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There is potentially a real problem for Donald Trump in the state of Florida. And importantly, remember that as you listen to what I’m going to lay out for you remember that Biden doesn’t even need Florida to win Biden won in 2020. Without Florida. That’s an important detail that will come back to what’s going on in Florida and what’s going on with with Trump in Florida? Well, in general, over the last couple of election cycles, Florida has increasingly been been seen as a much more reliably red state, reliable for the Republican in the presidential election. And we have a couple of numbers that at least raise some red flags about that continuing into 2024. And they come from the Republican primary in the Republican primary in Florida.
Nearly 200,000 Republican primary voters, even though everybody dropped out other than Trump and Trump was effectively unopposed in the Florida primary, almost 200,000, Florida Republicans still chose to go out and vote for someone other than Donald Trump to prove a point. And the point is, they don’t like Trump. But 150,000, Nikki Haley, voters went out and voted for Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, got a bunch of votes, some other candidates got votes, all of those individuals are not running. We’re not running at the time of that primary. And what this signals is that if you have the enthusiasm and the determination, to go out and vote in a primary that is not competitive, for someone who has ended their campaign, simply to show that you’re not going with Donald Trump, some percentage of those voters are certainly not going to vote for Donald Trump in November. Now, the other data point is that in 2020, Donald Trump had more than 90% of the vote in the Florida primary. And in 2024, he had only 80% of the vote. Now there’s a counterpoint to that the counterpoint would be David in 2020. It was an unopposed primary and 2024. There was a contested primary. In a sense, you are right. There was a contested primary in 2024. But it was long over by the time voters in Florida voted because every other candidate had dropped out. So it is still noteworthy to a degree that Trump’s support in the Florida primary dropped from more than 90% in 2020 to 80% in 2024. Now, let’s get to the critical question. Could all of this even really make a difference in November? Could Joe Biden actually win Florida? Listen, if you came to me and said, David, give me the optimistic case, it would be something like this. You’ve got a couple of 100,000 primary voters who signaled their discontent with Donald Trump by going out to vote. turnout in the general is way higher than in primaries. And so those 200,000 Republicans who voted for someone other than Trump in the primary probably represent 3456 700,000 People who don’t want Trump and are going to vote in November. You combine that with the fact that a bunch of Nikki Haley’s prominent supporters are now donating to Joe Biden rather than than Donald Trump. You combine that with what we’ve talked about before with regard to Taylor Swift, and the fact that Taylor Swift is getting very active in encouraging young young people to register and to vote, presumably she will be endorsing Joe Biden before the election. Florida has a lot of those 18 to 25 year olds who could choose to vote. The point here is there’s no one thing that says to me, Biden can easily win Florida. But if Biden can shrink the gap with Trump from 2020 have several 100,000 votes. That was the margin in 2020. If you can shrink it a little bit with some Nikki Haley supporters who plan to vote for him. If then Taylor Swift helps to get some new voters registered, and they are overwhelmingly going to vote for Joe Biden. If turnout then is just a little bit depressed for Republicans, because Trump’s running back and forth between criminal trials and trying to find money for a bond and doing whacked out rallies and whatever else the case may be. Each of those things could shift 50 to 60,000 votes from Trump to Biden. And before you know what if you get enough of those shifts, Joe Biden has a real shot at winning in the state of Florida. But then we get back to where we started. All of this, in a sense, doesn’t matter. Because Biden doesn’t need to win Florida. Biden won in 2020, with a healthy electoral margin without winning the state of Florida. And so what we can stick take a step back to is to say there’s a path for Biden in Florida, as unlikely as it is. But if Biden can improve in Florida from 2020, he’ll almost certainly win Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin, Michigan, the states he won in 2020. And that alone was enough for him to become President of the United States. That’s an explanation for why it doesn’t look very good for Donald Trump. Now, let me say one other thing about the predictions for 2024. There’s so many people confidently saying Biden can’t win.
There’s so many people confidently saying Biden will absolutely win. Just like every other presidential election in recent history, the 2024 presidential election is likely to come down to a few 100,000 votes in five or six states. And so any of these predictions are unnecessarily confident. Because either one of these candidates can win, it’s almost certainly going to come down to under half a million votes in just a couple of critical states. So when it’s all over, the people who quote got it, right, will pat themselves on the back and say, I knew it was gonna go this way because of XYZ. The only reasonable prediction right now is it’ll probably be close, and it’ll probably be decided by half a million votes or less in five to seven states. Let me know what you think.
