Battleground Snapshot: Florida

Of all the states that are still realistically in play, pride-of-place belongs once again to the Sunshine State–at least in terms of electoral votes. A person would have to have been living on Mars (or, at the very least, not involved enough in the unfolding political drama to be reading these words) not to know that Florida’s 27 electoral votes constitute a whopping ten percent of the total necessary to secure the White House. So why aren’t both campaigns running more exclusively in such a plum target?
The short answer is, all other things being equal, that it would indeed make a lot more sense to follow Hillary Clinton’s leftover advice from the primary campaigns and focus on fewer, riper targets like Florida and Ohio (for the Democrats) and Pennsylvania (for the Republicans). Trouble is, all things are not equal–especially in Florida. Most people who don’t live in the state (as does this author) think of it in understandably thumbnailed terms as a place disproportionately represented by seniors, Hispanics, and the hospitality industry.

By those metrics, of course, it should be a ripe state for Democratic plucking. However, there are some small problems with this. First, the term “Hispanic” (always offensive, but perhaps nowhere more so than here) would presume to lump citrus farm laborers and light industrial employees in the central portions of the state together with the large and growing population of more Republican-friendly expatriates from Cuba. Mr. McCain’s high-profile waffling on immigration reform probably hurts him with both camps, but the shocking bellicosity of his foreign policy stance probably wins back most of the latter group.

Second, the senior vote, which normally leans Democratic, is complicated by the obvious demographic (not to say ethnic) disparities between the candidates. However, Mr. Obama’s choice of Joe Biden for his running mate, and Mr. McCain’s failure to pick either Charlie Crist or Joe Lieberman, have both tilted the senior vote back toward Obama. In addition, the Obama campaign has recently done a much better job of targeting McCain’s senior-unfriendly positions on Social Security and health care.

Next, the heart-of-Dixie voters are, of course, solidly pro-McCain, and make no mistake: they constitute nearly as sizable a voting bloc here as in other, more demonstrably “southern” states nearby. According to a recently published demographic breakdown, Florida ranks 13th in the nation for military veterans and seventeenth in the nation for both self-identifying “Evangelical Christians” and the percentage of voters registered as Republican. All of these statistics may be attributed to the Dixie vote.

In a “normal” election (is there any such thing?), the three most heavily populated counties in the state, down in the southeastern corner–Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach–are supposed to go heavily for the Democrat (together with the counties containing Daytona, Gainesville, and Tallahassee). The bulk of the state is supposed to go heavily for the Republican, and the gigantic, monolithic suburb that stretches from Tampa Bay to the Atlantic Ocean along the Interstate 4 corridor is supposed to decide who wins. But this year there are signs that the normal coalitions may be significantly more fluid. For example, a ballot initiative that would constitutionally prohibit gay marriage seems to have had little traction in pitching up the culture wars, particularly against the backdrop of a recent story ranking the state third in the country for foreclosures. By contrast, the Jewish senior vote has been comparatively cool in its support for Senator Obama, even after his selection of the wildly popular Joe Biden to be his running mate.

It’s possible to find good news for both candidates in the literal state of the race here as well: One recent report indicated that the in-person early voting has been breaking by an improbably large 2:1 margin for Obama, and a second has suggested that Obama’s lead in this department has already surpassed the built-in advantage that Republicans always enjoy with mail-in absentee ballots. By contrast, the polling for the state has been improbably volatile in the same time period that so many other places seem to be in the middle of a clear blue trend. In addition, the McCain/Palin team is hopeful that the Mahoney scandal, coupled with the emergence of the campaign’s latest narrative–“Obama the redistributor”–will rally their demoralized troops on Election Day.

Under any scenario, Florida may be an unusually big plum (or would that be a big orange?), but it is also an unusually difficult one for either party to count on. With so many factions, so many media markets, so many contradicting agendas and galvanized constituencies, with such high-profile voting irregularities and clunky machines, and no scientifically repeatable metric for anticipating who will turn out and who won’t from race to race (compare 2000 to 2004), it would seem that any candidate basing his or her electoral fortunes on Florida is making an enormous, not to say reckless, gamble.

And if one needs further proof of Mr. Obama’s command of the electoral map, consider that he and he alone may comfortably reach the 270 electoral vote total without the need to recount hanging chads.