Throughout this election, operating assumptions have been that there are seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Campaigns, political parties, super PACs and the like have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into these swing states and been rewarded with a sky-high stack of polls suggesting the races there are too close to call.
But have they ignored other possible battlegrounds in the fight for 88 electoral votes up for grabs?
One of polling guru Nate Silver’s lieutenants, Eli McKown-Dawson, argues that’s potentially the case, saying their “model thinks Florida is the 7th-likeliest tipping point state — ahead of states like Nevada where the race is much more even but the number of electoral votes up for grabs is smaller.”
Indeed, Florida has 30 electoral votes — five times as many as Nevada and more than any single state conventional wisdom regards as a battleground.
And there are structural indications both Republicans and Democrats recognize the battle for the Sunshine State may be a dogfight, despite Republicans having over a million more active registered voters than Democrats after the pandemic led to party switches and an influx of COVID refugees.
For starters, Friday former President Barack Obama, who carried the state in 2008 and 2012, endorsed Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in her race against former governor Sen. Rick Scott.
The RealClearPolitics polling average shows a 4.3 point spread in favor of the incumbent.
The endorsement from Obama, who is stumping for the Kamala Harris campaign down the stretch, is a sign national Democrats, historically reluctant to engage in one of the few states where 2022’s “red wave” manifested as advertised, may play in Florida after all.
Of course, the Senate race isn’t the main event, and it’s still an open question whether Harris or Tim Walz campaigns in the state given that they’ve only sent surrogates thus far — especially with Trump up 6 in the RealClearPolitics average of polls.
The McKown-Dawson analysis recognizes the long-shot nature of the state, noting Trump has won it twice already and the “once quintessential swing state just isn’t anymore.” But when he poses the seemingly rhetorical question of whether Florida is a “lost cause for Harris that isn’t worth an investment of her campaign’s limited resources,” he says the answer “isn’t that simple,” even though their model gives Harris a 21% chance to win.
First, the Silver model sees Harris/Trump as a 3.3-point race — which would put it roughly on par with the Biden/Trump result in 2020. The analysis also notes some individual polls, though not “particularly high-quality” ones, frame the race as being as close as 1 or 2 points.
The political professionals diverge on partisan lines on how close Florida actually is.
While the Democratic Party didn’t weigh in when asked, GOP Chair Evan Power dismissed the idea the state is a battleground as “fool’s gold” during a recent interview, and he expanded on those points to The Post.
“Florida is a safe R state,” he said, contending that polls from the Florida Chamber and Associated Industries of Florida, which are favorable to GOP candidates, are “a lot more reliable than some of these public polls that have always underestimated Trump and Scott.”
“The fact is we have registered more Republicans, and when we turn them out it will lead to victories in Florida up and down the ballot,” Power added.
A source familiar with the Mucarsel-Powell campaign’s thinking believes voters may split their tickets between Trump and the Democratic Senate candidate, particularly Latino voters.
They feel Scott didn’t take them seriously, as evidenced by running fewer ads this cycle than he did in 2018 against Bill Nelson. And they think the race is as close as the closest public polling, which is believed to be more reflective of the 2020-presidential-cycle turnout model than that of the 2022 wave election.
Scott’s campaign takes a different tack, asserting the race isn’t particularly close and they’ve heard this line from the opposition party before.
“Every election, Florida Democrats say Rick Scott is in trouble, and every election they lose. But national Democrats are free to waste their money if they want. Given their lack of investment this late in the cycle, it seems like they don’t have much confidence in Debbie Mucarsel-Powell’s floundering campaign. We have taken this race seriously since the beginning,” a spokesman told The Post.
Partisan framings notwithstanding, the reality is this: The national campaigns may want to ignore Florida and continue to pump money into chasing a dwindling number of undecided voters in the battlegrounds.
But that could be at their peril.
Democrats likely need to compete again, if only to show they can.
And if Republicans somehow lose the Senate seat or the state’s 30 electoral votes, it will be a lesson in how to squander a political advantage that once seemed impregnable.
