Hillary Clinton speaks at a rally in Florida. | AP Photo/Andrew Harnik Democrats hope for more excitement among young black voters over Clinton

TALLAHASSEE — As a first-time voter and an African-American woman, Tyresha McClenney checks all the boxes for a Hillary Clinton supporter.

But there’s one descriptor for McClenney that could prove troublesome for Democrats: She's unenthusiastic about the party nominee.


"She does not care about what I stand for,” said McClenney, a 19-year-old education major at Florida A&M University. “She does not care about anybody but big companies, those who support her. … The black community really has no one to vote for besides Hillary, even though she wouldn’t help us, but we’re stuck with who we’re stuck with.”

For voters like McClenney, the most-compelling reason to vote for Clinton is disgust with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, making this election more about nope than hope. And McClenney said she’s a definite nope on Trump, who "does not care about anybody else but himself, and he’s literally a racist.”

The Florida presidential race, according to the averages of the most recent major public polls, is essentially tied. To deny Trump a shot at the White House, Clinton needs to win Florida. And to do that, Clinton needs big minority turnout.

To help do that, President Barack Obama is expected to visit Florida at least two times before Election Day. The Clinton campaign and Obama are also pointing out that Trump fueled the rumors that the first black president wasn’t a natural born U.S. citizen qualified for the Oval Office.

Over the weekend, the campaign sent a group of African-American mothers who lost their children because of gun violence or police-involved incidents — including Trayvon Martin’s mother — to campaign for Clinton in Florida. And former President Clinton, once nicknamed the “first black president,” is embarking on a North Florida bus tour.

The excitement is badly needed for Hillary Clinton because Democrats aren’t seeing it on the ground in a state Obama twice won, thanks in great part to strong turnout among blacks and young voters.

“No one is writing songs for Hillary. Obama had will.i.am. Hillary has nobody like that,” said Henry Crespo, president of the Miami-based Florida Democratic Black Caucus.

“Right now, the vote is against Trump. It’s not for Hillary,” Crespo said. “I still think she’s going to win. But you want your people to be for your candidate not just against the other guy.”

Part of the problem is trying to rekindle the passion that Obama created in the community when he first ran.

Obama enjoyed support from 95 percent of Florida’s black voters in both 2012 and 2008, according to exit polls.

But Clinton isn’t polling quite that well. An average of the last three Florida polls that provided racial breakdowns shows she’s polling less than 85 percent among African-American voters in Florida, and Trump polled around 5 percent. Florida has nearly 1.7 million black voters, who comprise more than 13 percent of all registered voters.

The lack of enthusiasm among young black voters has also been documented in focus groups in swing states.

Though it’s a high bar for Clinton to reach, it’s also part of the math that propelled Obama to win the state twice.

Meanwhile, another FAMU student who showed up at a campus rally with Clinton’s running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, last month said support for Clinton among young blacks is best described as “lukewarm.”

“A lot of older black people are actually strongly in support of her,” said Bryan Anderson, a 19-year-old engineering student at the historically black university. But college-aged blacks had little excitement, with many having been Bernie Sanders supporters and others weary of Clinton because of her husband’s “mass incarceration” policies.

But Clinton really isn’t the deciding factor.

“I really think the race is controlled by Donald Trump, because it seems like more people’s opinions are formed around him,” Anderson. “There is strong anti-Trump sentiment on FAMU’s campus… There’ s not a lot of vocal pro-Clinton, but almost everyone is vocally against Trump.”

Anderson said there’s still a lot of talk about third party candidates Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party) and Jill Stein (Green Party) as they “don’t want to be boxed-in” to voting for Clinton, adding “I think it’s a lot easier for people to get excited about voting for President Obama.”

Obama has started to cast the election in personal terms, saying Saturday that it would be “an insult to my legacy” if black turnout for Clinton falters. Earlier this month, Obama took to the radio waves to make the case for Clinton on Miami’s Hot 105, a radio station popular with African-American’s in South Florida.

Both Trump and Clinton are making moves to reach out to Florida’s black community, which is more diverse than in some other states because some of Florida’s black population originates from Caribbean countries like Haiti and Jamaica. And Clinton’s ad campaign reflects that, launching an ad this month narrated in Creole and running on Haitian radio stations in South Florida.

Trump has also recently made African-American outreach a theme of his campaign, but with mixed results. He met with a group of Haitian-American leaders in Miami two weeks ago.

Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, one of Clinton’s highest-profile black leaders in the state, acknowledged that he saw “varying levels of enthusiasm” for Clinton at a recent event. Though he said “it’s hard to recapture that level of enthusiasm” Obama enjoyed in 2008, he’s confident young black voters will show up to the polls for Clinton.

“While I’d love for them to be excited when they show up to the polls,” citing his own excitement about what Clinton’s policy agenda can offer the black community, “my first job is to make sure they get there,” Gillum said.

Bill Clinton is scheduled to stop in Tallahassee on Friday as part of a bus tour that begins in Jacksonville to the east and continues west through Panama City. Over the weekend, the Mothers of the Movement, the parents who lost their kids to gun violence, hosted Clinton events in Jacksonville. They’ll hold an event in Pompano Beach and a debate watch party Monday night in Deerfield Beach. They’ll then host a voter-registration drive in Opa-Locka near Miami. The group includes Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton.

Clinton’s campaign says it also been holding events in Orlando and South Florida, partnering with African-American owned small businesses and churches to recruit leaders for its volunteer efforts. Clinton volunteers, they say, have also been organizing on the campuses of Florida's Historically Black Colleges and Universities, like FAMU, Edward Waters College and Bethune-Cookman.

Among those efforts were a rally at FAMU headlined by Clinton’s running mate, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, in which he praised the value of HBCUs and started hammering Trump for pushing the “bigoted notion that President Obama wasn’t even born in this country” and tying the Republican to “Ku Klux Klan values.”

Both McClenney and Anderson attended that rally hoping to learn more about the candidate, but left uninspired. McLenney, for instance, noted that she doesn’t believe Clinton has spoken enough about racial inequality and police brutality.

“It’s not something that she continuously says, it’s only like when the media gets a video of a black person getting shot,” she said. “When the media dies down on that, and she’s still saying it … that would help have more trust in her and believe in what she says.”

Added Anderson: “A lot of her attempts to reach out come across as pandering.”