Missing. There is no trace of kamala harris and the Democrats in Florida. Every visible sign of the American elections is colored Republican red. T-shirts in stores, posters outside ordinary homes and luxury villas, streets decorated with pro- Donald Trump. Every trace of 2024 elections is one-way in the state governed by Ron DeSantis. Yet, the latest published polls, starting with ‘The Public Policy Polling survey of the state’, say that to date there are only four percentage points in favor of the tycoon.
Fifteen days around the Sunshine Statejust over two months from the vote, give a snapshot of a game that has apparently already been played. A rough survey, speaking with people met in bars and restaurants, on the beach or in the exhausting queues at Disney World, produces predictable results. What on paper is a swing state, contestable despite the fact that the last two rounds of elections have clearly shifted the balance in favour of the Republicans, appears to those who travel the roads that lead away from Miami to be a red fiefdom.
Northwards, along the A1A that runs along the entire Atlantic coast, and southwards, up to Key West, but also crossing the Gulf of Mexico and going up to Orlando. You come across cars with stickers thanking Trump and reproducing the slogans of the Make America Great Again
at the sides of the streets pinned in the flowerbeds the signs of local candidates, almost all Republicans. In Trump’s kingdom, at Mar a Lago, the ostentatious wealth of Palm Beach accompanies you to the entrance gate of the tycoon’s headquarters, adequately guarded by the police, committed to ensuring security and privacy. All around, supercars and millionaire yachts move, women and men who divide their time between jogging, scooters and rollerblades.
The numbers, those of the polls and those that emerge from the analysis of the electoral flows of the last elections, say that the game remains open especially because the big cities will have a significant weight, starting obviously with Miami. Between Downtown and South Beach, a multi-ethnic and international community moves that seems like a bubble that is not very permeable to the dynamics of an electoral campaign. While the main televisions broadcast live the democratic convention in chicagowith Barack and Michelle Obama launching Kamala Harris’s race, luxury cars and yachts continue their respective parades, a routine that adds to the punctual alternation of sunshine and rain showers of tropical August.
There are two different types of votes that add up in the accounting that Trump can rely on. The rich who expect an administration that is particularly indulgent with property and money, both in terms of taxation and in its approach to managing financial flows. The most nationalist and identitarian component of American society, the one rooted outside the cities, in a fabric that in Florida is particularly permeated by Trumpist infatuation. They are also the two most visible and readable components when crossing the Sunshine State.
Then there are the large communities, starting with Hispanics, historically available to choose the candidate considered most inclined to their interests. Trump’s anti-communist, or anti-socialist, obsession has become more insistent since he was constituted the new Harris-Scholz Democratic ticketfits well with the traditional impulses of Miami Cubans, who don’t want to hear of any distant resemblance to hated Castroism.
If the widespread signs of Trumpism cannot be a surprise, the almost total absence of democratic competition can be read with different interpretations. The first is linked to a choice of substantial disengagement in a territory considered lost. The second, more concrete, to an electoral communication strategy entrusted exclusively to the main message, that of the contrast between good and evil, of the choice of side between an America that goes forward and one that goes back, with little presence on the territory and the hope that a transversal awareness of American society may prevail. With Florida that can be felt along its streets on one side and the result of November 5 on the other, in the expectations of the Democrats who insist on the slogan “Florida is in play!”. (By Fabio Insenga)
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