President Donald Trump speaks during a rally May 8, 2019, in Panama City Beach, Florida. | Scott Olson/Getty Images 2020 Elections Ground Zero for Trump 2020 campaign: Florida

Florida isn’t just a state to President Trump’s reelection campaign. It’s an entire region.

In a sign of Florida’s crucial importance to his winning a second White House term, Trump’s campaign announced that the largest swing state in the nation would be considered its own geographical region when it comes to chain of command and allocation of resources.


“We can’t win the White House without winning Florida. Period,” said top Trump surrogate Joe Gruters, chairman of the Florida Republican Party who serves in the state Senate.

“When you look at Florida, at its size and the demographics, it’s like 5 different states,” Gruters added. “There’s no state like this.”

Florida is like a mini-United States due to its migration and development patterns.

North Florida is part of the conservative Deep South. Southwest Florida is also conservative and culturally attuned to the Midwest due to the common link of Interstate 75, which runs from Ohio south to Florida. Liberal Southeast Florida has more in common with the Northeast due to I-95 which runs along the coast. Miami-Dade County at the very bottom of the Peninsula is heavily Hispanic, initially because of immigrants from Cuba who began flocking there after Castro’s revolution in 1959.

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And the I-4 Corridor, in the physical and ideological center of the state, often acts like a fulcrum on which statewide elections balance. In recent years, the Hispanic population in Central Florida has boomed with voters of Puerto Rican descent who typically vote Democratic and help offset the influx of relatively wealthy white retirees who vote Republican.

Of the four most-populous states in the nation, only Florida and its 29 Electoral College votes are perennially up for grabs.

With 14 million registered voters and 10 major media markets, Florida also has a history of close elections. The past five top-of-the-ticket races have been decided by 1.2 percentage points at most, and three statewide races last year for Senate, governor and state agriculture commissioner went to recounts.

Florida also has another unique distinction: It’s Trump’s second home, and one he began to learn more about politically after his narrow win in 2016. Trump’s speech Wednesday night in Panama City Beach was his 39th rally since he first announced his candidacy for president four years ago, excluding fundraisers.

“Pairing Florida with Alabama and Georgia is just a dumb--- move,” said one top Trump campaign advisor. “Florida is just its own thing.”

While Trump rebuilds his campaign here, the Florida Democratic Party, former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg responded to the 2018 elections by announcing plans to register more voters heading into the 2020 election.

Heading up Trump’s efforts in Florida is Alex Garcia, who was most recently chief of staff for Lt. Gov. Jeanette Núñez and led the Republican National Committee’s Hispanic outreach in Florida in 2018. When the Trump campaign began hashing out its plans for 2020, Garcia’s name rose to the top of the list because, one advisor said, “he knows what he’s doing and we needed a Cuban-American from South Florida who knows that world.”

A significant number of Cuban-Americans — who tend to disproportionately vote Republican — were suspected of not voting for Trump in 2016 after his bruising primary fight with the favorite son of the Cuban exile community in Miami, Sen. Marco Rubio. But Rubio and Trump patched up their relationship and the 2018 elections indicated Cuban-Americans came home to the GOP and turned out in force, helping Trump’s favored candidates — Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis — earn their tight victories.

Their wins last year, fueled in part by the RNC’s cutting-edge data operations, helped keep Florida far more red than other swing states in what was an otherwise blue-wave election.

“Why focus so much on Florida? Twenty-nine Electoral College votes. Next question,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, a vocal Trump surrogate and adviser.

Gaetz said the major difference between the 2016 and 2020 election cycles in Florida is that the GOP is Trump’s party now.

“The RNC and Trump campaign in 2016 weren’t on the same page,” Gaetz said. “There was always disagreeing and fighting and jockeying and resentment and hurt feelings. A lot of people who lost during the [Republican primary] campaign with other candidates came to the RNC and made it an establishment enclave. That’s gone.”

