Democrats seize advantage registering Florida voters

AVALON PARK, Fla. — It’s a late Monday afternoon as about a dozen Hillary For America volunteers gather at the Starbucks in this planned community of middle-class families just east of downtown Orlando.

They’re here for training and a little pep talk before heading out to the Walmart in the nearby strip mall to register voters. This is the first campaign for many of them, and several talk about the enormous stakes of this presidential contest between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.

“We all know from Gore and Bush how a few votes could really turn the tide,” Navy veteran Hollis Porter, 59, says, referring to George W. Bush’s 537-vote win in Florida in 2000 that gave the Republican the presidency over Democrat Al Gore.

If Clinton is going to win the Sunshine State, she’ll need activists like Porter to register as many supporters as he can before the upcoming voter registration deadline.

On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee granted a request from the Florida Democratic Party to extend the deadline at least one day - from Tuesday to Wednesday - to determine whether a longer extension should be granted due to the displacement of Floridians along the East Coast due to Hurricane Matthew.

Once voter registration is completed, Clinton will need Porter and the roughly 90,000 other volunteers the campaign claims in Florida to mobilize Democrats, sympathetic independents and Republicans disaffected with Trump.

Republicans say they have “thousands” of volunteers canvassing Florida as well, though they declined to give specific numbers. And they say the Republican National Committee had staff and a state director in Florida for three years, long before the Clinton campaign had theirs in place.

But by almost every metric — volunteers, field offices, ad spending — Democrats appear to be winning the ground game in the nation’s most important swing state, experts and activists say.

Take voter registration.

Of the approximately 651,000 new voters that have signed up in Florida from Jan. 1 through Aug. 31, about 230,000 (35%) registered as independents, about 221,000 (34%) as Democrats and about 185,000 (28.4%) as Republicans, according to Daniel A. Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida who studies registration activity. The rest registered as third-party voters.

“I will guarantee you that number will get bigger in the last month because the Democratic operatives and their allies, the progressive, non-profit community, have been out registering voters leading up to the Oct. 11 deadline,” Smith said, referring to left-of-center groups representing labor, minorities and women that are mobilizing across Florida.

Republicans point to impressive registration gains since 2012, when Mitt Romney barely lost to President Obama.

Over the past four years, the number of Republicans in the state has grown roughly 195,000, to nearly 4.6 million, while the number of Democrats has shrunk by nearly 89,000, to a little more than 4.7 million, according to the Florida Division of Elections.

That roughly 285,000 net gain for Republicans is almost four times the 74,309 margin by which Obama beat Romney in Florida.

And, GOP officials say, this is the first time in over a decade that the RNC has invested in voter registration.

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“The RNC's historic ground game operation has been proactively engaging all communities across the state every day since 2013,” said Ninio Fetalvo, RNC Florida communications director, pointing to GOP Gov. Rick Scott’s re-election in 2014. “These same efforts and resources that have already proven to be effective will pay dividends as we work to elect the entire Republican ticket this November.”

But while progressive allies are pushing the virtues of Clinton to voters, conservative groups are not as unanimous in their support of Trump.

The Libre Initiative, an organization funded by the Koch Brothers to attract conservative Hispanics by focusing on free market principles, is helping build support for Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio — but steering clear of promoting Trump. And Monday, the South Florida-based Latin Builders Association, a Republican stalwart for decades, announced its board voted to endorse Clinton.

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Smith said the reach of the Clinton campaign isn’t nearly what it was in the past two elections, when the “Obama machine” basically supplanted local Democratic organizations because they were better registering and mobilizing voters.

Also playing in the GOP’s favor is that Democrats are being weaned off the registration rolls at a faster pace than Republicans for “routine list maintenance” such as death, relocation or inactivity. It also includes those who switched their affiliation, although Smith said that accounts for a very small percentage of the Democratic dip.

But he said the notion that the GOP is “out-registering” Democrats and their allies is a false one. He points to Hispanic voters as a prime example.

Since Jan. 2, 2013, more than 166,000 new Hispanic voters registered as Democrats, compared to about 66,000 new Hispanic Republicans, according to his analysis.

That advantage for Democrats has accelerated since the first of this year, with 42 percent of all new Hispanic voters signing up as Democrats vs. 16 percent as Republicans, he said.

About 85 miles from Avalon Park, on the other side of Florida’s politically key I-4 corridor, Republican Brittany Reed, 25, has been trying to mobilize voters in the Tampa area.

The University of South Florida student, who hopes to join the U.S. Foreign Service, has spent some recent Saturdays going door-to-door in Hillsborough County trying to register new voters and sell them on the virtues of Trump.

“You might hit 300 doors and you might get 10 that answer,” she said. But ‘if I just change one person’s mind or educate one person, then I guess it’s worth it.”

Voter registration drives are rarely 100 percent successful.

It can take hours to sign up even one new voter, as Reed is discovering. And because volunteers are not supposed to ask a person’s political leanings before they try to register them, it might be someone who's not voting for your candidate.

Clinton volunteer Theresa Darlington, 36, found out last week outside the Social Security office in downtown St. Petersburg when she persuaded George Almond to register as a voter.

Almond, 62, a retired stevedore, hadn’t been registered for decades but now he said he plans to vote for Trump. He calls the bombastic billionaire “erratic” but thinks Clinton is even worse.

“Hillary’s one of the good old boys,” he said. “She ain’t going to change nothing.”