With more than 95 percent of precincts reporting, Donald Trump carried a 140,000 vote lead in Florida. | Getty How Trump won Florida Trump's Florida win was a microcosm of what unfolded nationwide.

Donald Trump’s stunning win in Florida was a microcosm of what unfolded nationwide on Tuesday: Despite losing big to Hillary Clinton in diverse, urban areas of south Florida, Trump dominated in every other corner of the state and outperformed past Republican candidates with older, white and blue collar voters.

With nearly all precincts reporting,Trump carried a nearly insurmountable 134,000 vote lead – 1.4 percentage points -- leaving Democrats crushed and Trump’s team elated with a win that, at one point, they felt wouldn’t come.


“I am so proud of this team! MAGA!,” Susie Wiles, Trump’s Florida campaign manager, said in a text message using the acronym for his “Make America Great Again” slogan. Her tone was a 180-degree turn from early in the evening when she called the day “tense and nerve wracking.”

Despite Hillary Clinton’s large margins in Miami-Dade County and Broward County, Trump ran up the score elsewhere in the state -- from the Deep South Panhandle to the interior of Florida to peninsula’s southwest, a bastion of working-class whites and retirees from the Midwest who pushed him over the top. Trump ran up huge margins with white Florida voters -- who comprise 64 percent of the state’s voting rolls -- and have always been the most reliable voters in terms of turnout. Latino turnout in Miami-Dade and Orange County was just not enough for Clinton.

The ups and downs of the campaign had gnawed at Wiles for weeks when she took over following a campaign shake-up that left her in charge of winning must-win Florida without much of a budget to advertise or turn out Republican voters who tend to disproportionately cast absentee ballots by mail.

In early October, as Hurricane Matthew left part of the state damaged, Wiles realized the campaign had mistakenly not run an absentee ballot program at all. She sounded the alarm and Trump made sure the money was reprogrammed.

Two weeks ago during a meeting at Trump’s golf club in Doral, sources said, Wiles successfully made the case to Trump to spend more on mail, advertising and paid callers to reach out to more Republican absentee ballot voters. Wiles, who managed Gov. Rick Scott’s first campaign, in 2010, would neither confirm nor deny the accounts.

The spending was noteworthy because Trump, notoriously tight-fisted with campaign money, believed that campaigns dropped too much money on TV and get-out-the-vote “ground game” efforts. Instead, Trump had his outsized personality, his knowledge of Florida – his second home where he owns the Palm Beach Mar-a-Lago estate – and his plane that could carry him to any spot on a moment’s notice in Florida, where thousands of supporters materialized for his rallies seemingly spontaneously.

But even with all of the new Trump spending, Hillary Clinton’s campaign began to surge. Black and Hispanic voters cast record numbers of absentee ballots and flocked to the early voting polls.

By Tuesday morning, Democrats felt confident they could ride out the wave of what they knew would be a surge of Republican voters who tend to vote in greater force on Election Day.

About 1 p.m., one source with Clinton’s campaign said, the Democrats were worried. Republicans were crushing the vote in the Panhandle, Southwest Florida and smaller conservative-leaning counties.

“By 5 p.m., our voters showed again,” the source, not authorized to speak by the campaign, said. “We felt pretty good.”

The size of the vote was historic in populous Democratic strongholds like Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties.

But turnout was even higher in Republican areas. By the end of the night, Trump’s lead was so big that, even if turnout in Florida was modeled at 80 percent – far higher than recent elections – Clinton would still not win if she beat Trump by double digits.

Clinton’s campaign was almost reduced to a regional effort confined to the southeastern peninsula. She won a stunning 571,000 more votes than Trump in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale media market, one of ten in the state, according to state elections data posted after midnight. She won three lesser markets: West Palm (a 44,000-vote lead); Gainesville (10,000 more votes) and Tallahassee (11,000 more votes).

Trump blew away records in the Tampa Bay media market, the western edge of the vaunted I-4 corridor that helps swing elections. In the counties composing the market, Trump rolled up a 193,000 vote lead over Clinton. In the Jacksonville market in the northeast, he pulled in 165,000 more votes. He held vote leads of 144,000 in Naples-Fort Myers market, 126,000 in the Pensacola market, 83,000 in the Panama City market and 58,000 in the Orlando market, which anchors the eastern end of the I-4 corridor.

One of Trump’s pollsters, Tony Fabrizio, said the results showed that Clinton exceeded President Obama’s margins in the Florida markets he won in 2012. But Obama only carried Florida by less than a point.

“The difference here is that Trump did far better than Mitt Romney did in almost every county on Election Day,” Fabrizio said.

Trump began Election Day down by at least 57,000 votes to Clinton, according to results posted on the Florida Division of Elections website just after the last Florida polls closed at 7 p.m. Central Time. But after that, as Election Day votes poured in, Trump began building a margin that stretched to more than 100,000 by 8:30 p.m.

By 9:10 p.m., Trump’s margin started to peak at just under 150,000 votes over Clinton. It started to trend down. But not fast enough for the liking of Democrats, who just two hours before were musing about how Trump had lost Florida and therefore the White House.

“So goes Florida, so goes the country,” said Florida’s senior senator, Bill Nelson. “Look at the Hispanics turning out. Often the Hispanics are registered no party affiliation, but the young Hispanics, they’ll be voting for Hillary.”

Nelson and other Democrats also expected Clinton to pad her margin with African-American support.

But while Clinton rolled up votes with non-white voters, white voters appeared to heavily trend toward Trump. And whites are still a majority of Florida’s voter rolls, 64 percent by registration. And they vote in even greater numbers. Their outsized support counteracted the votes of Hispanics and blacks – 16 percent and 13 percent of the voter rolls, respectively.

Trump’s strong showing calls into question those who believed his inflammatory comments about immigration reform would ultimately cost him Florida. Trump’s positions put him at loggerheads with the Spanish-language powerhouse network, Univision, which has studios in the same city as his Doral golf club.

“My theory is that no one can make it to the WH without the Latino vote. It seems @realDonaldTrump has a different theory. See you Nov 8th,” Univision pundit Jorge Ramos wrote June 3 on Twitter, repeating his oft-held maxim – proven wrong in this instance by Trump – about the power of the Hispanic vote.

Florida is also a retiree mecca, with one of the oldest populations in the country. And poll after poll showed that the older the voter, the more they liked Trump.

Most major surveys also showed Trump losing the state – including exit polls on Election Day.

“This was a data defying feat that captured a populist fervor we just couldn’t measure,” said one Republican pollster who was surprised by Trump’s numbers. “The Trump campaign kept talking about the missing white voter. Well, they showed up on Election Day.”

In myriad ways, Trump succeeded despite the conventional wisdom.

Trump’s campaign initially didn’t run a robust absentee-ballot program to get voters to fill out and mail back their votes. He delayed advertising on television – a must for any other statewide candidate. And he refused at times to soften his tone on immigration.

“Trump didn’t run a robust program in South Florida targeting the Hispanic community. You could make an argument that his past statements [about immigration and illegal immigrants] made it impossible,” said Curt Anderson, top adviser to Gov. Scott, the chair of the pro-Trump super PAC. “But when Gov. Scott won, he did so because he really reached out. If Trump had, we wouldn’t be talking right now. He would have Florida in the bag. Maybe he’ll win because of what’s in the countryside, so to speak, or the Panhandle. But this is really doing it the hard way.”

The Florida meltdown is a familiar story for Democrats still scarred by Al Gore’s 2000 loss to George W. Bush in a razor close race. Though Obama won the state twice, both times were by narrow margins built on the strength of his appeal to minority voters in the state.

But the vaunted Obama machine in Florida was no machine without Obama on the ticket. Now Democrats face a bleak prospect of the coming midterm elections, when liberal-leaning voters tend to stay away from the polls while Republicans keep voting. Sen. Nelson’s team fears a showdown with Scott, who has won twice based on the strength of white voters and an outsider message.

Clinton allies expressed increasing optimism about their chances in the state heading into Election Day, energized by early vote results that showed Hispanic turnout exploding. Exit polls reinforced that optimism, showing Clinton with a narrow lead and demographic trends pointing her way.

Trump’s strength was no surprise to Republican Party of Florida Chairman Blaise Ingoglia, who earlier in the day said Republicans had more energized voters who couldn’t wait until Election Day to cast ballots.

“We had the advantage in high-propensity voters and they didn’t,” Ingoglia said. “But ultimately, this is a message to the establishment. It’s an anti-establishment year.”

