US elections: Winning Florida is the key

President Donald Trump and his challenger Joe Biden spent a considerable time campaigning in Florida on Thursday for a very good reason – it’s a special “swing state”.

Florida is one of the so-called “swing states” or “battlegrounds” where the US presidential candidates go all out because battles are fought and won there. This southeastern state is a special case in the US electoral process. It goes beyond being just a swing state, it determines the likely winner of the election.

It is said, with a pinch of salt, that once Florida is lost, a candidate might as well throw in the towel. In fact, many experts said with justified exaggeration that if the elections were held in Florida first and the results declared immediately, the voters would know who their new president would be.

After Florida, a winning candidate has to take just three more of the close to a dozen swing states. While there are emerging swing states, the 2020 top prizes are Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. According to East-West Centre political scientist Liz A Dorn, if Biden won Florida plus Ohio, the two more states needed would just be a formality for him go to the White House.

This is because the Florida/Ohio combination was sufficient to be able to conclude who the victor would be. Dorn, who predicted a Biden victory in the 3 November election, said if early indications showed Biden was leading a swing state, especially Florida, he would likely win. The same applied to Trump.

“Florida’s popular vote determines who will win the elections. Therefore the popular vote in that state becomes important for the candidates,” Dorn said.

In the past 20 years, or five elections, all the candidates who won Florida were later declared US president. The state switched between the Republican and the Democratic Party and it was difficult to predict which would win. George W Bush in 2000 and 2004, Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Trump in 2016 all bagged Florida.

If Trump loses this state and the elections to Biden, he would have broken the trend for a sitting president in having served only one term. Florida and Ohio are true swing states because they frequently switch between backing Republican and Democrats. The level of margin was very small in Ohio in 2016.

“It is my belief that Biden is going to come out because of the enthusiasm of the voters. The youth are disillusioned and that is not a good sign for Trump. “Also the blacks who stayed away against Hillary Clinton will come out this time because they do not want Trump,” Dorn said.

She said Trump, however, was not supported only by non-Hispanic whites, he also had support among some conservative African-Americans unhappy with certain Democratic Party policies.

“Trump has a solid contingent of Hispanics who support him because they have social values that align with the Republicans. There is a conservative bloc of Hispanics in Arizona,” Dorn said.

With Biden predicted to win as he has double digit points in all polls, if all the swing states that he should win to get to the White House are red (Republican) it would spell bad news for him. Dorn said Biden would not win Georgia, which was right-leaning and always voted Republican.

“Trump must win Florida and two other states because he has Georgia already,” she said. The swing states change frequently because demographic dynamics change due to the migration of people from state to state. This could cause a conservative state to become neutral or somewhat progressive and vice versa. This affected voting patterns.

Even in Georgia there has been an interesting evolution. In the right-leaning state, there has been an increase in African-Americans, which neutralised it and made it swing slightly towards Biden. Texas has not voted for the Democrats for many years and the party has not visited Texas in 30 years.

The visit to the state by Biden’s vice-presidential running mate, Kamala Harris, was being watched with interest. Swing states are the ones that matter in the US election and candidates’ campaigns are mostly concentrated on swing states. The US electoral system is quite unique.

The president does not have to appeal to the majority of the American people but to the voters of the swing states because he is not the people’s president. A candidate must achieve 270 of the 538 college votes to win the presidential election. The 538 electors elect the president.

This meant that voters did not vote for the president, but for their state elector who elected the president. There have been numerous attempts to amend the US constitution to do away with the college system, but all have failed.

“In the US there will never be a run-off election because as long as they reach 271 they are declared president. The founders (of our constitution) did not design the US democracy as a true democracy, but as a representative democracy,” Dorn said.

Political journalist Eric Naki.

Eric Naki is Saturday Citizen’s political editor and our man currently covering the 2020 US presidential election as part of a seminar organised by the East-West Centre, based in Honolulu, Hawaii, US. He is the only South African in a cohort of 12 foreign journalists attending the seminar virtually.

– ericn@citizen.co.za

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