Biden leans on one-time battleground Florida as a cautionary tale

MIAMI — President Joe Biden probably won’t carry Florida in November. But he hopes the state serves as a warning to voters elsewhere about what could happen if he doesn't win.

Biden plans to denounce Florida’s policies, especially a six-week abortion ban taking effect next week, during a campaign event in Tampa on Tuesday. It’s just one example of how the campaign in the coming months will try to designate the now conservative-leaning state as “ground zero for Trump’s MAGA blueprint,” citing not just abortion but also looser gun laws and book removals from school libraries.

Playing no small part into the boogeyman narrative for the Biden campaign is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed the abortion ban into law last year as he and Trump vied for the GOP presidential nomination.

Biden knows he has to spend time in Florida to show how "extreme" conditions have gotten in the state under DeSantis, said state Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried. "He understands that if we're going to fight back against the extremism of the MAGA Republicans, that you got to come to the belly of the beast," Fried said.

The Biden campaign made the surprising declaration this month that it saw Florida as “winnable,” after the state Supreme Court authorized a referendum that would allow voters to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution, thereby undoing the six-week ban. But the path to turning Florida blue starts with dumping millions of dollars in campaign cash on a state that Democrats haven’t won in over a decade, an unlikely scenario for a campaign that, for now, is spending in only one state — North Carolina — Biden didn’t win in 2020.

Even so, Florida provides a useful backdrop for showing “what the national Republican agenda looks like and its impacts on real people,” said Joshua Karp, a Democratic consultant who’s worked on multiple Florida races. That, Democrats hope, trickles out not only to swing state voters, but energizes beleaguered Florida Democrats looking to break the state GOP’s supermajority in the state legislature.

“This is contrast messaging,” said Kevin Cate, a Florida-based Democratic communications consultant, of Biden’s visit. “There is not a state in the union that indicts the failed MAGA leadership quite like Florida does.”

For much of this week, the presidential race will be centered outside of the core battleground states. Biden will be dropping into Florida, his challenger’s adopted home state, to talk about abortion, contraception and in vitro fertilization. Trump, meanwhile, is tied up in court for his hush-money trial in New York on Tuesday — a state that Republicans have sought to demonize with the former president in front of a jury and protests roiling one of the nation’s premier universities.

Florida, in contrast, seems on track to hit 1 million more active registered Republicans than Democrats. DeSantis won reelection by almost 20 points and all statewide offices are held by Republicans. Yet while Democrats frequently rail against the state, they still often fly down here to raise cash. Biden isn’t doing a fundraiser in Florida this time, said Chris Korge, the Democratic National Committee’s finance chair, but Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg did attend one last week with the Biden Victory Fund in his personal capacity in Miami, and also led a roundtable with Democratic mayors.

It’s similar to what Republicans have long done in California and New York: publicly flogging the blue states while happily collecting big checks at exclusive fundraisers.

Though state Democrats insist Florida’s a battleground and that they have a better chance to win the nation’s third-largest state than they did in 2020, Biden’s campaign has yet to spend a significant amount of cash in the state. In 2020, Biden and Trump together spent about $250 million on TV ads by October, a POLITICO analysis found, but are poised to spend far less this cycle.

But Florida can still serve Biden, even if Trump gets its 30 electoral votes. And his team insists it sees a chance to make inroads given that Biden is out-fundraising Trump, who’s spending much of his campaign warchest on battling his criminal indictments.

“It's exceptionally smart for the president to come to Florida to tell the rest of the nation how quickly a purple state can become an extreme MAGA Gilead and how the abortion issue on its own has driven that,” said Miami-based Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi, referring to the setting of the dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Republican who lost his suburban Miami seat in 2018, said Biden was campaigning in Florida to try to show it was on offense. “[Abortion] is going to be a destructive issue for Republicans, and while that may not be the case in Florida, it certainly could be the case in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan,” he said.

Republicans say they welcome the contrast and the Trump campaign confidently declared Florida “Trump Country,” given the GOP voter registration advantage and polling in the former president’s favor. DeSantis, who signed the six-week abortion bill into law, frequently skewers Biden during public events on issues from the economy to immigration. His pitch to America has long been that Florida offers a “citadel of freedom” drawing away residents from blue states.

“This is not going to be a state that’s competitive in November,” DeSantis said in Miami Beach last month. “And that’s just the reality.”