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BREAK
Florida was an essential state for President Trump in his quest for the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the US presidency.
Orlando, Florida – President Donald Trump’s victory in Florida on election night kept his chances for a second term alive, but unlike previous presidential election cycles, this race will not depend on the Sunshine State.
With 96 percent of the precincts reporting, Trump beat Biden in Florida, 51.3 percent to 47.8.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden, 77, had a chance for a knockout punch in the first round with Florida. It spun hard but missed. The Trump campaign needed all 29 votes from the Florida Electoral College, the nation’s largest battlefield award, to avoid a late-night defeat Tuesday and got them. Despite the fact that Florida has played the role of benchmark for decades, the race for the White House will likely be won or lost elsewhere.
Biden made an aggressive play in Florida: He visited the state in recent days and his wife made a last-minute stop here on Election Day, but his campaign failed to increase turnout enough in the state, particularly in the blue counties. densely populated in the state. Southeast.
In Miami-Dade County, a region where Democratic support is traditionally strong, Biden fell short of expectations, compared to 2016. With 93 percent of precincts reporting, Biden got just 53.5 percent of the vote. ; Four years ago, Hilary Clinton won 63.7 percent.
This year, the 74-year-old Trump won 512,000 votes in that county, up from 333,000 four years ago. He would have had to surpass Clinton in that crowded county to match support for Trump in the more conservative parts of the state. To that end, his campaign did not hit the mark.
Early data from exit polls suggest that Trump’s success came from inroads among Latino voters. While Trump is not expected to win the majority of these voters in Florida or across the country, he appeared to narrow the gap against Biden in parts of the Sunshine State where he mattered.
Tag ‘socialist’
Preliminary exit polls from CNN suggest that support for Biden among Florida Latinos did not match that of Clinton. Biden earned just over 50 percent; Clinton had won more than 60 percent. A significant amount of support for Trump came from Cuban-American voters.
The result comes after the Trump campaign invested heavily in Latino outreach for months before Election Day. The campaign ran ads in Spanish throughout the summer and aimed to link prominent Democrats who embrace the label of “socialist” with Biden in courting Latinos who fled oppression and economic depression in failed socialist and communist states.
In other parts of the state, Biden met expectations for turnout, but it wasn’t enough to make up for lost margins in the Southeast.
Biden, for example, made his way into Sumter County, a region in the center of the state north of Trump’s friend Orlando. The county is home to the largest population of retirees living in The Villages, a sprawling community for seniors that consistently votes Republican. Where Clinton won just 29 percent, Biden brought the Democratic numbers to 30.
With 92 percent of the precincts reporting in Duval County, Biden appears to have beaten Trump, a region Clinton lost.
And in Pinellas County, a notoriously indecisive district that Trump won in 2016 after he voted for Democrats during two previous presidential election cycles, Biden has a slight edge.
But despite cutting margins in the red districts and winning battlegrounds, it seems ultimately that it was poor performance in Miami-Dade that kept him from winning.
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