Biden’s Miami Gardens rally won’t fix the mess Democrats have made in Florida | Editorial

The president of the United States is visiting Florida one week before an all-important election. But Joe Biden’s scheduled trip to South Florida on Tuesday feels “meh” — a Hail Mary pass for a Democratic Party that’s expecting the worst after digging itself into a hole over the past years.

Plagued by anemic fundraising, a loss of registered voters and a popular governor who’s done everything conventional wisdom says a governor in a swing state shouldn’t do, Florida’s Democrats are going into Nov. 8 pessimistic. Biden, who’s all but ignored Florida this election season, is expected to campaign with U.S. Rep. Val Demings and Charlie Crist in Miami Gardens and attend a fundraiser for Crist.

It feels a little too late for Democrats to bring out the big guns — if that’s what you call Biden, whose popularity among Floridians is in the tank.

This will be the president’s first political event in the state since he took office, though he flew down after the Surfside building collapse and Hurricane Ian. His absence is emblematic of the attitude Democrats have toward Florida. Biden’s been great at parachuting in after a catastrophe. But now he’s jumping in at the 11th hour, trying to prevent what looks like a catastrophe in the making.

Fade to red

Once considered the nation’s most populous purple state, it’s starting to act more like it’s solid red. For the first time since Jeb Bush was elected governor in 2002, Republicans might carry Miami-Dade County, a stronghold Democrats need to win statewide.

There are a lot of reasons for that rightward shift, such as concern about the economy and inflation or the tired GOP stunt of calling Democrats “socialists” — a trope that, nevertheless, remains effective among Cuban, Venezuelan, Colombian and Nicaraguan voters. But this is also a self-inflicted wound.

Florida Democrats emerged from an embarrassing election year in 2020 in debt and demoralized. They lost the state to Donald Trump by a greater margin than in 2016, thanks to his growing support among Hispanic voters. Republicans flipped two congressional seats in Miami-Dade. Trump is scheduled to stump for Sen. Marco Rubio on Nov. 6.

After that fiasco, former Miami Mayor Manny Diaz became the head of the Florida Democratic Party with promises of registering more voters and turning things around. Two years later, a member of the Democratic National Committee has called on Diaz to resign the day after the Nov. 8 elections.

If Democrats didn’t think things could get worse, well, they have.

National donors are fleeing the state. As POLITICO reported, Democrats have collectively raised $29 million in the four non-federal statewide races while Republicans almost $200 million. As of last week, Republicans were ahead of Democrats in the number of mail ballots and also in-person early voting. There are now more than nine new registered Republican voters for every new Democratic voter in the state, according to a analysis by the Sun Sentinel.

Growing their own

It’s Republicans who are looking for new voters, playing the long game with Latinos by setting up ground operations and outreach efforts year-round. As the Herald reported last week, the GOP runs naturalization clinics for prospective new citizens, who the party hopes will leave their citizenship oath ceremony and go straight to the elections office to register with an R next to their name. This is what a party that’s thinking 10, 20 years down the road does.

You reap what you sow.

DeSantis is favored to win reelection easily. If polls are correct, he will carry the Hispanic vote, which he lost by 10 percentage points in 2018, according to exit polling. Even his callous political stunt of dumping Venezuelan asylum seekers on Martha’s Vineyard hasn’t generated the expected backlash. A Telemundo/LX News poll estimates 50% of Florida Hispanics were in favor and 43% opposed the relocation.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, DeSantis has been on the offensive, picking fights with public health experts, re-opening the economy and schools earlier than other states and pushing back against masking. He’s sucked the air out of the room with culture war after culture war on “critical race theory,” drag queens and transgender athletes. Every week, there’s a new DeSantis headline. Democrats cannot keep up.

Democrats were hopeful that the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of constitutional abortion rights in June would shift the focus way from the economy and to Republicans’ extreme and unpopular ideas on the matter. DeSantis signed a 15-week abortion ban with no exceptions for rape and incest and has promised more “pro-life” legislation. Crist has been hammering the issue, but his message is beginning to sound repetitive and stale. Or maybe he just doesn’t have enough resources to spread his platform effectively.

Biden’s trip to South Florida will likely not alleviate Democratic anguish leading up to Election Day. We will know more once the results are in, but any Hail Marys might be a little too late to fix a Democratic mess years in the making.