Once again, it looks like Florida will play a crucial role in the contest for the White House. President Donald Trump won the state on Tuesday and will therefore get 29 Florida’s electoral votes – a big step towards re-election. Trump even won quite clearly, at least by Florida standards. After counting almost all of the votes, he was three percentage points ahead of Democrat Joe Biden – 51 to 48 percent.
The latest polls had suggested a much tighter outcome, and several surveys even saw Biden in the lead. But election results in Florida are and will remain difficult to calculate, which is partly due to the very special conditions in this state. There is, for example, the composition of the electorate. About a quarter of the 20 million population consists of Latinos, who actually have a majority vote for the Democrats. Not so in Florida. There are many Latinos Cubans in exile and their children there. You or your parents fled the socialist regime on the Caribbean island for political or economic reasons. Accordingly, these voters, who already lean towards the Republicans, were receptive to Donald Trump’s staunchly anti-socialist campaign.
Biden did better with the many white seniors who are retiring in the Sunshine State than the Democrat Hillary Clinton four years ago. But that wasn’t enough to offset Trump’s increase in Latinos. Biden’s result in the metropolitan area of Miami, where a particularly large number of Cubans in exile live, fell so far below expectations that it cost him the victory in Florida – and possibly the victory too. Because in the past few years it has always been the case: Whoever wins Florida wins the presidency. No matter how tight it is.
So it was in 2016 when Donald Trump won in Florida by 1.2 percentage points over Hillary Clinton. That was the case in 2012 and 2008 when Barack Obama beat his Republican opponents by less than one and two percentage points, respectively. And so it was especially in the 2000 election, when George W. Bush ultimately trumped his opponent Al Gore by 537 votes – with almost six million ballots cast, a margin of 0.009 percentage points.
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