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If Miami-Dade goes more Republican, is Florida still a swing state?

By David Smiley, Miami Herald
Published: November 18, 2020, 12:30pm

MIAMI — In three statewide elections over the last four years, Miami-Dade County has voted as if it were three different places.

In 2016, the county’s voters overwhelmingly rejected Donald Trump in numbers not seen by a top-of-ticket Republican since the 1990s.

Two years later, Republicans rebounded somewhat in Miami-Dade, with losses modest enough in the blue-leaning county to allow the GOP candidates for governor and the U.S. Senate to win narrowly.

And on Nov. 3, Trump pulled off a stunning turnaround in the county, performing like Republicans from a previous era of Florida politics as he added Florida to his win column in what was, by modern standards, a blowout.

Now, as Democrats and Republicans begin to plan for the next set of elections — which will include governor, statewide cabinet positions and one of two U.S. senate seats in Florida — political strategists and candidates want to know one thing: Which Miami-Dade County will show up on Nov. 8, 2022?

Miami-Dade’s rightward shift in 2020 has already generated talk that the nation’s biggest swing state might be losing its swing.

“For the moment, we’re a pink state, not a purple state,” said Eric Johnson, a Democratic consultant who has advised Florida’s only statewide elected Democrat, Agriculture Commissioner Nicole “Nikki” Fried. “Does that mean you give up? Of course not.”

If the county’s 1.5 million voters vote more like they did in 2020 than they did in 2016, it would bode well for Republicans and poorly for Democrats, who need to run up the score in Democrat-heavy South Florida to compete in races statewide.

Miami-Dade’s evolution over the last 15 years from a left-leaning but competitive county to a reliably blue region has coincided with Florida’s emerging reputation as a state where races for president, governor and Senate come down to 1 percentage point or less.

Back in 2000, when the presidential race went to a recount in Florida, Democrats did not enjoy an overwhelming advantage over Republicans in the county. But since then, as the number of voters in the state has nearly doubled, immigration and migration patterns have changed Florida’s demographics, and a growing community of Hispanic and Caribbean immigrants in South Florida has become something of a counter-balance on the left to a steady stream of conservative-minded Midwest retirees moving to Central Florida.

Given that dynamic, any hint that Miami-Dade County has once again become more friendly to Republicans could ward off Democratic donors and give top-of-ticket candidates second thoughts.

But elections and voter bases aren’t static. And neither party assumes that the coalition that came out for Trump this month will automatically come out for any other Republican candidate.

“It’s all about the messaging and the candidate,” said Reggie Cardozo, deputy Florida state director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, which lost the state to Trump despite a Miami-Dade County win of 290,000 votes. “Politics are a pendulum.”

Similarly, Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chairman Steve Simeonidis said he expects Democrats to rebound from 2020, much in the way Republicans bounced back from their losses in the county four years ago.

“The gains Republicans saw (this month) are similar to the gains we saw in 2016,” he said. “Politics are fluid situations and coalitions are going to vary.”

Many Democrats also say that the coronavirus pandemic altered the 2020 election by forcing unprecedented changes in campaigning, and it’s unknown how future elections will change after the pandemic fades. They also hope a Joe Biden presidency will help beat back Republicans’ claims — which landed strongly in Miami-Dade — that Democrats want to usher in socialism to the United States.

But heading into 2022, Clinton’s results four years ago in Miami-Dade County — made possible by Trump’s poor standing among conservative Cuban-Americans and independents — look more like an outlier than Trump’s 2020 numbers. And Republicans head into the next election under the belief that Trump’s 2020 voters in Miami-Dade, which were based around a surprisingly diverse coalition of Hispanic voters from around the Caribbean and Latin America, are theirs to lose.

“If you look at the city of Hialeah, Trump went from winning the city by, like, 100 votes to getting 66% of the vote,” said state Sen. Manny Diaz, Jr., a ubiquitous Trump surrogate in the heavily Cuban American section of Northwest Miami-Dade. “That’s a growing movement, and it’s not going away.”

Giancarlo Sopo, a Cuban American communications strategist involved in Hispanic outreach for the Trump campaign, said no one can replicate Trump’s “unique blue-collar appeal.” But he said future Republican candidates can learn from a campaign that used nontraditional methods — such as an October Trump interview with Spanish-language, Cuban American social media influencer Alex Otaola — to communicate his message to voters outside the typical Republican base.

“Nothing lasts forever in politics,” said Sopo, a former Miami-Dade Democrat who renounced his affiliation with the party several years ago as it shifted left. “To sustain these gains, we must continue engaging these new constituencies with the same kind of sophisticated messaging we demonstrated on the campaign and appealing to blue-collar values. Culture drives politics and the Democrats created a huge opportunity for conservatives with Hispanics by branding themselves as the party of socialism, ‘Latinx’ and postalitas” — Spanish slang for phony.

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Trump’s top Florida strategist, Susie Wiles, reinforced that idea in a post-election memo provided to the media. Wiles wrote that the president’s results in his newly declared home state ought to signal that the GOP can and should be a “big tent” party — recycling a Reagan-era idea — as a way of holding onto much of the coalition that Trump built.

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