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Democrats have supposedly given up winning one of the nation’s most historic, long-time swing-states for the upcoming 2024 election.
The Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon admitted that the state of Florida was not in the campaign’s targets for the election, which all but concedes the Sunshine State’s 30 Electoral College votes to President Trump.
During a podcast interview on Puck’s John Heilemann, which was released Monday, whether Joe Biden’s reelection team saw the state as a battleground for this cycle, Dillon replied, “No.”
Heilemann then joked that “he was afraid you were going to lie” about Florida’s status as a battleground, as the state has made trends to the right during the past few elections.
“I think the job of the campaign is to keep as many battleground states in play for as long as possible, so we can navigate any flexibility in the race,” Dillon told Heilemann.
Florida was one of the most high-profile swing-states of the 21st century, with its closest election separating presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore by 537 ballots among the near six million votes cast in 2000.
Even recently, President Trump carried the state by roughly one point in 2016, and by three points four years later. During the 2018 midterm elections, Republican Ron DeSantis won his first term as governor by less than half a percentage point, while Rick Scott defeated incumbent Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson by an even smaller margin than the governor-elect.
Over the last four years, however, Florida as a whole sharply turned from a strong centrist identity towards conservatism. As RSBN previously reported, the Florida GOP is projected to have over one million more voters more than Democrats by Election Day this fall.
Republicans gained these registration surges around 2021—possibly because of the DeSantis administration’s COVID-19 era policies, compared to the harsh pandemic restrictions across other states and dissatisfaction with Joe Biden’s tenure during this tumultuous period in time.
DeSantis’s popularity and Republican gains can be further shown with the governor’s 19.4-point reelection win in 2022, as he and the party made gains specifically throughout the once-strong Democratic southern portion of the state.
In 2018, for instance, DeSantis lost by 21 points in Miami-Dade County and 17 points in Palm Beach County. However, the governor flipped these Democrat strongholds just four years later, carrying Miami-Dade by more than 11 points and then Palm Beach by nearly three points.
From a strategic standpoint, it makes sense for Dillon to write off Florida and instead focus the campaign’s resources on defending the states the incumbent carried four years ago, as she has promised.
However, her remarks on the podcast directly contradict Biden’s very own comments from April, when he claimed Florida was “in play, nationally.”
“Florida—I think Florida is in play, nationally,” Biden told his supporters during a rally in Tampa at Hillsborough Community College, per a report from Fox News.
Nonetheless, polling paints a conflating picture to Biden’s, as the incumbent has not led in a single poll for the state and instead has trailed President Trump by evidently insurmountable margins.
As of Wednesday, Real Clear Politics’ polling averages show Trump ahead by 7.6-points over Biden (50.4 percent to 42.8 percent) for the 2024 race in Florida, with many other individual surveys giving the 45th president an even wider margin.
With Florida seemingly not in play for Democrats, Dillon, who managed Biden’s 2020 campaign, revealed that Democrats will invest resources in winning North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada.
Biden narrowly carried these states, with the exception of North Carolina, in 2020. Dillon argued that the easiest pathway to victory would be “through the blue wall,” which encompasses Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, but that she felt very “bullish” as well in regards to the Tar Heel State.
Dillon explained there was ample opportunity for victory in North Carolina “because we lost it by 1.3 percentage points in 2020, and we did not play there.”
She argued that the legislature’s “extreme bills,” a “restrictive abortion law,” and the “beyond-extreme candidate running for governor,” referring to the popular GOP Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, would help put North Carolina “in play” for Joe Biden.
Like Florida, North Carolina seems to be an unlikely victory for Biden, who has not led in a single poll in the Tar Heel State since March of 2023.
Real Clear Politics’ recent averages show President Trump defeating the incumbent by 5.8 points (47.6 to 41.8 percent) as of Wednesday. The 45th president has also carried the state twice, another roadblock for Biden in the state.