By ADAM C. SMITHThe Bush and Kerry campaigns pitch to narrow voter blocs with the potential to deliver a winning margin.
Rarely a week goes by that either of the presidential campaigns fails to check in with the Florida Arab American Leadership Council.
"We're constantly being contacted by both campaigns and called into meetings with the campaigns. Both parties are courting our community," said Taleb Salhab, a Democrat who coordinates the nonpartisan group that promotes political activism.
There's good reason for that political outreach. Florida's more than 100,000 Arab-American voters handily backed Bush in 2000. This year, though, polls of Arab-Americans in Florida and other battleground states suggest concerns over Middle East policy and civil liberties have flipped that voting bloc nearly 180-degrees in favor of John Kerry.
In a state where polls show another dead heat, victory comes on the margins. It's the empowering nature of Florida's 537-vote margin in 2000: Even the narrowest voting bloc can reasonably claim a decisive role in the Florida contest.
The estimated 50,000 gay Floridians who voted for Bush in 2000 arguably swung Florida. So did Cuban-Americans, who make up only about 5 percent of the electorate but overwhelmingly backed Bush. And African-Americans? But for problematic ballots in Duval and Palm Beach counties, Democratic leaders say their turnout would have won the White House for Al Gore.
"The reality is any group with a few hundred members can say, "I can swing the state,' which is partly true," said Tait Sye of America Coming Together, a Democratic voter mobilization group.
So as Bush and Kerry spend tens of millions of dollars on TV ads in Florida, they're also waging microcampaigns aimed at subsets of Florida's ever-changing electorate.
Barely one in 20 voters is undecided, so strategists are aiming to drive up turnout among faithful partisans and slice off slivers of voters wherever they can.
It's not enough to target Florida's always crucial senior vote, for instance, which in 2000 split evenly between Bush and Gore. Instead, campaigns need to more precisely target military retirees, or Northeastern or Midwestern retirees. One independent Democratic group is working to mobilize the growing number of relatively affluent seniors living in South Florida's gated communities.
The political slicing and dicing is demographic and geographic.
"They keep raising the bar for us," said lobbyist Mike Hightower, who is heading the Bush-Cheney campaign in Duval and three neighboring counties and is working to meet the campaign's target: beating Kerry in those counties by more than 100,000 votes.
Republicans are concentrating on boosting voter registration and turnout throughout conservative North Florida. They're especially hopeful about dramatically increasing their numbers in counties stretching northeast of Orlando to Jacksonville, where turnout disappointed them in 2000.
That North Florida effort is aimed at countering the solidly Democratic vote in southeast Florida, where the Kerry campaign has its own goals. The area's turnout was a few percentage points below the statewide average of 70 percent in 2000.
"It's realistic to have South Florida perform at the statewide level, and if we can get South Florida turnout to that level that would be a winning formula for us," said Marcus Jadotte, deputy campaign manager for Kerry-Edwards.
The basic formula for winning Florida has held true election after election.
For Democrats: Minimize losses in North Florida by winning more than 40 percent of the vote; win about 60 percent of the vote in South Florida; nearly tie the GOP in the Central Florida battleground. Doing that usually requires winning Tampa Bay.
Republicans likewise need to minimize South Florida losses, maximize their North Florida margins and keep Democrats from fighting to a near-draw along the I-4 corridor of swing voters.
But in a state where hundreds of thousands of people move in and out every year, strategists face a continuing challenge of determining where to target their efforts. Both sides can point to advantages over 2000.
Democrats note that the population of Democratic-leaning non-Cuban Hispanics is soaring. It partly explains why Orange County went Democratic in 2000 for the first time since World War II.
Some Republicans, meanwhile, contend that suburban growth helps the GOP.
"The growing suburbs and the exurbs (outer suburbs) are good for us - middle-class voters who want to buy a house and keep taxes low," said senior White House political adviser Karl Rove, who also suggested migration trends in Florida are helping Republicans.
"What has happened over the last five or six years is that the migration pattern in Florida has been ... somewhat less from the (heavily Democratic) Northeast and more from the Midwest and a lot more from the interior South. You've got a lot more people who lived in Atlanta or Nashville or Mobile or Montgomery who are moving to Florida," Rove said.
Voter registration trends offer good news for both sides.
Since the last election, Republicans have added nearly 20,000 more voters to the rolls than Democrats. The recent trend, however, looks much better for the Democrats. From December to August, they gained nearly 186,000 registrations, compared to nearly 128,000 for Republicans and 174,000 registered to neither party.
For the next two months thousands of campaign workers will be laboring to mobilize very specific voters. Among the chief targets:
CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVES: Republicans are aggressively working to register and mobilize evangelical voters across Florida. How many additional votes that is likely to give Bush in November is uncertain, but strategists expect it should be in the thousands because many of these voters apparently stayed at home in 2000.
"The question is whether that's the Republicans' secret weapon - working the evangelical churches as if they were voting precincts," fretted Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, which has 350 people in Florida working full time to mobilize anti-Bush voters.
But touting issues such as a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage has a downside. Exit polls in 2000 found that one in four voters who identified themselves as gay backed Bush. Leaders of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay political group that endorsed Bush in 2000, think Bush is likely to lose two-thirds of that vote this year.
JEWS: Al Gore won 81 percent of the Jewish vote nationally, according to exit polls. Some Republican strategists think Bush may have won less than 10 percent of Florida's 500,000 Jewish voters. Without Jewish Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman on the Democratic ticket and with Bush's strong record of standing up for Israel, some Republicans think Bush will pick up thousands of votes in South Florida.
AFRICAN-AMERICANS: Black voters account for about 11 percent of registered voters and in 2000 they turned out in disproportionately high numbers. Exit polls showed fewer than one in 10 backed Bush in 2000. Nobody expects Bush to dramatically increase his share of the African-American vote, but he could hardly do worse. The real question is turnout. Weak turnout almost guarantees Bush wins Florida.
Among black voters, both parties are paying increasing attention to Haitian-Americans and other voters of Caribbean origin. An estimated 150,000 Haitian voters live in Florida, and both sides are reaching out to them, focusing on issues such as immigration.
"You look at what the Republicans are doing (advertising) on Caribbean radio and it's clear they agree that the Caribbean vote is not identical to the African-American vote," said John Hennelly, state campaign director for the Service Employees International Union, some of whose Haitian members are working full time to turn out Caribbean voters.
HISPANICS: Probably the most aggressively targeted group in Florida, Hispanics fall into two distinct categories: overwhelmingly Republican Cuban voters and Democratic-leaning non-Cuban Hispanics.
On both scores, Bush-Cheney stands to benefit from Cuban-born Orlando resident Mel Martinez winning the Republican Senate nomination. Republicans are convinced Martinez will drive up turnout among South Florida Cubans and help move Central Florida's other Hispanics to Bush.
Democrats, though, are mounting an effort to register and win over non-Cuban Hispanics, emphasizing their agenda expanding access to health care and improving the economy. These voters handily favored Gore in 2000 and Jeb Bush in 2002. A decade ago, Cubans accounted for 80 percent of Florida's Hispanic vote, but today they make up just over half.
Some Democratic strategists also see a shot at shaving off some of Bush's Cuban support, because of changing demographics in the Cuban community and opposition to restrictions the administration put on travel to Cuba.
"Al Gore got 17 percent of the Cuban vote in 2000, and he had the problem with Elian. Bill Clinton got nearly 40 percent of the Cuban vote in '96. It's just a question of where we fall in that range," said Tom Shea, head of Kerry's Florida campaign.
WHITE WOMEN: Whoever wins over white women in Tampa Bay will probably win Florida, said Democratic pollster David Beattie. That's because nearly 78 percent of the people living in swing counties live in Tampa Bay and white women are among the most "persuadable" voters in the state.
Both campaigns are aggressively targetting women with direct mail, phone calls and TV ads emphasizing security, education, health care and other issues that resonate with women. To name just one example, the political arm of Planned Parenthood expects to get 50,000 abortion rights supporters cast their votes when early voting starts Oct.18.
Staff writer Bill Adair contributed to this report. Adam C. Smith can be reached at adam@sptimes.com or 727 893-8241.
[Last modified September 4, 2004, 23:35:33]