Clinton struggles to gain traction in Florida, despite spending

Hillary Clinton has vastly outspent Donald Trump on TV ads in Florida. Her 57 campaign offices dwarf Trump’s afterthought of a ground game. And Trump is deeply unpopular among Hispanics, who account for nearly one in five Florida voters.

Despite these advantages, Clinton is struggling in the Sunshine State, unable to assemble the coalition that gave Barack Obama two victories here, and offering Trump a broad opening in a road to the White House that not long ago seemed closed to him. Trump is pressing down hard to win the state, campaigning in Miami on Friday and in Fort Myers on Monday, after a rally in Pensacola recently.

Recent polls show Clinton is not earning the same support among Hispanics, young people or white voters that Obama captured when he eked out a Florida victory four years ago in the country’s most hard-fought swing state.

Clinton could afford to lose here and still find other routes to victory. Trump’s electoral map is narrower; he must have Florida in his column. But as the most populous and one of the most racially diverse battleground states, Florida is also a bellwether for the nation: a candidate’s struggles here often are mirrored elsewhere.

Polling in swing states that Clinton once led, prompting predictions a month ago of an Election Day romp, now show Trump closing the gap or slightly ahead, including in Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada.

“If she underperforms what Obama did in ’12, she’s not going to carry Florida,” said Fernand Amandi, a Democratic strategist in Miami. A poll his firm conducted for Univision, released last week, showed Clinton winning 53 percent of Florida Hispanics, compared with the 60 percent who voted for Obama four years ago.

After several weeks in which Trump attempted to sand off some of his rough edges and attacked Clinton for portraying half his supporters as “deplorables,” the share of Florida voters who view the candidates unfavorably is now the same for Trump as for Clinton, according to a CNN/ORC poll.

In Miami on Friday, Trump departed from scripted remarks and said Clinton’s bodyguards should disarm and “see what happens to her,” a comment that could renew voters’ doubts about his fitness for the presidency.

With 20 million people and 10 major media markets, Florida is a place of vast diversity and contrasts that is a challenging puzzle for any statewide campaign.

The traditional playbook has been for Democrats to run up the score in South Florida, with its large nonwhite population, and for Republicans to rack up votes in the conservative northern panhandle.

That leaves Central Florida, and especially Tampa on the Gulf Coast, as one of the state’s most contested swing areas. The booming region has the largest share of registered voters statewide, with one in four voters in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, registered as independents.

“The old saying is: ‘As goes Hillsborough County, so goes Florida,'” said Susan MacManus, a political scientist at South Florida University in Tampa. No candidate since 1960 has won Florida without carrying the county.

Within this swing region, an epicenter of swing voters is the explosively growing New Tampa. It is a community of affordable subdivisions reached by grandiose landscaped entrances off a 12-lane highway, attracting young professionals with families. In interviews, undecided voters there seemed uncertain if they would cast ballots at all.

Kish Nathan, 45, a computer professional born in India, voted for Obama four years ago. He has ruled out Trump, but is unenthusiastic about Clinton. “I might not even vote,” he said.

Leo Lewis, 51, was reading political news on a laptop outside a Starbucks. Trump scares him, Lewis said. Clinton, he believes, is dissembling about her health. He, too, is considering sitting out the election. “The world has gotten so bad no matter what you do, no one’s going to fix it,” he said.

Some strategists believe the pool of persuadable voters this year is shallower than in the past, which may explain why the tens of millions in TV ads run by Clinton and her allies in the state have failed to give her a noticeable advantage. (Trump and outside supporters have spent about $8 million.)

Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, D-Fla., said recently that the Clinton advertising push was a failure.

“You give us $22 million, and I’ll produce more votes for you than a damn television ad,” Hastings told a meeting of Democrats, arguing that television does not reach young voters.

Clinton’s bulwark is her vast organizing effort, currently focused on registering new voters and signing up volunteers. But Republicans have not been idle: Field teams working for the Republican National Committee and state party have cut the Democrats’ advantage with registered voters in half since 2012. It is now just 258,000 active voters.

The Florida Democratic Party pointed out that of the 146,000 newly registered Hispanic voters this year, only 15 percent are Republicans.

“I want to make sure I give my vote to Hillary,” said Valesca Barilles, who registered for the first time with a Clinton volunteer outside a Dollar Tree store in Tampa last week. Born in Honduras, Barilles, an assistant bank branch manager, said of Trump, “I love the USA, and I don’t think we need someone to come and ruin it.”

After poor grass-roots efforts during the primaries, Trump seems to be belatedly getting a ground game together. When he spoke in Pensacola, where the crowd was asked to text “Trump” to a number, some 3,500 followed up on a reply message about how to check their voter registration, according to the campaign, and 1,400 signed up to volunteer.

“There is an army of RNC volunteers and Trump volunteers crawling every part of this state every day,” said Susan Wiles, Trump’s state director.

Trump must find a way to turn out a wave of white supporters who are infrequent voters. The campaign concedes that Mitt Romney’s field staff members four years ago drove conventional white turnout in Florida about as high as possible.

But Anna Greenberg, a Democratic strategist and pollster based in Washington, said the ability to increase the white vote in Florida was limited, and therefore Trump could not win the state, given his toxicity among nonwhite voters.

“With the exception of the Tallahassee area, you don’t have the same kind of down-and-out blue-collar whites that you see in the Rust Belt,” Greenberg said.

In this state of razor-tight contests, every small demographic shift is closely watched. Obama won 37 percent of the state’s white vote in 2012. Clinton is falling short of that number in head-to-head polls with Trump.

“If she’s getting 34, 33, 35 among whites in Florida, I’m going to start to buy a lot of antacids,” said Steve Schale, who ran Obama’s Florida race in 2008 and was a senior adviser in 2012.

Clinton could make up for the erosion among whites by gaining with Hispanic voters. But so far, polls show Clinton falling short of Obama’s 60 percent share of Florida Hispanics in 2012.

“Against the candidate perceived to be the most hostile to Hispanic voters in modern presidential politics, why is she not exceeding where Barack Obama was?” Amandi, the Miami pollster, asked.

He criticized the Clinton campaign for beginning Spanish-language advertising only this month and for not doing a forum with either Univision or Telemundo.

“I think it’s too early to hit the panic button, but if these numbers by mid-October aren’t at or slightly above where Obama was, there’s reason to be concerned,” he said. “She’s going to need all these votes to carry Florida.”

And Florida, he added, “is the whole enchilada.”