release from the Biden campaign indicates that its new abortion-themed ad “Trust” is being placed on digital platforms in Florida but not on Florida TV stations.)
Whether to compete for the Sunshine State is a vexing challenge for political strategists. Playing in the incredibly populous and diverse peninsula is not cheap. In 2020, the Biden and Trump campaigns spent a combined $264 million just on Florida advertising. Media mogul Michael Bloomberg kicked in another $100 million on Biden’s behalf.
If Florida’s 30 Electoral College votes (one more than in 2020) are within reach, making the ad buys is an easy call. Placing that bet on a long shot? Not so easy.
In 2020, Democrats had more money to burn than Republicans and, after Biden won, rationalized the hundreds of millions spent. They claimed it forced the relatively cash-constrained Trump to sweat Florida and spend less in other battleground states where Trump fell short.
Pulling off that trick twice might not be easy. If the Trump campaign believes Florida is no longer purple, a Florida feint won’t work well.
Is Florida red or purple?
Generally, states that have flipped in recent presidential elections, with margins of around 5 points, are classified as swing states. No presidential candidate has won Florida with a margin bigger than 5.7 since George H. W. Bush in 1988, with Bill Clinton winning it once and Barack Obama twice. (And Al Gore probably would have won it in a fair contest.) Trump won it twice, but only by 1.2 points in 2016 and 3.4 in 2020. These data points put Florida in the purple camp.
The red argument points to the rightward trend in the famously ornery and elderly state, both longstanding and recently accentuated. Democrats haven’t won the governorship since 1994 or a statehouse chamber since 1996. Not only did Trump grow his Florida margin in 2020, but he also did so in an election year when nearly every other state ticked bluer. Ron DeSantis won the 2018 governor’s race by less than half a percentage point, governed like a right-wing lunatic, then was rewarded in 2022 with a nearly 20-point landslide re-election.
The Biden campaign memo was released the same day as the Florida Supreme Court decision upholding a near-total abortion ban while also placing an abortion rights amendment on the November ballot. Reproductive freedom is central to the case that Florida can be purple again.
Pointing to a poll showing that 62 percent of Florida voters support the referendum (slightly more than the 60 percent needed to win), the memo predicts the abortion issue “will help mobilize and expand the electorate in the state.” Given national trends since the Dobbs decision, with Democrats overperforming in the 2022 midterms and reproductive freedom advocates pitching a perfect game on state referenda, that’s a plausible conclusion.
The memo also argues that Biden is “uniquely strong with seniors, an influential, reliable, and large voting group” and accuses Trump and Senator Rick Scott (who is up for re-election this year and only won by a tenth of a percentage point in 2018) of plotting to cut Social Security and Medicare.
And the memo claims that Florida voters are already turning away from “MAGA politics,” citing how “Donna Deegan, a Democrat, won the [2023] Jacksonville mayoral race for just the second time in the last three decades, flipping the county by 15 points” and, in a January 2024 special election, “Tom Keen won a battleground State House District that had previously been won by [Governor Ron] DeSantis by 13 points.”
All of these points from the memo come with counterpoints.
The 62 percent supermajority in favor of the abortion rights referendum, from a November poll by the University of North Florida, is buoyed by 53 percent support among Republicans. Many of these pro-choice Republicans are not single-issue voters—if they were, they wouldn’t be Republicans—and will still vote for Trump. As David Weigel of Semafor argued on X this week, “There is a long record in Florida of progressive ballot measures passing as Dems lose all the key races.”
Biden may show strength with seniors in some national polling, but that has yet to materialize in Florida fully. Plus, he has weaknesses with youth voters to worry about. In a March poll of Florida voters by WMNF radio, Trump led by 6 points overall and led in every age group. WMNF didn’t release all the crosstab data, only emphasizing Trump’s oddly wide 18-point lead among voters under 30. In a bar graph, Trump’s lead among voters 70 and up looks small, which can be taken as a victory for Biden, considering in the 2020 Florida exit poll, he lost seniors by 10 points.
And the relevance of the two local elections mentioned may be overstated, as both Duval County (mainly composed of Jacksonville) and Keen’s House District 35 voted for Biden over Trump in 2020.
Nevertheless, it would be unfair to say that the Biden campaign memo is off-target. Left out of it is an indicia of voter backlash to Florida’s hard-right turn: DeSantis’s tanking job approval ratings.
According to polls from Florida Atlantic University, DeSantis’s approve-disapprove numbers went from 54-43 in July 2023 to 50-49 in November 2023.
Polling from the progressive Florida Communications and Research Hub shows an even steeper approve-disapprove collapse throughout 2023, from 60-40 in February to 50-49 in May to 45-52 in December.
DeSantis fares relatively better in Morning Consult’s periodic sampling of all 50 state governors, with a 51-45 spread in data released this past January. But since the beginning of 2023, his approval number in that poll still dropped 5 points, and his disapproval shot up 7 points.
Morning Consult said its decline was “driven almost equally by independents and Republicans.” However, in the FAU crosstabs, DeSantis’s approval over the latter half of 2023 went up among Republicans and down among independents and Democrats. Either way, we can’t attribute DeSantis’s fall mainly to lost support among Trump diehards following his failed presidential bid. He’s lost support from the middle.
Perhaps getting his clock cleaned in the presidential primary indirectly affected Floridians by stripping DeSantis of his cocksure strut and refocusing attention on his weak record. The memo lists not only DeSantis’s far-right record on social issues but also his failure to rein in Florida’s high housing and healthcare costs.
The memo’s focus on abortion is hardly misplaced. While voters can approve the abortion rights constitutional amendment without supporting Democrats up and down the ballot, Florida Republicans must defend one the most severe abortion bans in the country.
The state Supreme Court ruling came down this week, but the six-week ban DeSantis signed doesn’t go into effect until May 1. (The ruling immediately enacted a previously passed 15-week ban and cleared the way for the stricter ban to supersede it.) At six weeks of pregnancy, many women don’t even know they are pregnant. When this law hits Florida, it’s going to hit hard. And being a peninsula bordering only Alabama and Georgia, there’s no easy drive to a legal abortion state.
Trump has been scrambling to have it both ways on abortion, taking credit for overturning Roe v. Wade to galvanize Republican base voters while criticizing total or near-total bans to woo swing voters. During the primary, he called DeSantis’s ban a “terrible mistake,” but on Tuesday, he dodged a question about it, saying he would make a statement next week. The Biden campaign is well positioned to squeeze Trump on this issue, rightly blaming him for creating the Supreme Court that scrapped Roe and made “terrible” bans possible, and potentially–if Trump continues to lurch to the middle awkwardly—stoking a rift between Trump and anti-abortion absolutists in the Florida GOP. (Senator Scott is also on record supporting DeSantis’s six-week ban.)
Can abortion prompt a 3.4 percentage point shift in the presidential race and flip the state to Biden? The data from the 2022 midterms is uneven. Republican governors in Georgia and Texas were re-elected in 2022 despite polls showing opposition to their abortion bans. But abortion does appear to have helped accelerate the bluing of Arizona, where in the 2022 gubernatorial race, Democrat Katie Hobbs edged MAGA Republican Kari Lake by less than a point, following two double-digit victories by Republican Doug Ducey.
One could argue that considering all of Lake’s nutty views and behavior, abortion wasn’t the sole reason why Hobbs won. True, but abortion won’t be the only factor impacting Florida. DeSantis’s increasingly unpopular, over-caffeinated conservatism has roiled Florida on several fronts ahead of his six-week ban becoming a reality.
Also, remember that a 3.4-point statewide margin shift between presidential elections is hardly unusual. In 2020, 23 states had margin shifts of at least 3.4 points. That includes two states that flipped (Arizona and Georgia) and others that didn’t flip but were eyed by the campaigns (Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Texas).
As long as Biden is outpacing Trump in the fundraising war, and as long as Biden doesn’t collapse in Florida trial heat polling, early investment in Florida makes sense. A reasonable next step would be a bona fide Florida TV buy in the aftermath of the six-week ban going into effect to see if that can spark some ground-level tectonic plate movement and tighten the Florida polling. Some poll movement would likely spook the Trump team and necessitate a redeployment of financial resources.
I understand the chronic pessimism about Florida; I voiced it myself after DeSantis’s 2022 blowout. But in politics, pendulums do swing, and sometimes swing hard. Having already swung hard to the right, Florida may be ready to swing back.
