Florida turns red: Can Democrats make a comeback?

[In It to Win It]

Florida turns red: Can Democrats make a comeback?

It was less than a day after the 2012 presidential election and Florida Republicans were already suffering from a particularly painful post-election hangover.

The state GOP had outspent the Florida Democratic Party by a 3-to-1 margin, while Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney had visited the state nearly 40 times — far more than then-President Barack Obama.

Yet Obama still came out on top, eking out a narrow 1-point victory that earned him Florida’s 29 electoral votes and helped propel him to a second term in the White House. The details of that win were even more alarming for Republicans.

Florida’s politically influential Cuban community, which had favored Republicans for decades, split its vote almost evenly between Romney and Obama, according to exit polling at the time. The GOP had even gone as far as to hold its 2012 national convention in Tampa in an effort to show its commitment to the state.

For Democrats, it was a momentous occasion; a show of how discipline, data and long-term organizing efforts could win over even the toughest and most expensive of battleground states.

“The feeling was that Democrats had picked the Republican lock on Florida,” recalled Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic pollster who helped Obama win the state in 2008 and 2012. “Almost like a video game cheat code.”