The strange story behind the Democrats' failure to flip Florida
November 11, 2020 in Blogs
One day after Florida election officials announced that President Trump and Republican candidates had so badly beaten Democrats up and down the ballot that pundits were asking if Florida had become an irreversible red state, Joe Biden’s Florida campaign held a statewide conference call.
“There was a Florida campaign call today that said Florida allowed us [Biden] to win the Midwest,” said Ion Sancho, a retired longtime Florida Democratic county official, who cringed at the explanation. “It felt like a setup.”
“Biden didn’t go all-in—in South Florida,” said Sancho, who ran elections in the state’s capital county for nearly three decades. “It was a feint to draw Trump’s eyes off of the real prize, which was the three rust-belt states. He never planned to do it [win Florida] from day one. The Midwest was the prize all along.”
Biden’s feint was helped by ex-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who in mid-September announced that he would spend $100 million for late-breaking media and voter-contact efforts in Florida. The feint led Trump, whose campaign was cash-poor, to concentrate its spending and rallies in Pennsylvania and Florida, especially in South Florida’s metro areas where a vast electorate including diverse Latino voting blocs lived.
“The way I look at this [result] is that the effort here in Florida caused the Trump campaign to spend time, money and resources that could have made a difference in states closely won by Biden,” said Larry S. Davis, a Hollywood, Florida, attorney who this summer helped litigate a Florida Democratic Party lawsuit to preserve digital voting records, in case the state’s 2020 results were contested.
“This was a battle we lost, but it helped win the war—a war this country could not afford to lose,” Davis said.
Nobody likes to hear their hard work campaigning was not a priority. But Sancho’s observations underscore what Democrats must do to win in big and complex states like Florida. His experience also contrasts with neighboring Georgia, where he has seen Democrats and voting rights activists steadily organize for years, and where Biden narrowly beat Trump (in a vote that will be recounted) and where two U.S. Senate runoffs will decide control of that body and much of Biden’s agenda.
“In Georgia, the community of color groups have been active,” said Andrea Miller, executive director of the nonprofit Center for …read more
Source: ALTERNET
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