A Clinton rally in Tampa. | AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster Eyes on general election, Clinton showcases big Florida team A dozen staffers in state, getting ready to face Trump

Hillary Clinton hasn't clinched her party’s presidential nominee, but her campaign is acting like it in Florida, where it has a dozen senior staffers and about 100 paid organizers who are canvassing neighborhoods and starting to register voters for the general election.

Clinton’s Florida team includes a mix of national Democratic operatives and veterans of the campaigns of President Barack Obama, who won the state twice.


As Obama's team did, Clinton’s campaign is targeting a broad coalition that includes single women, young people, African-Americans, voters of Caribbean descent and three different types of Hispanic voters: Puerto Ricans, Cuban-Americans and other Latinos with South and Central American roots.

Headquartered in Tampa, Clinton’s big Florida presence underscores the importance of the nation’s biggest swing state, the part-time home of Donald Trump. He probably can’t afford to lose here and expect to win the White House. Recent Florida polls show the two are essentially tied.

“The stakes couldn't be higher this election,” Simone Ward, Hillary for America’s Florida state director, said in a written statement, “and we're not taking anything for granted against Donald Trump.”

That’s not idle talk from Ward.

Florida Democrats have nervously watched as the number of active registered Republican voters started growing faster than that of Democrats since the last general election — a sign Trump’s campaign might be better organized than it gets credit for.

Democrats, who outnumbered Republicans by about 456,000 in 2014, have had that advantage cut to about 262,000 as of April 30, according to the most recent state election data of active voters. That’s about a 43 percent reduction. Democrats are 38 percent of the rolls and Republicans 35.8 percent. Independents (mostly those with no party affiliation) make up the balance of the voter rolls.

Compared to the 2012 presidential elections, Democrats’ registration edge over Republicans has been cut by more than half, from 4.5 percentage points to 2.1 points. Obama won the state by less than a percentage point in 2012 — and that was after his campaign had registered as many as 350,000 new voters over five months.

Simply registering voters doesn’t guarantee they’ll vote the party line. But if it’s part of an organized effort, voter registration is a closely watched metric that campaigns use to measure their viability.

Leading up to the March 15 presidential primary, the Trump campaign registered 30,000 new GOP voters and instituted a “ditch and switch” program that converted 5,000 independents or Democrats into registered Republicans, said Karen Giorno, Trump’s Southeast regional director who led his successful Florida primary campaign.

“People underestimated us in the primary. They said we had no campaign. And look what happened,” Giorno said. “For those who underestimate us, please continue. I would love you to.”

Clinton’s staff says that’s not happening.

“Our candidates have changed. But the imperatives are the same,” said one senior Clinton staffer. “We need as diverse an electorate as possible and we need to get them out to vote.”

Clinton’s campaign would have started organizing and registering voters earlier in Florida, but the contested national primary with Bernie Sanders made that difficult.

“Ideally, you would start this earlier. But they have to start with the time frame they have, not the time frame they wanted,” said Eric Jotkoff, former spokesman for Obama’s 2012 Florida team, who’s not a Clinton staffer. “The start might be a little late, but Clinton has more than enough time.”

Jotkoff said Florida Democrats can’t take Trump lightly in a state that twice elected an anti-establishment businessman as governor, Rick Scott. One of the masterminds of Scott’s maverick 2010 bid, pollster and South Florida resident Tony Fabrizio, joined Trump’s campaign last month. He’s a friend of another Trump-backing political operative who lives nearby in the state, Roger Stone. Trump owns Palm Beach’s Mar-a-Lago.

Unlike the midterm years when Scott was elected, Democrats, minorities and other liberal-leaning voters tend to show up in bigger numbers during presidential cycles in Florida. And, since the last presidential election, the proportion of non-Hispanic white voters — the GOP’s base — has slightly decreased, which should help Clinton.

Clinton’s second in command, deputy state director Reggie Cardozo, is an Obama for Florida veteran who specializes in Hispanic turnout, particularly with the exploding population of Puerto Ricans in central Florida. By some estimates, as the island’s economy deteriorated, as many as 1,000 Puerto Rican families have moved monthly to Florida.

The Clinton campaign also plans to make a serious effort to win the Miami-centric Cuban-American vote, once a Republican bulwark.

“We have an opportunity with the Cuban community like never before. They just don’t like Trump. But we’ve got to seal the deal,” said a Clinton adviser, pointing out that leading Miami Republican political figures of Cuban descent say they can’t endorse Trump because they believe his rhetoric on immigration is too harsh.

The Clinton’s campaign’s press secretary in Florida, Valentina Pereda, also specializes in Latino outreach, having joined the campaign after serving as a White House director for Hispanic media.

The campaign’s Florida communications director, Mahen Gunaratna, worked for two of the state’s influential African-American leaders: U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson of Miami and her predecessor, Kendrick Meek, who ran for U.S. Senate in 2010. The campaign’s Florida political director, Keenan Austin, is a former senior staffer and adviser to Wilson as well.

Among the six staffers coordinating the Clinton campaign’s efforts with the state party is Florida Democratic Party executive director Scott Arceneaux, who will serve as a senior adviser. Having watched Obama and Scott twice win the state, Arceneaux is keenly familiar with the perils of poor voter turnout for Democrats.

Another veteran Florida Democrat, Steve Schale, also saw the highs and lows as an adviser to the two previous gubernatorial and presidential races. Schale isn’t working for the Clinton campaign. He said that Ward, Clinton’s state director, gained a reputation at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee of being efficient and easy to get along with — a must in the pressure cooker of Florida elections. Multiple factions in Washington highly recommended her to Clinton’s team, Schale said.

Clinton Democrats are ultimately confident that they’ll win, Schale said, but they know it’s not easy.

“Are many Democrats complacent and think Trump will be easy to beat? Abso-freaking-lutely,” Schale recently told POLITICO. “Is the Clinton campaign taking Trump for granted? No … They know the last time we thought that Republican division would lead to a Democrat we got Gov. Rick Scott. Twice.”