Is Biden in hot water in the Sunshine State?
Democrats are turning out to vote in person at lower rates than Republicans in Miami-Dade, which is Florida’s biggest county, after the campaign of Democrat candidate Joe Biden tamped down its field operations in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Operatives with the Biden team told Politico that door-to-door efforts for Biden were on pause and without funding for months leading up to Election Day, even though the campaign has had record-breaking fundraising hauls.
“We did not get the kind of funding for different vendors who would do that type of work until late in the campaign,” said Representative Frederica Wilson, who represents Miami’s heavily black congressional district.
According to state data released Friday, Miami-Dade has seen 152,964 registered Republicans cast early ballots, compared to 146,371 Democrats.
Democrats in the county, however, lead Republicans in mail-in ballots 208,803 to 116,040.
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To make up for the campaign’s deficient ground game, Democrat vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris is hosting an event tailored to black men before Election Day, while the NAACP is organizing “Souls to the Polls” events at black churches.
Florida is considered the nation’s largest swing state and is a must-win for either candidate to win on November 3.
Last week, President Trump and Joe Biden held simultaneous rallies in the state, with the president hosting a Make America Great Again Rally in Hillsborough County in Tampa, while Biden hit up deep-blue Broward County, which boasts 310,000 mostly Democratic Black voters.
But Biden appears to be lacking when it comes to the support he needs among blacks.
“We’re seeing some gaps in young Black voter turnout,” Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC, told the Miami Herald. “The top five counties with the largest number of Black voters have some under-performance. In Broward and Duval, it’s off by a percentage point…. In Miami Dade, it’s off by 5 percentage points. There’s a lot of work to do.”
“There is not the turnout here [Miami] in the black community that I’ve seen in the past. I can speculate about the reasons, but the fact is it remains concerning,” Senator Oscar Braynon, a Black Miami Democrat, told Politico.
Moreover, the outlet notes that the Biden campaign is also having trouble with the Hispanic vote in Miami.
Among Hispanic voters, who make up nearly 70 percent of the county’s population, the deficit is even bigger — 9 points.
“Democrats have a big turnout issue in the Hispanic community in Miami-Dade,” said Florida-based Democratic data analyst Matt Isbell. “Hispanic Democrat turnout is only 48% while the Republican Hispanics are at 57%. This large of a gap doesn’t exist in Broward or Orange. It is a Miami problem.”
Polling of Florida’s Hispanics has been all over the board. A Mason-Dixon poll conducted for Telemundo and released Thursday showed Biden leading Trump 48-43 percent among Florida Hispanics, a margin that could be disastrous for Democrats.
A veteran Democratic organizer from South Florida said winning Florida looks increasingly difficult as Republicans turn out in big numbers and the pace of Democratic momentum in casting early ballots slows. It shows the party is exhausting its high-propensity voters.
“Look, our people hate Trump and they like Biden. But not enough of them love Biden,” the organizer said. “It also doesn’t help that the campaign reacted so late here and they didn’t help us with voter registration when we needed to be doing it.”
A recent Rasmussen poll suggested that black support for the president is nearly 50 percent. Historically, Rasmussen has been one of the more reliable polling outfits. As for its methodology, the organization reports that daily “tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis.”
“The margin of sampling error for the full sample of 1,500 Likely Voters is +/- 2.5 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence,” Rasmussen also explains.
Yet even if Republicans win just a third of the black support Rasmussen finds, it could spell doom for Biden. The Democrat Party relies on its “Rainbow Coalition” of overwhelming support among minority voters in order to win presidential elections. Even a few points of erosion of that majority severely weakens Democrats’ chances of victory on Election Night.
