I want to suggest to you today that Donald Trump could actually lose the state of Florida in November. And it all has to do with Governor Ron DeSantis pushing his extremist agenda, which is increasingly unpopular even with Floridians. Now, I think the important thing for context is that Joe Biden doesn’t need Florida to become President of the United States for four more years. Biden won in 2020 with a healthy electoral margin, even though it depended on only 120,000 underlying votes in three states, Biden won with a healthy electoral margin without winning the state of Florida.
And increasingly, the state of Florida is seen more as a reliable red state rather than the purple state than it once was. You’ll remember in 2000, of course, famously, Bush v. Gore coming down to just hundreds of votes in the State of Florida, at least as far as the initial count was concerned. So Biden doesn’t need Florida. But it’s conceivable that Trump, at the hands of DeSantis’s mismanagement of the state culturally, with regard to “don’t say gay,” abortion bans, etc., could be setting up Trump to actually lose. Which hilariously, if you believe that DeSantis does still have presidential ambitions, and that those ambitions would be channeled towards 2028, you would say, maybe DeSantis in some way benefits from Biden winning. So DeSantis can more strongly argue in 2028, the Republican Party should have selected me. So listen, I don’t want to get hopes irrationally up for people that Biden is going to win Florida. But there’s a couple of different things that are important to mention about what’s going on there that certainly aren’t good at all. And one of those has everything to do with Florida’s abortion ban. We know that since Roe v. Wade was overturned,
any abortion related ballot referendum has gone in the direction of pro choice and abortion rights, women’s health, privacy and bodily autonomy. If indeed, Florida is going to continue being one of the states that is pushing in that direction, that could very much dissuade Republicans
from going out and supporting the people that their parties have nominated. 69% of Floridians surveyed say they support an amendment that would establish a minimum standard of abortion all the way up to fetal viability, which is considered to be early in the 20 Something weeks, 2122 weeks, usually sometimes 24. That’s a pretty progressive in the modern political context perspective. So that if it’s the predominant view of Floridians is not good at all, for Donald Trump in November of 2024. Now, there’s one other thing I want to talk about, which is the Taylor Swift effect.
I don’t believe Florida depends on Taylor Swift exclusively. But we’ve run the numbers when you look at the margin in 2020, by which Trump won Florida, which was a few 100,000 votes. And you look at the size and following of Taylor Swift. And you look at how many young voters 18 to 29, there will be in Florida come November. And you think about the margin that could be swayed to go from Trump to Biden on Taylor Swift say so it’s not out of the question that not alone by what she says. But to some degree, Taylor Swift saying, We’ve got to vote Biden, especially to my fans in Florida, it could basically cut that 2020 gap in half. And so you take a Taylor Swift gap cut in half, and then you take the abortion dissatisfaction from Democrats, independents and Republicans in Florida, you can certainly bridge that gap with some real ability. Now, at the end of the day. It’s also important to remember that even though there are 50 individual elections in the presidential election, they do tend to move together. So very often we say, well, you know if Michigan were to go Trump, but Wisconsin goes Biden, and sure we can do that math, but the truth is that more often than not, it all kind of moves together. If things are moving in the direction of Biden, he’ll probably get a bunch or most of those critical swing states if things were moving in the direction of Trump, Trump would probably just get Wisconsin and Michigan as examples. In the same way, Florida alone would not make it so that eat that usually Republicans cannot win without Florida used to be Ohio now it now it’s Florida. But the truth is, if Biden were to get Florida, he almost certainly wouldn’t need it. Because if Biden gets Florida, he’s almost certainly getting Pennsylvania. He’s almost certainly getting the bad
Probably Arizona, almost certainly Michigan, probably Wisconsin, and with those states, which he hadn’t 2020 He doesn’t need Florida anyway. So there’s this double edged sword. There’s there’s the two stories. On the one hand, things are looking as bad as they’ve looked in a while in Florida for Republicans. On the other hand, Biden doesn’t need Florida. He only needs to do as well as he did in 2020. And he won without Florida then so let me know your thoughts. Where do you see Florida falling in November?
