Biden's Shot at Florida Isn't Looking So Good

The battleground state of Florida is turning into a battleground indeed. With more than 90% of the vote counted, the AP has Trump leading 51.3% to 47.8% and the New York Times' election needle is reading "very likely Trump." The storylines emerging from the state: All eyes are on southern Miami-Dade county, with CNN reporting that Joe Biden doesn't seem to be performing as well as Hillary Clinton did there four years prior. The county is home to many Cuban American voters, and Nate Cohn of the New York Times tweets that "Trump is doing way, way better than 2016 in Hispanic and Cuban areas" in the state. "Biden *is* doing better in older and relatively white areas," he continues, "but not by much—and that doesn't cut it in diverse FL."

That Trump is doing way better there isn't a happy accident. Vox outlines a concerted effort by the Trump campaign to go after not just Latino voters in Miami-Dade County but specifically Cuban Americans, "who have historically leaned more Republican than Latinos from other countries of origin, embittered by John F. Kennedy’s withdrawal of support for an operation against dictator Fidel Castro at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs decades ago." Since June the Trump campaign has been running ads in Spanish that paint Biden as similar to Castro and other "ruthless Latin American caudillos," per Vox. So what if Trump takes the state and its 29 electoral votes? Per FiveThirtyEight's election map, that bumps Trump's chance of winning it all from 10% to 33%. (More Election 2020 stories.)