Getty Increase in minority voters poses problem for Trump in Florida

The complexion of Florida’s electorate is becoming browner by the day, and that spells trouble for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as he struggles to attract minority voters.

Since the 2012 presidential election, Florida’s voter rolls have grown by 436,000 — and only 24 percent of that increase is from non-Hispanic white voters while non-whites grew by 76 percent, according to new voter registration numbers released in advance of the Aug. 30 primary.


The number of Hispanic voters leaped by 242,000, which was 55 percent of the increase. Latinos are now 15.4 percent of the voter rolls, up from 13.9 percent overall in 2012, when President Barack Obama narrowly carried Florida thanks to the outsized backing of minority voters.

Recent Florida polls show Trump is losing the Hispanic vote by historic margins to Hillary Clinton after the Republican’s incendiary comments about illegal immigrants, which offended a broad array of Latino leaders, including many in his own party.

“If you want to engage in dog-whistle politics, Florida is not the state to do it. There’s no doubt these registration numbers aren’t good for Trump,” said Daniel A. Smith, a University of Florida political science professor who studies Florida voting patterns.

Smith cautioned that Clinton might not excite minority voters the way Obama did. So it would be a mistake to confuse voter registration data with projected Election Day turnout. Smith also pointed out that voter registration data and polling are only snapshots in time, and Florida has a history of close top-of-the-ticket races.

Election-advocacy groups and the campaigns — especially Clinton’s — are just starting to embark on voter registration drives. The rolls will grow far bigger than the current 12.4 million currently registered voters. Oct. 11 is the last day to register to vote for the Nov. 8 general election in Florida.

While the proportion of non-white voters is growing in Florida, non-Hispanic whites still dominate the rolls. They’re 65 percent of the registered voters. However, that’s a decrease of 1.5 points since 2012. In raw numbers, new white voters increased the most since the last presidential election. But a greater percentage of them died or moved out of state.

Trump is handily carrying the white vote, but he’s doing so poorly among minorities right now that he’s losing Florida by about 4 percentage points overall to Clinton, according to the averages of the four Florida polls taken this month. Without carrying Florida, Trump has almost no shot of winning the White House.

Another potential problem for the Republican nominee: a majority of the new white voters might be more inclined to support Clinton than Trump. Of the 1.3 million new non-Hispanic white voters who have registered since 2012, 55 percent are under the age of 50, according to an analysis from the Republican-leaning business group Associated Industries of Florida. And recent polls show voters in this age bracket tend to favor Clinton in Florida by double digits.

Also, Clinton might be doing even better than recent polls let on because they did not oversample Hispanic voters.

In Florida, the Hispanic vote is largely split between Republican-leaning Cuban-Americans in the Miami area — whose numbers are relatively dwindling — and Democratic-leaning non-Cuban Hispanics, especially Puerto Ricans, whose numbers are skyrocketing in the Orlando area. So by under-sampling Florida Latinos, surveys can misreport overall Latino support, often in favor of Republicans because Cuban-American voters tend to have landline phones and are easier to reach for pollsters.

In polls that survey only Hispanic voters, Clinton is dominating Trump. A smartphone-based survey of Florida Hispanics conducted by Florida International University professor Eduardo Gamarra last week showed that Clinton was beating Trump by historic amounts, 74-15 percent. A poll for Univision conducted by Bendixen & Amandi International in July found Clinton winning the Latino vote by 61 to 21 percent.

“The key takeaway is Clinton is already at Obama’s number from 2012 and there are more Hispanics now than then, and it will be a bigger piece of the statewide pie in 2016,” said pollster Fernand Amandi, a Democrat. “Bad news for Trump.”

Hispanic voters have been flocking to the Democratic Party or registering as independents at far-greater rates than with the GOP in Florida. The number of Hispanics registered as de-facto independent voters now exceeds the 501,000 registered Republican Latinos by about 162,000. Democrats have the most Latino voters: 734,000.

Many Latinos began souring on Trump as soon as he jumped in the race in June 2015 and said that many illegal immigrants from Mexico and Latin American are rapists, drug dealers or just people with “problems.” His pledge to build a border wall and deport millions of non-violent illegal immigrants has been portrayed by some Hispanic leaders and media as an attack on all Latinos.

Ryan Tyson, the Republican political director for the AIF business group, said Republicans do have one bright spot in the voter registration numbers: they’re closing the gap with Democrats who used to vastly outnumber them. In many ways, the party registration statistics reflect a re-balancing of the rolls in which conservative Democrats and independents who always voted Republican are registering with the GOP.

Beyond that, Tyson said, the voter registration trends and polling bode badly for Trump at this moment.

“Assuming Trump wins no more of the non-white vote than Mitt Romney did in 2012, he’s going to need to surpass 65 percent of the white vote in order to be able to win. And the last Republican who did that was Ronald Reagan in 1984,” Tyson said, pointing out that Reagan’s re-election that year was historic.

“You can’t lose this much of the non-white vote in a state where the non-white vote is such a big share of the electorate,” Tyson said. “The math just isn’t there.”

