With Florida a major battleground in November’s elections, the white retiree is starting to achieve the ubiquitous media status the Ohio diner customer has enjoyed for the past four years. Voters 65-years-old and over have shifted dramatically away from Donald Trump, even as Florida’s Latino—or at least Cuban—voters have warmed to him somewhat. Biden narrowly leads in recent Florida polling, but it’s the state in which the Trump campaign is investing most heavily. It’s going to be a fight to the finish line, so expect to hear from a lot of Florida retirees over the next seven weeks.
Retirees like Joy Solomon, 65, who voted for Trump in 2016 but told CNN, “I'm going to tell you what turned me off the most. I was watching TV with the Covid, which I really think is a very serious thing, and I think he made it like it was no big deal.”
“Biden is like exhaling,” a man who didn’t vote in 2016 said. “It's like being in a storm, and I know calm waters are coming.” Attitudes like that present a serious challenge to Trump ads’ fearmongering that if Biden is elected, senior citizens’ calls to 911 will go unanswered.
Biden, on the other hand, is focusing his ads on the coronavirus and Social Security. “Donald Trump stepped off the golf course and signed an executive action directing funding cuts for Social Security,” one ad opens. Biden is also trying to solidify his support among Florida’s non-Cuban Latino voters, with Biden visiting a Puerto Rican community on Tuesday, days after his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, visited a heavily Venezuelan community. The Biden campaign can also benefit from the $100 million Michael Bloomberg has promised to invest in Florida.
One key difference between the campaigns is that Republicans have brought their “coronavirus doesn’t matter” ethos to campaigning, keeping up a traditional field presence, while Democrats are trying to avoid spreading the virus through too much in-person campaigning. Instead, the Biden campaign is training older voters to write letters to the editor and having volunteers reach out to their communities about voting by mail.
Florida is going to be a fight. But it’s not Biden’s only path to victory, while Trump is extremely unlikely to be able to win without it. That means that things are going to keep getting uglier despite already being historically ugly, but “I think generally the Biden campaign is in better shape to win Florida than we were at this point either in '08 or '12,” Obama campaign veteran Steve Schale told CNN. “I mean, obviously it has a long ways to go and in no way am I saying that it's anything but competitive, but I feel pretty good about things.”