Trump is losing Florida, and in a pretty big way. Polls are showing Biden ahead of Trump by 6.4% in the aggregate. Florida went to Trump in 2016, but only by 1%. As Florida is a constant 50-50 state (Obama won this state twice, but by very slim margins) the development of Trump losing a good portion of the Senior vote in the state is significant.
Coronavirus is surging in Florida -- and so is anxiety over Trump's chances with senior voters
John Dudley, a retired banker, proudly cast his ballot for Donald Trump in 2016, excited at the prospect of sending an entrepreneur to the White House on a pledge to change Washington.
It's a vote he regrets, he said, and a mistake he hopes to correct in November.
"He blew it," Dudley said, not mincing words as he assessed Trump's first term. "We were so excited in the beginning. A businessman to run our country like a business and it hasn't happened."
The searing sentiment of Dudley, 77, illustrates one of the rising worries inside the Trump campaign: losing the senior vote, a reliably Republican constituency for two decades.
In the video Dudley states: “Based on my friends he doesn’t have a chance. He blew it!” Dudley, who largely voted for Republicans for almost 6 decades said “We have got to get a new guy. Trump is erratic”. Think about that for a moment. It isn’t just Dudley himself who is changing from Trump to Biden this election. He sees this happen among his friends as well, in his circles, the retirement community he lives in.
Here in Florida, people 65 and older made up 21% of the vote in 2016. Trump won that group by 17 points over Hillary Clinton. But now, one poll after another shows Joe Biden either tied -- or with an edge -- among senior citizens in key battleground states and nationally.
In Florida, all the polls are showing us massive movement away from Trump. Crosstabs of all available polls show that Trump has lost, on average, 22% of the Senior vote in this state. A recent TIPP poll showed Biden winning the Senior vote by 9%. As Trump won the Senior vote in Florida by 17% for Biden to actually lead in this age group is a stunning development.
"I hoped that I would be wrong in not voting for him and that he would turn out to be a great president, but it didn't happen," said Marsha Lundh, 77, a Michigan retiree living here and a lifelong Republican who plans to vote for Biden in November.
She said that defeating Trump would add stability to the country and the world.
"We're very divided in every way," she said. "Everything could have been handled better and should have been handled better. Now is a chance to change things."
Paula Schelling left the Republican Party because of Trump, after voting for GOP candidates for much of her life. She changed her registration to "no party affiliation" and also plans to vote for Biden.
"I had to change parties. I could not do this anymore," said Schelling, 74, a retired teacher. "As I saw his interactions with foreign countries, how they were laughing at us, it just fortified my thoughts."
Lifelong Republicans are turning away from Trump and to Biden.
For Trump, there is virtually no path to reelection without winning Florida, a state where seniors have outsized influence. The key battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin also have large elderly populations, which has top Republicans sounding the alarm about the erosion of support among older voters.
On Florida's Gulf Coast, Trump won Pinellas County by 1 percentage point -- the same margin he carried the state. Democrats and Republicans had roughly the same number of registered voters in 2016, but Democrats have an advantage of about 10,000 now, which make places like the "On Top of the World" retirement community a hot campaign battleground.
"There are more Democrats now than there used to be in years past," said Donna Lukas, a longtime leader of the community's Democratic club. "People seemed to have a hatred of Hillary for a variety of reasons, but I'm not hearing as much negativity about Joe. I know some Republicans who are definitely not voting for Trump and are probably going to vote for Biden."
Pinellas County, a retirement haven county here in Florida, has seen a surge of new Democratic voters since the 2016 election, which has moved this county from being even in registrations to a massive 10,000 people edge for Democrats. Surging Democratic registrations have been happening all over the state.
Yesterday the state broke a new Coronavirus record in the state with 10,109 new cases reported:
Another Day, Another Coronavirus Record In Florida
Florida has been hard hit, and Trump was already in big trouble in Florida before this recent surge in Coronavirus cases. Now it looks like, at the direction of Trump, Florida reopened way too soon, putting more lives at danger than would otherwise be the case, mostly Senior lives. Trump is largely blamed for the mess, because DeSantis is seen as a loyal Trump surrogate who reacts, or better, doesn’t react, with force to the Coronavirus crisis at the behest of Trump.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Donna Shalala, who represents parts of Miami, said, "In their rush to reopen, they've put politics ahead of public health."
Shalala said DeSantis made a mistake by not acting sooner to shut the state down. "We needed at the beginning to hit this virus with a hammer, to starve it all the way down," she said. "We didn't do the right thing in the beginning, and now we're trying to play catch-up."
Seniors want to live and feel safe. This President has made them feel unsafe, at danger of losing their lives, in the name of getting a robust economy going just in time for the November election. The growing disdain for Trump is spreading throughout the Senior contingent in Florida, spreading through retirement communities, and it has an infectious effect. You hear 2 or 3 former Trump voters state that they are fed up and voting for Biden, it makes others rethink their vote and hop on the bandwagon.
Florida looks very good for Biden and Democrats, and the rapidly changing Senior vote away from Trump is the main reason for that.