Politics
Election 2012: Obama, Romney tussle it out in Florida
U.S. President Barack Obama (l) and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (r). PHOTO/File
In the presidential battleground with the biggest prize, Democrat Barack Obama is focused on ratcheting up voter turnout in Florida’s university towns, its Hispanic enclaves around Orlando and its Jewish communities in the south. Republican challenger Mitt Romney is working to squeeze as many votes as possible out of north Florida’s conservative military bastions, the senior-heavy Gulf Coast and Miami’s Cuban community.
But their strategies to energize core supporters overlap in the central Florida swing-voting region that’s key to winning the state and its 29 electoral votes. Voters along Interstate 4, which stretches from Tampa Bay to Daytona Beach, will determine the outcome if the race remains close into the fall, as expected. About 45 percent of the state’s voters live in that 17-county area.
“Neither party has enough base alone, which is why those persuadable places, particularly along the I-4 corridor, are so important,” said Steve Schale, a Democrat who ran Obama’s Florida campaign four years ago.
It seems that’s usually the case, judging by Florida’s track record of hard-fought races and narrow presidential outcomes since the 2000 race landed at the Supreme Court, which then handed the White House to Republican George W. Bush.
Bush won the state again four years later, 52 percent to 47 percent, over Democrat John Kerry. But in 2008, the state sided with Democrats when Obama defeated Republican John McCain, 51 percent to 48 percent.
This year, the stakes are hard to overstate: Obama’s re-election is nearly assured should he repeat his 2008 victory in Florida, based on how the states lean now. His standing in Florida is far more precarious than it is in other contested states, so if he wins Florida, it’s likely that he’s won in many other states as he looks to cobble together the 270 Electoral College votes it takes to win. Romney’s state-by-state routes to reaching the magic number are more limited than the president’s, and a Florida victory would make it far more probable that he could win the presidency.
The electorate in Florida is virtually unchanged from 2008 because the ailing economy stifled the population growth of the previous decade. And in this campaign, the economy dominates.
