Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

Rosemary Hernandez lives in a Florida suburb called The Hammocks, a mostly Hispanic subdivision of pastel stucco homes built on former swampland south of Miami. There are palm trees in the yards, SUVs in the driveways and “Bienvenidos” on the front doormats. Property values have rebounded nicely since the financial crisis of 2008. The job market has bounced back, too, and Hernandez is working as a human resources manager.

Hernandez voted against Barack Obama twice, because she doubted his eloquent promises and feared he would make the kind of mess in her adopted country that big-talking politicians have made in her native Venezuela. But she now thinks her fears were a bit silly. America has enjoyed a record 75 consecutive months of job growth, cutting the unemployment rate in half. As the Obama era winds down, she thinks things are going pretty well.


Her new fear is another big talker named Donald Trump. She gets the visceral appeal of Trump’s say-anything political incorrectness, but she finds the angry, blustery things he actually says—about Hispanics, the economy and the world—disturbing. “Extremes scare me,” she says. “Trump is too hot.” In November, she says, she’ll reluctantly vote for Hillary Clinton over an impulsive, divisive primal scream of a candidate.

That’s a problem for Trump, because to win the White House, he most likely will need to win his part-time home state of Florida—and to win Florida, he most definitely will need the distinct minority of Hispanic voters who rejected Obama twice.

But the Rosemary Hernandez view of the surprise Republican nominee doesn’t just illustrate the daunting electoral math Trump will face this fall in up-for-grabs states like Florida; it also frames the real referendum of 2016, which is less about the official race, Trump versus Clinton, than the deeper clash of Trump’s version of the United States versus Obama’s. Ever since he started questioning the first black president’s birthplace in 2011, Trump has been campaigning against Obama and the kind of country he represents. The contrasts between the bombastic developer/reality TV host and the technocratic community organizer/law professor on style and substance could not be starker. It’s hot versus cool, emotional versus methodical, division versus inclusion, blunt versus measured. It’s also nostalgia for the past versus confidence in the moment, anger over a fallen nation that needs to be made great again versus pride in a great nation that’s getting greater. This time, Trump is the outsider clamoring for Change We Can Believe In, as he vows to roll back not just Obamacare but the entire Obama era.

Florida seems like just the place for a swaggering no-no-drama billionaire with a flair for self-marketing to make that case: a Republican-controlled, no-tax kind of state with a penchant for flash and outlandishness.

But even here, it’s unclear how Trump’s sales pitch for an America that once was can produce a majority in the America that now exists. This is a diverse state, with an electorate that has gone from 4 percent to 18 percent Hispanic in a generation, and it is demographically even more Obama-friendly than it was when Obama won the presidency twice. It’s booming, home to four of America’s 10 fastest-growing metro areas, generating a million new jobs since 2009. It’s welcoming, too, a destination for a record 100 million visitors last year and home to more than 4 million immigrants, renowned for its come-hither economic ethos that couldn’t be less about building walls. Florida’s lunch isn’t being eaten by foreign powers exploiting bad trade deals that Trump claims are killing jobs; in fact, 1 in 5 of its jobs relies on international trade. It has problems—bad schools, overwhelmed infrastructure, severe inequality, rising seas that threaten its 1,300 miles of coastline—but it simply doesn’t resemble Trump’s portrait of America as an Obama-fueled garbage fire.

Of course, Trump’s ability to paint that portrait with his original brand of showmanship helped him shock the world in the Republican primary. He ran as a photographic negative of the Democratic president, thrilling a GOP electorate dominated by older white Obama-haters, trashing the Obama economy as an unmitigated disaster and the president as a stupid weakling who prefers Mexican undocumented immigrants, Muslim terrorists and Black Lives Matter thugs to other Americans.

Swing State | Trump’s part-time home of Florida might seem like a welcoming place for the flashy billionaire. But it also has fast-growing cities and is 20 percent foreign-born. In Tampa, the Museum of Art, left, debuted a new building in 2010, and the historic Ybor City neighborhood, pictured above, has a large immigrant population. | Christopher Morris for Politico Magazine

Florida was once expected to choose in its March primary between its favorite sons, former Governor Jeb Bush or Senator Marco Rubio, but instead Trump swept all but one of its 67 counties. And he has stuck with his in-your-face strategy as the presumptive nominee, portraying Obama as a terrorist sympathizer, making little effort to woo the multicultural coalition that twice delivered the state to Obama. In Florida and other key 2016 battlegrounds, Trump’s theory of the case is that Americans nervous about their physical and economic security are desperate for a winner to remind them what winning feels like, and he knows that Hillary Clinton is the second most unpopular major-party nominee in modern history.

Unfortunately for Trump, he’s the most unpopular. At a time when Obama’s approval rating has surpassed 50 percent, despite the loathing of the Republican base, Trump’s has dwindled below 35 percent. Gas prices, crime, teen pregnancy, foreclosures, oil imports, the budget deficit and the uninsured rolls, as well as joblessness have all plunged on Obama’s watch. Meanwhile, the Hispanic share of the electorate is increasing every day, which would have posed a challenge to the candidate promising mass deportations and a massive wall even if he hadn’t launched racist attacks on a Latino judge. While some pundits seem to view Trump’s bombs-away bluster as an irresistible force for low-information voters, it’s already alienating natural allies like Rosemary Hernandez, while galvanizing opponents who otherwise might not bother to vote.

Florida produced Obama’s narrowest victory in 2012, and if Trump can’t flip its 29 electoral votes, he’ll probably need to flip long-shot states like Michigan and Pennsylvania that Republicans haven’t won since 1988. He can take heart that Florida’s GOP governor, Rick Scott, is also a brash businessman and political outsider—but then again, Scott barely won during the low-turnout GOP romps of 2010 and 2014. And Scott has since become deeply unpopular, while the state electorate has become far less hospitable to Republicans in high-turnout presidential years.

Florida has always been fertile ground for real estate moguls with big mouths and big plans—naturally, Trump owns an over-the- top Palm Beach estate and a posh golf club in Doral—but it also is a perfect illustration of why he faces such an uphill climb to the White House. It may be a unique fantasyland of sketchy deals and weird tans, but demographically, economically and even culturally, it looks and feels more like Obama’s America than Trump’s.

***

Trump’s most glaring problem, especially in Florida, is his extreme unpopularity among Hispanics, one of the fastest-growing slices of the electorate. Republicans tend to do better with Hispanic voters in Florida than elsewhere, especially among conservative Miami-area Cuban exiles who have seen the GOP as the stronger anti-Communist party. George W. Bush actually won Hispanics in Florida when he carried the state by 5 points in 2004. Even Mitt Romney pulled a semi-respectable 39 percent of Florida Hispanic voters (versus only 27 percent nationally) when he lost the state by a single point in 2012. But that is not an encouraging trend line for Republicans. And Trump could be a uniquely toxic Republican.

After the Romney defeat, establishment Republicans warned that demographic shifts could keep their party out of the White House forever if it does not back immigration reform and do a better job of reaching out to Latinos. But GOP primary voters rejected that advice, siding with Trump and his “we don’t have a country” restrictionism. Now Trump has gone way beyond Romney’s bungled “self-deportation” suggestion, actually calling for mass deportation. His most notable outreach to Hispanics has consisted of tweeting a picture of himself eating a taco bowl.

Out of Business | Orlando and Tampa have thriving Latino business communities that include many conservatives. But Trump’s candidacy has given some of them pause. Roberto Torres, 38, above right, is an immigrant from Panama who owns an apparel shop in Tampa. He describes himself as a George H.W. Bush Republican but says Trump’s message “has absolutely not resonated with me.” Yanet Herrero, also 38, of Orlando, immigrated from Cuba at age 7 and now owns a cleaning company she describes as a “Christian business.” She’s a lifelong Republican who typically encourages her 200 employees to vote, but she cites Trump’s not-so-subtle lack of personal faith as a turnoff: “We were ready for a Republican president, but are we ready to see this type of presidency? I don’t think that we are.” | Christopher Morris for Politico Magazine

At first blush, Trump’s immigration policies might not seem disqualifying for a Florida audience. A majority of the state’s 4.8 million Hispanics are either Cubans, who get special legal status once they set foot in America, or Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens, so walls and deportations aren’t necessarily relevant to their lives. But Hispanics in both parties describe Trump as an inadvertently unifying figure for a community traditionally fractured by national origin, income and immigration status. He has crossed lines of disrespect that always seemed uncrossable, openly describing “the Hispanics” as a “them” distinct from the American “us.”

At a Republican focus group last fall, a Cuban-American from conservative Seminole County was asked about Trump’s description of Mexicans who cross the border illegally as rapists. “He’s calling all of us Hispanics rapists,” the man replied. A GOP strategist who was there said he’d never seen that kind of solidarity before. Similarly, at a Democratic focus group this spring, an Orlando-area Puerto Rican was asked about Trump’s deportation policies. “He wants to go after Mexicans now, but we’ll be next,” the man said. A Democratic strategist who watched the session said he had never seen such hostility toward a national candidate.

One more story, this one from Carmen Dominguez, a Puerto Rican homebuilder from Winter Park who happens to be my mother-in-law. She’s lived in Central Florida for 38 years, and even though the region used to be overwhelmingly Anglo—my wife was the only “Spanish” kid in her class—she never faced any overt anti-Hispanic sentiment. But in May, some jerk at the grocery store told her to go back to her own country, an error (tactical as well as factual, if you know Carmen) that she blames on Trump emboldening racists to express their ugly feelings without shame. She’s a registered Republican, but she wouldn’t vote for Trump at gunpoint.

Image Photo Gallery: Is This Trump’s America? (Click to open) | Christopher Morris for Politico Magazine

Florida Republicans now control every state office and both houses of the state legislature; they know how to get anti-tax, pro-gun voters to the polls. Even though Trump has been slow to start fundraising or organizing, he’ll have a huge advantage in the white Republican strongholds of North Florida, which is really part of the Deep South, and southwest Florida, which is dominated by conservative snowbirds and transplants from the Midwest. But he’s looking at trouble in the I-4 corridor of Central Florida, where statewide elections tend to be decided. Demographics here are changing at an almost unimaginable pace: About 1,000 Puerto Ricans fleeing their island’s financial crisis have been arriving every week. Osceola County election supervisor Mary Joe Arrington told me she recently discovered 2,500 new voters, almost all Democratic or unaffiliated, on the rolls in a single Kissimmee-area neighborhood that was already built out. She realized they were mostly Puerto Ricans who had moved in with their extended families, and she’s added a new polling location for November.

The landscape looks even bleaker for Trump in densely populated and heavily Hispanic southeast Florida, which already leaned Democratic but may be trending toward a landslide this fall. Even before Trump, the Hispanic politics of the area were changing fast, no longer dominated by cutthroat who-hates-Castro-the-most fights over Cuba that favored Republicans, shifting toward bread-and-butter issues like jobs and health care that have favored Democrats. In 2012, the Obama campaign ran ads boasting about Obamacare on Spanish-language TV in the Miami area—and nowhere else in the entire country. The heavily Cuban community of Hialeah is the national leader in Obamacare signups.

And Trump’s unpopularity among Hispanics vastly exceeds his party’s. It’s not a coincidence that the only county Trump lost in his primary was Miami-Dade, the most heavily Hispanic county in the state, or that many prominent Miami-area Republicans—including not only Jeb Bush but Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Carlos Curbelo, as well as the city and county mayors—have refused to endorse him. Former Rep. Joe Garcia, a Cuban-American Democrat who is trying to regain the seat he lost to Curbelo in 2014, thinks Trump can create the kind of political tipping point in Florida that Pete Wilson produced in California, when the Republican governor’s support for a 1994 ballot initiative cracking down on undocumented immigrants pushed his state into the Democratic column for a generation. Garcia has a sly sense of humor about politics, which he calls “the art of turning self-delusion into mass delusion,” but he believes Trump is pushing it in an ugly direction.

Worth Its Salt? | Randy Bennett, 66, above, the supervisor at the private Carolina Marine Terminal, takes a different view of the trade argument. Rather than free trade hurting American manufacturers, he says it makes it easier to get the cheap bulk imports they need, like the urea salt above. “Start talking tariffs,” he warns, “and it would affect everything—the whole economy. These are all components for so many things that are a part of our everyday life.” | Christopher Morris for Politico Magazine

“When you tell that woman cleaning toilets that her kids aren’t real Americans, she’s going to vote against Republicans the rest of her life,” Garcia says.

Garcia is himself a symbol of the area’s shifting political winds. He once ran the Cuban-American National Foundation, a powerful hardline exile group that turned normalizing relations with Cuba into a third-rail issue. But he now supports Obama’s normalization efforts, as do most Cubans born after the Bay of Pigs generation. Florida’s Cuban community is becoming less hardline, while its Hispanic community is becoming less Cuban. Vivian Rodriguez, head of Hispanic outreach for the Florida Democrats, told me Trump is doing her job for her.

“He’s lumping everyone with an ‘ez’ at the end of their name into the same banana boat,” says Alicia Ramirez, head of Orlando’s Hispanic outreach office. “Even Republicans—they were excited for Jeb or Rubio, but they won’t vote Trump.”

I did find a few Trump voters when I attended a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce expo in Orlando, but only a few, and none of them were happy.

“I’m a Republican—what else can I do?” asked Ana Maria Lowry, a Colombian immigrant who owns a translation firm. “I’m sure he’ll get better people around him, and retract some of his statements. Right?”

Maybe. The thing is, opposition from reliable Republicans like Lowry didn’t keep Obama from narrowly winning Florida when unemployment here was 8 percent. What will happen now that it’s 4.7 percent?

***

One night in early June, at a new “Center for Technology, Innovation and Creativity” in downtown Orlando, I watched Donald Trump get whacked over the head with a mallet.

The on-screen beatdown—a Trump avatar getting whacked with a virtual mallet—was the highlight of the monthly meetup of Indienomicon, Central Florida’s fast-growing community of independent video game developers. I sat with several dozen gamers and gaming entrepreneurs to watch Outhouse Games co-founder Chris Borden demo his local firm’s mobile app, Bash the Vote 2016, basically a well-drawn Whac-A-Mole, featuring Trump and Clinton instead of moles.

“So far, 40,000 people have bashed Trump in the face,” Borden announced. “What better way to show your patriotism?”

If the real Trump’s biggest demographic problem is hostile Hispanic voters, his biggest thematic problem may be his insistence that the U.S. economy is in shambles. It’s hard to see the evidence in Orlando, which led the entire country in job growth last year. And it wasn’t just tourism and construction jobs, although Disney World and the rest of the hospitality industry did have a record-breaking year, while real estate continued its dizzying rise from the depths of the 2008 crisis. The entire area is becoming a kind of “Center for Technology, Innovation and Creativity,” a hub for life sciences as well as Indienomicon-style digital jobs. There are still more tourism jobs than tech jobs in the Orlando area, but there are now more wages paid to tech workers. It’s easy to mock the unruly facial hair and geeky jargon at Indienomicon, but video games are now a bigger industry in the United States than movies and music.

Port City | Wilmington’s ports are one of the largest trading hubs in the country. And Trump’s No. 1 enemy when he talks about trade happens to be Wilmington’s No. 1 export partner: China. “If you tell people that we’re going to bring jobs home, and we’re going to put 35 percent tariffs on [products], that all sounds good on the stump, right?” says Jeff Stokley, a 57-year-old operations manager at an apparel and accessory company that gets most of its inventory from China. “I need to see the fine print.” Danny McComas, a 63-year-old former GOP state legislator who runs a transport company that relies on the city’s ports, doesn’t have kind words for Trump’s protectionist ideas, but still says, “By and large, he’s going to be the better one.” Shane Walker, above, a 25-year-old crane operator at a marine construction firm, isn’t too worried about the trade debate. “I have a good, steady job that’s not very affected by a recession,” he says. “But I can definitely see it both ways.” | Christopher Morris for Politico Magazine

“These are high-paying jobs that don’t get outsourced to China,” says Kunal Patel, a game developer who helped start Indienomicon. “When it comes to the creative side, America is on top, and you can see it in Orlando.”

The job and housing markets have rebounded throughout America during the Obama era, and in Florida, the rebound feels a bit less like the bubbles of the past. Traditionally, Florida’s economy has been a kind of Ponzi scheme that depended almost exclusively on bringing in newcomers, most of them construction workers and mortgage bankers whose livelihoods depended on bringing in still more newcomers. But Florida is now doing more than building houses and entertaining visitors, exporting a record $53 billion of merchandise last year, led by computer and electronic products, and handling 40 percent of U.S. exports to Latin America. A recent Florida International University study estimated that South Florida alone has 1.7 million “creative class” workers; the region attracted as much venture capital in 2015 as Greater Chicago. Central Florida is also in the tomorrow business, from advanced sensors manufacturing to the technology that lets you open your iPhone with your thumbprint to fast-growing education- al institutions like the University of Central Florida, the nation’s second-largest school.

Orlando, better known for Mickey Mouse and time shares overlooking golf courses, is Exhibit A. It’s now the U.S. capital of virtual-reality simulation, home to Lockheed Martin’s war games for U.S. soldiers as well as JetBlue’s training facility for pilots. There’s also a state-of-the-art simulator for biomedical training at a biotech hub called Medical City, which was just a patch of dirt in 2009, and is now a thriving cluster of hospitals, cutting-edge research campuses and UCF’s new medical school. The kind of knowledge workers who work in these kinds of industries make metropolitan areas younger, denser and politically bluer.

Ten days before an ISIL-inspired gunman broke Orlando’s heart at a popular gay club— the kind of hotspot many Americans probably didn’t realize was operating in a region of early-bird dinners and spinning-teacup rides—the city’s fourth-term mayor, Buddy Dyer, gave me a tour of its revitalized down- town. He showed off a new tech incubator housed in a once-decrepit mall, a new performing arts center, new sports arenas, a new commuter rail line, a new bike-share system, new mixed-use high-rises and a new police station built with savings produced by municipal energy conservation. His main theme was that his former cow town turned notorious tourist trap has become a cosmopolitan, sustainable, progressive modern metropolis.

Dyer is a fiscally conservative Democrat—he stayed neutral in the 2014 gubernatorial race, even though Governor Scott is a Tea Party stalwart—but even before the mass shooting at Pulse, he was an outspoken advocate of gay rights and gun control, as well as walkable neighborhoods, affordable housing, public transit and other issues associated with urban liberalism. He told me Trump’s insistence that everything used to be great before globalism, multiculturalism and Obama-ism messed it all up simply lacks power in a thriving, multiethnic, global city where the median resident is only 34 years old. Orange County, which includes Orlando, is now majority-minority, and hosts three naturalization ceremonies every week. George H.W. Bush won it in 1992, but Romney lost it by 85,000 votes in 2012, when he lost statewide by only 73,000 votes. Trump could end up doing a lot worse.

“His whole message is off here,” Dyer said. “It’s stuck in the past.”

Dyer’s other theme, which sounded corny at the time but feels much less so after Orlando’s inspiring response to the massacre in its midst, was that his city’s resurgence is all about teamwork. He called himself “the mayor of collaboration,” and just about all those gleaming new projects he showed me were the result of public-private partnerships. He simply laughed when I mentioned how Republicans often argue that government can’t get out of its own way, and again when I asked him about Trump’s heroic promises to fix everything on his own. Dyer told me a story about how Orlando’s civic and corporate leaders came together to fund full scholarships for every student in UCF’s first medical school class.

His pitch for a politics of kumbaya seemed to take on a greater significance after the horrors at Pulse, after hundreds of local residents lined up to donate blood, after an interfaith coalition led a vigil of love and healing (featuring the Orlando Gay Chorus singing “True Colors”) outside the new performing arts center. A local Reform rabbi wrote a Facebook post after the attack reminding his congregants that the city’s “diversity and sense of hachnasat orchim (or welcoming the stranger) are legendary.” Trump’s reaction was considerably less welcoming, ratcheting up his anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric. The politics of fear can be powerful in times like this. But it felt churlish compared with the grace of a city in pain, and as Trump’s drop in the polls showed, fear isn’t the only emotion that can move people.

After Pulse, I kept thinking about a conversation I had with Craig Ustler, the developer of Creative Village, a billion-dollar public-private experiment in urbanism on 68 acres of downtown Orlando. It will be anchored by UCF’s Center for Emerging Media, home to the nation’s top-rated master’s program for video game developers, and Ustler envisions an eco-friendly, pedestrian-friendly, millennial-friendly mecca for the creative class. Ustler said his most important design principle was openness, the idea that UCF shouldn’t isolate its new campus from the rest of the city, the notion that diverse communities full of random interactions are a good thing.

“That was my one rule: no walls,” Ustler said. “No one in this business still thinks it makes sense to build walls and keep people out. Except Trump, I guess.”

***

Elections are numbers games, and Trump’s numbers here look bad on paper. The Hispanic share of the Florida electorate should be at least 2 percentage points higher than it was in 2012. Most residents of this low-lying coastal state reject Trump’s odd belief that global warming is a Chinese hoax, not to mention his conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya. As summer started, the Clinton campaign had more staffers on the ground in Florida than Trump had nationwide. Beyond the numbers, even Republican leaders who support Trump admit he’s ignorant about public policy, and it’s hard to fathom a president who has said he doesn’t care if we have a trade war, accused Ted Cruz’s father of complicity in the Kennedy assassination, denied the existence of the California drought, speculated that Vince Foster and Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered, and waddled like a penguin to make fun of Romney.

Then again, Trump has already confounded everyone’s expectations in 2016. He’s an unpredictable candidate in an unpredictable year, a reality-TV star in a reality-TV age. And if you think he appeals exclusively to grouchy old white guys who want their country back, allow me to introduce Jason Molina, a 32-year-old Cuban-American Democrat who lives in the same subdivision as Rosemary Hernandez. Molina voted for Obama twice, but ... well, let him explain.

“Trump is fucking crazy, but I’ll vote for him,” Molina told me. “The whole system is fucked. Why not vote for the craziest guy, to see the craziest shit happen?”

Rust Belt Renewal? | Trump might appeal to workers feeling the effects of the recession and globalization. But since 2009, Toledo, Ohio, has seen the largest manufacturing bounceback among mid-sized U.S. metro areas; companies like the one where Chuck Brainard, 56, top left, works, are keeping pace. Still, Matt Yarder, 34, who runs the manufacturing business at bottom right, says Trump’s pledge to “make America great again” is a draw for some of his employees. | Christopher Morris for Politico Magazine

Molina said he would gladly vote for Obama for a third term. But he said he’s been cynical about politics ever since the disputed 2000 election in Florida, when he felt that his vote for Al Gore didn’t count. Molina works in banking, and he says the financial crisis of 2008 damaged his faith in government. I told him that if he was upset about Bush’s victory and Bush’s presidency, but happy with Obama, it seemed odd to vent his frustration with politics by voting for a Republican.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “We got ISIS, we got Zika, we got this, we got that. At least Trump is fun to watch.”

It’s doubtful that many Americans want to give Trump control of our nuclear arsenal for the entertainment value, or at least would be so willing to admit it to a reporter, but the real estate mogul does provoke unusual reactions. A Peruvian-American from that same neighborhood told me he thinks Trump is racist toward Hispanics, but also said he’s sympathetic to some of Trump’s complaints because he doesn’t like the way newer immigrants push in front of him at the supermarket. After Trump won the nomination, a supporter at the public tennis courts in Miami Beach gloated to me: “You don’t get it, Politico! Everyone’s doing better in America except the white man!”

It’s certainly true that some white men don’t like the changes in Obama’s America. Statistics may suggest that Orlando is flourishing, but a local prosecutor was recently suspended for describing it on Facebook as “a melting pot of 3rd world miscreants and ghetto thugs,” offering his considered opinion that “the entire city should be leveled.”

The Trump victory scenario for Florida assumes he’ll get just about all of Romney’s voters and mobilize disaffected whites who sat out 2012, while Clinton fails to turn out many blacks, Latinos and millennials who voted for Obama. Blaise Ingoglia, head of the Florida GOP, says Trump is already energizing low-propensity Republican voters who are usually the hardest to mobilize, so the party expects to focus more on the easier task of rallying the ardent Republican base. If our chat was any guide, the message will focus on antipathy to Obama and Clinton as well as the importance of the Supreme Court, without much effort to persuade conservatives that Trump has a lot more to offer them. And Democratic operatives have been unpleasantly surprised by the speed with which Republican voters, if not conservative intellectuals, seem to be falling in line behind Trump.

“All I’ll say is, Mr. Trump’s tactics are unconventional, but they’ve worked so far,” Ingoglia said.

Worried Democrats can recite all kinds of Clinton nightmare scenarios: an indictment, a recession, a rocky performance in front of a record audience at the first debate. “If Trump doesn’t vomit all over himself, he’ll exceed expectations, and the media will go nuts,” one Obama aide frets. The fear is that Trump will sound like a bold anti-Washington truth-teller, while Clinton comes off as a typical elite politician, tracking in nuance, process and boring wonkery. Maybe a “silent majority” of Americans will identify with Trump’s name-calling and score-settling, his attacks on Muslims and immigrants, his disdain for the specific details of public policy, his vague promises to undo the Obama presidency and kick the world’s ass.

But if that silent majority exists, it didn’t stop Obama from getting elected twice. Why would it suddenly materialize now, after a record 75 consecutive months of employment growth has created more than 14 million private-sector jobs? Middle-class wage growth has been slow, but as Obama argued during a February visit to Jacksonville, after touring an electric-vehicle battery factory financed by his 2009 stimulus bill, it’s hard to claim with a straight face that things have gotten worse, considering that nearly 800,000 jobs were vanishing every month when he arrived in the Oval Office.

“Anybody who says we’re not absolutely better off than we were just seven years ago, they’re not leveling with you,” he said.

The danger for Trump is that the silent majority might just be the actual majority, that the new America reflects Obama’s values. It’s the Tampa Bay Rays’ gay pride night after the Orlando massacre, when fans bought so many tickets the team had to open up extra seats in the upper deck. It’s the new UCF medical school, where the students speak 30 languages; the progressive curriculum includes training in cultural biases, refugee health and treating the poor; and the sign at the entrance proclaims that “UCF Celebrates Diversity and Inclusion.” Trump supporters may find it thrilling to watch him violate norms we all learned in elementary school—don’t insult people because of their heritage or religion or appearance, don’t call people “losers” or “sleaze” or other nasty names, do your homework—but a plurality of Republican primary voters won’t decide the next president.

Norms tend to be norms for a reason, and while Florida may lead the nation in naked police-blotter escapades and garish get-rich- quick schemes, most of its 12 million registered voters are normal people with normal concerns. When I spent an evening watching Joe Garcia campaign in The Hammocks, I heard a lot of prosaic complaints about Trump: He doesn’t care about ordinary people, he’s biased against Hispanics, he’s not serious about the job. For every voter like Jason Molina who thinks politics is a joke, I met a bunch of voters like Rosemary Hernandez who know politics really matters, often because they had seen it destroy their native countries.

“These folks are living the American dream,” Garcia says. “And they know it’s real, because they’re living it. It doesn’t matter what Donald Trump says about it.”