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Florida is gonna Florida, 2016 version


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For much of the window between 2000 and 2012, the conversation about Florida, driven at times by Nate Silver himself was “is it really a swing state?” This year, the new narrative is “why isn’t Hillary Clinton crushing it in Florida?” Both then, and now, those statements were and are absurd.

Let’s settle one thing, for good. Until further notice, Florida is an exceptionally competitive swing state. In fact, it is THE most competitive.

When you look at the last four Presidential elections in Florida, Republicans won two, and the Democrats won two.

Over those four elections, roughly 30.5 million voters have had a presidential vote counted – and the difference between Republicans and Democrats? Try 71,000 votes. That is a margin of 0.24 percent.

No other state in the country was closer.

Just look at Tuesday’s New York Times poll, the first poll using the actual file of registered voters. What was the margin? One point.

Florida is just wired to be close. And 2016 will be no different. Here are a few reasons why.

The electorate is closely divided – and both sides are united.

There are 12 million voters, and Republicans and Democrats are separated by just over 2 percentage points. Among the most likely voters, it is even tighter.

Florida used to be a state where, particularly on the Democratic side, partisan loyalty was not a given. But over the last decade, voters have generally migrated to the “correct” party for their voting behavior. According to exit polls, in 2008, both D’s and R’s won 87 percent of their own partisans, in 2012, it was 90 and 92 respectively, and in 2014 governor’s race, 92 and 89 percent. In Tuesday’s NYT poll, they were at 88 and my side at 86. In other words, at this point, particularly with the anger of partisans toward the other nominee, once undecideds go to their camps, both candidates will start with about 90 percent of their own likely voters.

Moreover, like most places, independents aren’t all that independent – and look a lot like the partisans. In ’08, Barack Obama won them by 7. In ’12, by 1.

So let’s do a little math: If the electorate is 40 Dem, 39 Rep, and 21 NPA and both sides get 90 percent of partisans, and Donald Trump wins NPA by same as Obama ’08 (7 percent), well he’d win by the massive margin of 0.5 percent, or just about 40,000 votes. If Clinton wins NPA by Obama ’12 (1 percent), she’d win by a point.

And if Trump carries them by 4, the margin in the NYT race, under my model, we are living 2000 again. Everything is about the margins in Florida.

But Steve, Hispanics …

Just last week, during a trip to D.C., one of the smart ones tried to tell me that Clinton should win here by 6-8 points, because, you know, Hispanics.

Demographics are big, and they are Clinton’s edge, just as they were the driving factor in Obama’s 2012 win. But when I mean big – it means the demographics are a huge advantage to my team this year.

If you take the exit polls as truth, Obama won 61 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, after winning 57 percent in 2008. Given the higher floor among Hispanics in Florida due to the large Cuban Republican population, it is hard to imagine her above +40 among these voters. And again, +40 would be historic, given that in 2004, exit polls said Bush won Hispanics by 12 over Kerry!

So let’s say she wins the same 0.9 percent share of white, and black (African-American and Caribbean) voters – and the latter turn out at their 2012 share, but wins Hispanics by 40 points, instead of 22 – she’d win by 4-5 points. The only way it becomes a blowout is if Clinton can really take back ground with whites, but so far, there’s been no evidence of it happening.

But what if she loses whites by 26? Her lead slips to 3. And if that number drops to 35, so we are talking about a 28-point Trump win among whites? Her lead goes to 1.

In other words, you can see how capitalizing on Hispanics moves the Hillary needle, but in no way does it move the state into some kind of slam dunk.

So what does it all mean?

First, what we are seeing is Florida is being Florida. She has a self-correcting political equilibrium that causes the state to find its competitive center.

Of Florida’s 67 counties, 60 of them have voted for one party or the other in each of the elections from 2000 to 2012. Only one of Florida’s 67 counties, Hillsborough, split it 2-2, voting twice for Bush and twice for Obama.

I can predict with almost total certainty that Democrats will win 11 counties in 2016, Republicans will win 54, and there are only two where I am uncertain – and neither candidate will win either of these two counties by more than 500-1,000 votes.

In a nutshell, the more things change here, the more they stay the same.

Florida has been close since 1992, and will be for years to come. And Trump has to win it, as the last president to go to the White House without Florida was Calvin Coolidge. So pull up a lawn chair and settle in.

Steven Schale is a Tallahasse-based political, communications and government relations strategist. His column appears courtesy of FloridaPolitics.com.