Florida, with its growing Latino, youth and African-American populations, was supposed to be one of the more winnable battlegrounds for Barack Obama in 2012, with prospects a bit sunnier than in North Carolina, Virginia and Ohio.
Throw in a governor, Rick Scott, who is one of the country?s most reviled Republican politicians, and Team Obama had reason to feel confident they could match, or even improve upon, his 51-to-48-percentage-point victory in 2008.
Continue ReadingBut it hasn?t turned out that way. As Obama prepares to promote tourism at Disney World on Thursday, Florida has become a real political problem child for the campaign. Ohio ? the state that seemed to offer the dimmest hope for the incumbent after a Democratic wipeout in the 2012 midterms ? is proving to be surprisingly strong for Obama.
?At this stage, Florida looks like a more difficult lift for the president than Ohio,? said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
The president is either trailing or running neck-and-neck with GOP front-runner Mitt Romney in recent polls of the state, including a Quinnipiac survey showing Romney edging Obama.
And a potential game-changer hovers on the sidelines: freshman Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, a political rock star who could find his way onto the GOP ticket, with hard-to-fathom implications for Obama.
But it?s the economy that threatens Obama most. No other state, with the possible exceptions of Nevada and Arizona, has suffered so much during the Great Recession, and voters remain in a surly, unpredictable mood.
Tellingly, the tipping point for Obama?s Florida win last time might have been John McCain?s infamous declaration in September 2008 that ?the fundamentals of the economy are strong,? just as the economy tumbled into the biggest recession since the Great Depression.
?When McCain made that statement is when you saw a lot of undecided voters go to Obama,? said Florida Democratic pollster Dave Beattie. Obama ?was elected because of the economy.?
Now Obama is the guy trying to sell a positive economic message to people who are seeing few glimmers of economic hope around them.
The unemployment rate is a dismal 10 percent in Florida. That?s down 2 percent since 2010 but still well above the national average of 8 percent. The state?s housing market, ravaged when the real estate bubble popped, still hasn?t recovered. More than 40 percent of mortgaged property-owners in Florida still owe more than their properties are worth, according to real estate tracking firm CoreLogic. That?s double the nationwide average.
Much of this, Democrats argue, is beyond Obama?s control. Yet even though the stimulus pumped tens of millions of dollars into the local economy, administration cuts to NASA are a headline story and a drag on the president?s already flagging popularity.
By contrast, the Obama-led auto bailout has buoyed his chances in northern Ohio, home to some of the country?s biggest auto assembly plants. ?It?s given us some strength that you won?t see in places like Florida,? said a Democratic operative in Ohio.
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