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Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Obama's Florida 2012 Problem

Politico: Florida, with its growing Latino, youth and African-American populations, was supposed to be one of the more winnable battlegrounds for Barack Obama in 2012, with prospects a bit sunnier than in North Carolina, Virginia and Ohio.

Throw in a governor, Rick Scott, who is one of the country’s most reviled Republican politicians, and Team Obama had reason to feel confident they could match, or even improve upon, his 51-to-48-percentage-point victory in 2008.

But it hasn’t turned out that way. As Obama prepares to promote tourism at Disney World on Thursday, Florida has become a real political problem child for the campaign. Ohio — the state that seemed to offer the dimmest hope for the incumbent after a Democratic wipeout in the 2012 midterms — is proving to be surprisingly strong for Obama.

“At this stage, Florida looks like a more difficult lift for the president than Ohio,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

The president is either trailing or running neck-and-neck with GOP front-runner Mitt Romney in recent polls of the state, including a Quinnipiac survey showing Romney edging Obama.

And a potential game-changer hovers on the sidelines: freshman Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, a political rock star who could find his way onto the GOP ticket, with hard-to-fathom implications for Obama.

But it’s the economy that threatens Obama most. No other state, with the possible exceptions of Nevada and Arizona, has suffered so much during the Great Recession, and voters remain in a surly, unpredictable mood.

Tellingly, the tipping point for Obama’s Florida win last time might have been John McCain’s infamous declaration in September 2008 that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong,” just as the economy tumbled into the biggest recession since the Great Depression.

“When McCain made that statement is when you saw a lot of undecided voters go to Obama,” said Florida Democratic pollster Dave Beattie. Obama “was elected because of the economy.”

Now Obama is the guy trying to sell a positive economic message to people who are seeing few glimmers of economic hope around them.

The unemployment rate is a dismal 10 percent in Florida. That’s down 2 percent since 2010 but still well above the national average of 8 percent. The state’s housing market, ravaged when the real estate bubble popped, still hasn’t recovered. More than 40 percent of mortgaged property-owners in Florida still owe more than their properties are worth, according to real estate tracking firm CoreLogic. That’s double the nationwide average.

Much of this, Democrats argue, is beyond Obama’s control. Yet even though the stimulus pumped tens of millions of dollars into the local economy, administration cuts to NASA are a headline story and a drag on the president’s already flagging popularity.

By contrast, the Obama-led auto bailout has buoyed his chances in northern Ohio, home to some of the country’s biggest auto assembly plants. “It’s given us some strength that you won’t see in places like Florida,” said a Democratic operative in Ohio.

And that has Florida Democrats, who had been hoping for a 2012 reprieve from three squeaker elections, predicting another too-close-to-call contest.

“The one thing that’s absolutely certain is it’s going to be a nail-biter,” said Steve Schale, a longtime Democratic strategist and Obama’s state director in Florida in 2008.

In past years, Florida has split across the middle politically, with the north tilting Republican and the south tilting Democratic. The battles have been won in the middle — the so-called I-4 corridor encompassing the Tampa and Orlando markets. More than 60 percent of Obama’s victory margin in 2008 came from that area.

“It’s where the election gets won or lost here,” said Schale, who still volunteers for Obama but is not on the payroll. “Winning Florida requires at least competing to a tie in those two markets.”

Since 2008, the Latino population has blossomed along the corridor, and most of those new residents are Puerto Ricans, who tend to vote Democratic, unlike Cuban immigrants who have tended to vote Republican.

So the Florida weakness shouldn’t worry Obama’s Chicago campaign brain trust too much — in theory.

His top advisers, led by 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe and successor Jim Messina, disdain the old John Kerry-Al Gore electoral map, with its focus on “must-win” Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. In presentations to donors and reporters, they emphasize a series of non-Florida, non-Ohio paths to 270 electoral votes.

In reality, many of the states on those new paths — Colorado, Virginia, New Mexico, North Carolina — are iffy, too. That means the old-path states, especially Florida with its 27 electoral votes, remain vital. And the campaign will most likely pump tens of millions into its expensive Miami, Orlando and Gulf Coast media markets before Election Day.

And Scott’s popularity has edged up in recent months — from the low 30s to the high 30s. He remains toxic to Republican presidential candidates, but they have carefully avoided the abrasive former health care executive during their swings south. And that, in turn, has diluted the effectiveness of Democratic attacks linking Scott to the eventual GOP nominee.

In recent months, top officials in Obama’s Chicago-based campaign headquarters have begun privately to express concern about Florida. During Obama’s visit to Orlando on Thursday, he will announce tourism initiatives designed to pump up the Sunshine State’s economy. He is expected to make a number of other forays to Florida in coming months.

Romney, who holds a lead over his GOP rivals in polls ahead of the state’s primary later this month, has looked past his primary opponents to hammer Obama.

“President Obama’s coming to Florida because he knows he’s in trouble,” Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said. “Four years ago, he promised new jobs and a new direction to Floridians. Now it’s clear his policies have failed. Florida has endured 31 straight months of double-digit unemployment. Nearly a million Floridians are unemployed, and Florida has lost over 150,000 jobs since President Obama took office.”

Williams said Romney’s team is “committed to running a vigorous campaign in Florida. We’re committed to earning every vote.”

While the principals duke it out in the headlines, the political parties are engaged in what might be a decisive guerrilla war over ballot access and early-voter laws.

One law passed by the GOP-controlled state Legislature moves up the early-voting deadline from the Sunday before an election to Saturday, potentially hurting Democrats who organize voting registration drives around Sunday church services.

Another law requires groups that hold voter-registration drives to turn in paperwork within 48 hours or face steep fines, a move that spurred The League of Women Voters to cease registration drives in the state and accuse GOP legislators of attempting to suppress votes.

The Democrats stand to gain the most from new registrants because a large chunk of new Florida residents are young people and immigrants who tend to vote Democratic, party officials claim.

Beattie said he believes the Republican laws were “a direct response to registration and turnout in 2008.”

The way forward for Obama could be to go negative against Romney. While Obama has repeatedly pushed the DREAM Act and other proposals to ease the path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants, Romney has taken a much harder line on illegal immigration.

Seniors, another important demographic in Florida, are now leaning Republican, polls show. But Democrats could make inroads with messaging tying Romney to the privatization of Social Security.

No matter what the Democratic line of attack, Obama faces an uphill slog, said Jennifer Duffy, senior analyst at the Cook Political Report.

“He’s going to have to fight for Florida, no question,” Duffy said.

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