Florida Democrats will begin laying the groundwork this weekend to secure the state’s 30 electoral votes for Vice President Kamala Harris in November’s presidential election and prevent former President Donald Trump from winning a second term.
Sunday marks 100 days until Election Day, and Democrats are celebrating the milestone with a series of training sessions, phone banks, ice cream parties and a mile-long golf cart caravan in cities from Pensacola to Miami.
On Friday, the campaign is kicking off a “100 Days of Action Weekend” to mobilize volunteers, who have surged since Harris became the presidential candidate.
The idea, according to Florida Democratic Party officials and Harris campaign staff, is to build community among newcomers and expand the Democratic base.
Experts expect Trump to win Florida’s election in November, with a poll by the FiveThirtyEight website giving him an 8-point lead in the state.
But with roughly 30 percent of Florida’s voters not affiliated with either the Republican or Democratic Party, Democrats believe they can flip the state in November by deploying an army of grassroots volunteers to make phone calls, canvass doors and make public appearances to endorse them.
“We are fighting for every vote in this state and we are determined to win,” said Jasmine Barney Clark, Harris’ campaign manager in Florida.
That’s a tall order, given that Republicans are expected to surpass Democrats in statewide registered voters at the end of 2021 and hold a lead of 1 million by the November general election.
Clarke said undeterred that 7,000 Floridians signed up to volunteer on her campaign within 72 hours of Harris becoming the candidate — a surge of new recruits not seen since President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, veteran Democratic campaigners said.
The plan is to have more than 2,600 new recruits in action this weekend.
“I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Jennifer Griffith, chairwoman of the Pinellas County Democratic Executive Committee, put out a call for volunteers to work in a phone bank on Saturday earlier this week and was stunned when 266 people responded by Thursday afternoon.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Griffith, who has been with DEC since 2017.
“We’ve had to expand to a second shift on Saturday and add two more shifts on Sunday due to the increase in people wanting to register. Our office has a maximum capacity of 55 people,” Griffith said.
Biden won Pinellas County in 2020 by 1,200 votes.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio have dismissed Harris as too left-wing for California and too liberal for Florida. DeSantis said Wednesday that Harris would be a “disastrous” vice president and that she is more liberal than Biden.
“She wanted to get rid of all private health insurance, so she said, ‘Let’s get rid of it all,'” he said.
Rubio told Fox News that if Harris became president, “it would ruin the country. At the end of the day, she’s a radical leftist from California and people need to know her record.”
Andrea Evans Dixon, a St. Petersburg volunteer at the weekend effort, said Harris brings an “energy” that has been missing from the Democratic Party.
Harris has campaigned against reproductive rights, Trump’s legal record and economic policies included in Project 2025, a presidential blueprint compiled by Trump’s former advisers, which she says threaten the middle class. Trump has distanced himself from the proposals.
Related article:‘Lab rats?’ Republican Project 2025 apparently being test marketed in Florida
Griffith, Evans and Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said there are clear differences between Harris’ policy proposals and those of Trump — differences that will be highlighted in the calls: More than 25% of the names on the phone bank’s calling list are independent voters.
The targets are voters who have been moved to the inactive voter list. The plan is to reactivate them and bring them over to the Democratic Party.
The last Democratic presidential candidate to win Florida was Obama in 2012. The last Democratic candidate to win a statewide election was Fried, who won for agriculture commissioner in 2018.
Fried said Democrats have a chance to halt a string of statewide losses by expanding their coalition of voters. He cited the 2023 elections in which Democrats won the mayoralty of Jacksonville and recaptured a congressional seat in the Orlando area of Florida. More than 65% of independent voters voted Democratic.
“They represent a third of Florida’s voters — 28 percent, in fact — and they will play a decisive role in November,” Fried said in a video call with reporters.
Independent voters tend to be politically moderate, says professor
NPA and disengaged voters are primarily moderates, according to St. Petersburg College political scientist Tara Newsome, whose research shows that, as a group, they are dissatisfied with politics.
Newsom, director of the school’s Center for Civic Learning and Community Engagement, said national polls show NPA voters are motivated by economic and education issues and support the right to choose and privacy in family planning, issues that Trump appears to ignore.
“Harris stands in stark contrast to Trump, whose far-right message sounds like the party of grievances, and she comes across as much more moderate,” Newsom said.
He added that Democrats could also position Harris’ elevation to the top of the list as a response to voters calling for a new approach.
The Democratic Party’s “Action Weekend” is part community building with meet-ups and other activities for new volunteers, and part voter outreach with phone banks and town hall meetings.
more:Florida Democrats endorsed Kamala Harris after Biden withdrew.
The event begins Friday morning with networking events in Pensacola, Fort Walton Beach and Panama City, where Gadsden County Commissioner Brenda Holt will host a Black Leadership Roundtable in Quincy.
The Harris campaign will deploy 1,765 volunteers to 16 phone banks on Saturday — two with 400 volunteers in the Panhandle and two in Central Florida targeting Hispanics — to introduce Harris as a presidential candidate to unaffiliated voters and encourage those who have fallen off the voter rolls to start voting again.
The campaign plans to rally new volunteers for the fall campaign with roundtable discussions in Temple Terrace, a voter recruitment training session for seniors in Wilton Manors, door-to-door canvassing in the Coral Springs neighborhood and a caravan of 100 golf cart owners parading through The Villages.
On Sunday, the Tamarack Jewish Federation will host a postcard-writing class, the Delray Beach Democratic Women’s Club will combine an ice cream party with a phone bank, canvassers will work in neighborhoods in Miami and Miami Gardens, and phone banks will make calls from Jacksonville, Sarasota and St. Petersburg.
James Call is a member of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jcall@tallahassee.com or by email at X. @ColeTallahassee.
