That the US president, Donald Trump, has chosen Orlando to kick off his campaign for re-election and that the first and large public debate of the nominees for the Democratic Party nomination will be in Miami is not the result of the Chance: Florida weighs in the elections.
All indications point to this “key” state, which is because it has shown that it can give the victory to either of the two parties, will have a decisive role in the presidential 2020.
In 2016 Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in Florida by just 1.2 points, while four years earlier Barack Obama, who was seeking re-election, defeated Republican Mitt Romney in this state by 0.9 points.
Winning in Florida is important to reach the White House, because it is the only one of the four most populated states in the country whose result is unpredictable and it is always in doubt who will take the 29 votes that correspond to him in the Electoral College, which is the organ that finally defines the winner of the elections.
The voter registration, which will be open until 29 days before the November 3, 2020 elections, shows for now that the vote in Florida will be contested.
As of last April, 4.9 million people had registered as Democratic voters, 4.7 million as Republicans and 3.6 million as independents.
For all that, both parties have turned to Florida in these early days of a campaign that begins every time before.
The president, who has made his club Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach (Florida) the winter presidential home, is a frequent visitor to the state, both to rest and to proselytize.
The day after officially launching his re-election campaign at a rally scheduled for June 18 at the Amway Center in Orlando, Trump will attend a fundraising event at a club he owns in Doral, the county Miami-Dade.
A survey by Florida Atlantic University shows that Trump’s popularity, which is struggling to increase it, is on the rise in Florida, since it went from 41% approval in February to 47% in May, while the percentage of those who disapprove his management fell from 46 to 44%.
Faced with the 2020 elections, the poll shows that the current president and former vice president Joe Biden are tied in Florida voting intentions, but Trump takes advantage of all other candidates for the Democratic Party nomination.
However, in an internal re-election poll conducted in March for the Trump campaign, which ABC had access to on Friday and which the president had denied existed, the Democrat Biden defeated him by seven points in Florida.
Biden, who leads Trump by nearly nine points in all national polls, according to Clear Real Politics, is one of twenty Democratic candidates who will participate in Miami in the first public debate of this campaign, which will take place in two days, 26 and June 27, given the high number of participants.
The race to select the Democratic candidate in 2020 has reached 25 main contenders, which leaves the 17 Republican pre-candidates of 2016 short.
So far, the only possible rival for Trump in his party is the former governor of the state of Massachusetts Bill Weld, who announced his aspiration to take the nomination in the Republican primary.
For the Democratic debate, which will be televised by NBC, only those who have received donations from at least 65,000 people or have a 1% intention to vote in a minimum of three national or state surveys have been selected.
Qualified are Biden, Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bennet and Cory Booker, and House Representatives Eric Swalwell, Tulsi Gabbard and Tim Ryan.
There are also Julian Castro, former Secretary of Housing of Obama and the only Hispanic on the list, former congressmen Beto O’Rourke and John Delaney, the Governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, former Governor of Colorado John Hickenlooper, mayors Bill de Blasio, Pete Buttigieg, author Marianne Williamson and former technology executive Andrew Yang.
The only Floridian interested in being the Democratic candidate who will fight for the White House at the polls, the African-American Wayne Messam, mayor of Miramar, was left out of the debate.
A former mayor and also African-American, Andrew Gillum, who in 2018 lost Florida’s governorship by a slim margin to Ron DeSantis, a Trump supporter, has promoted since last March a plan to register up to one million Democratic voters as part of an effort to prevent the republican from triumphing again in Florida.
It is expected such a hard-fought vote in the “Sunshine State” on November 3, 2020 that the Florida Democrats appointed a chief of voter protection, Brandon Peters, before the possibility that a recount of votes is necessary.
It is a subject in which Florida has become infamous since the presidential elections of 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore, and last year was repeated with the recount of votes of three high officials, including the governor.
