Florida top battleground state for presidential election

With the most electoral votes of any battleground state in the nation, Florida once again will be the most hotly contested prize in the presidential election in November.

Big, diverse and expensive for political campaigns, Florida plays a pivotal role every four years in deciding the presidency. The infamous Florida recount in 2000 between Al Gore and George W. Bush, with hanging chads and legions of campaign attorneys, was just the most extreme example in a state where races are almost always decided by razor-thin margins.

Since 1996, no candidate has won more than the 52.1 percent of Florida votes that Republican George W. Bush garnered in 2004. With 29 electoral votes at stake, Florida represents more than 10 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency.

Florida has become a bellwether — in the past 10 presidential elections, Floridians have picked the winner nine times. The exception was 1992, when incumbent Republican George H.W. Bush won Florida with 40.89 percent but lost the presidency to Democrat Bill Clinton (39 percent in Florida). Independent candidate H. Ross Perot pulled in 19.82 percent of the Florida vote in that contest.

The state has every kind of voting bloc imaginable — conservatives, liberals, Democrats in north Florida who tend to vote Republican, a large Puerto Rican population, veterans, retirees from all over the country, Cuban Americans and a growing influence of immigrants from Latin American countries such as Peru, Ecuador and Brazil. Nearly a quarter of all South American immigrants to the U.S. since 2010 have settled in Florida.

The Interstate 4 corridor, which runs through central Florida from Tampa to Orlando to the Daytona Beach area, is known as the most important swing region in the most important swing state.

“Florida is as purple as purple states come,” said political consultant Adam Goodman of Tampa. “We’re like the face of America. It is a microcosm and a melting pot.”

It is also costly for media campaigns, with large or medium-sized broadcast markets in Tampa, Miami-Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Naples, Fort Myers, Palm Beach, Jacksonville and Tallahassee. Mr. Goodman, president of The Victory Group who has worked on more than 135 winning campaigns in the state, said the presidential campaigns in the general election will be expensive for outside advocacy groups and the candidates themselves.

“To go statewide with a message that saturates, you’re talking about $3 million-plus a week,” he said. “That’s a lot of money, and not a lot of people have that.”

Adding to the cost this year is the campaign for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat. Republican Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera and Democratic U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy are hoping to emerge from crowded fields, but no candidate has significant name recognition. They are vying for the seat being vacated by Republican Marco Rubio, who is running for president.

“Neither party has an 800-pound gorilla in the race,” said a state Republican operative. “So you’re probably looking at a more than $50 million project to win the U.S. Senate seat, and when you start spending that kind of money statewide on a Senate seat, that drives up the price of presidential [air] time. It’s supply and demand.”

With the general election looking increasingly like a contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, analysts are expecting the campaign in Florida to be — guess what — a close race. Mr. Goodman rates it “a real tossup.”

Mrs. Clinton defeated Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary in Florida, though the state’s primary that year was largely meaningless because the Democratic National Committee sanctioned the state party for moving up the date of its primary.

This year, Mr. Trump is polling ahead of Mr. Rubio in his home state. Mr. Trump owns a 126-room beachfront estate in Palm Beach.

“It’s really going to be a fight between the demographics and the new geographics of politics,” Mr. Goodman said, adding that Mr. Trump and Democratic candidate Bernard Sanders, an independent U.S. senator from Vermont, “really created some new turf” by running as outsiders.

“I think the people of Florida are just as open to exploring that as anyone else in America,” he said.