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With Donald J. Trump pulling even or ahead of Hillary Clinton in a series of recent national polls, the once unthinkable has become at least plausible. But if he is to be elected the 45th president, he must compete on a political map that, for now, looks forbidding.
In the Republican primaries, he proved a master of nationalizing the political debate, appealing to voters across regional lines with jeremiads about immigration and crime that captivated an almost uniformly white primary electorate. At the outset of the general election, Mr. Trump has dominated the day-to-day political combat on national television and social media.
In the general election, however, his fate will be determined not by his Twitter followers or a relatively homogeneous Republican electorate, but by a set of interlocking and increasingly diverse regions, home to some 90 million Americans, that hold many of the 270 electoral votes he needs to win.
Republicans enter the general election at a hefty disadvantage: Since the 1992 campaign, 18 states have voted consistently for Democrats in presidential elections, giving their party a firm foundation of 242 electoral votes to build upon.
And in the four regions likely to decide the presidency — Florida, the upper Southeast, the Rust Belt and the interior West — Mr. Trump faces daunting obstacles, according to interviews last week with elected officials, political strategists and voters.
Of course, months remain before voting begins, and this political year has defied many predictions. But if Mrs. Clinton clinches the Democratic nomination as expected, she may find an electoral bulwark in these coveted swing-state voters.
Minority Clout in South Florida
Had Republicans nominated Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush for president, Tomás Regalado would have hurled himself into the task of electing their candidate.
“I would have been all in,” Mr. Regalado, the Republican mayor of Miami, said in his office overlooking Biscayne Bay.
Instead, Mr. Regalado, a former broadcast journalist, intends to sit out the presidential race. He considers Mrs. Clinton untrustworthy, but views Mr. Trump as a poisonous candidate who has aggravated racial divisions. In Miami, Mr. Regalado said, Mr. Trump is seen as “a bully, as a person who despises people that don’t look like him.”
Mayor Tomás Regalado of Miami, a Republican, said he could not support Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Credit Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
Mr. Regalado, 69, said he had been inundated with angry email, some of it mentioning Mr. Trump by name. “Sometimes they say, ‘Yeah, Trump is right, you guys have to all go back to your country,’” said Mr. Regalado, who was born in Havana and emigrated as a teenager. “This is my country. I can’t go back to Cuba.”
Since Mr. Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, he has consolidated support from national party leaders and from many in the rank and file. He has pulled nearly even with Mrs. Clinton in many polls, including in Florida.
But the southern tip of the nation’s most populous swing state has been a blazing exception to the trend — most of all in Miami-Dade County, a densely populated bastion of diversity that cast about a tenth of the statewide vote in 2012.
Mr. Trump has trampled local sensibilities in myriad ways, from his belittling treatment of Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush to his personal coarseness, slashing comments on immigration and endorsement of open relations with the Castro government.
In addition to Mr. Regalado, two Republican members of Congress from Florida, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Carlos Curbelo, have said they will not back Mr. Trump, as has Carlos A. Gimenez, the Republican mayor of Miami-Dade County. All four are Cuban-American.
Early polls show voters in the area resoundingly rejecting Mr. Trump: A Quinnipiac University poll this month found Mr. Trump about even with Mrs. Clinton statewide, but losing a band of southeastern counties, including Miami-Dade and Broward, by 38 percentage points.
Some voters who were once intrigued by Mr. Trump now regard him with distaste. Carlos Guerrero, 55, said he had been willing to “look the other way” on many of Mr. Trump’s speeches — including “the way he speaks of Latin people” — because he liked Mr. Trump’s overall message.
But Mr. Guerrero, a Republican who described himself as a religious Catholic, said he recoiled when Mr. Trump began attacking Heidi Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz’s wife. “He is not qualified to run this country,” Mr. Guerrero, who is an actor, said of Mr. Trump. “This country was made by people who believed in God.”
Should Mr. Trump get trounced in South Florida, he might be hard-pressed to make up the difference elsewhere.
Trump supporters believe he can improve upon Mitt Romney’s performance in North Florida, in the conservative panhandle region and in the Jacksonville area. But Mr. Romney found it difficult in 2012 to overcome a catastrophic defeat in Miami. He cut into President Obama’s support across most of Florida, but the president held steady in Tampa and Orlando, two other diverse cities, and expanded his margin of victory in Miami-Dade by about 69,000 votes over his 2008 lead.
Mr. Obama ultimately captured Florida by about 74,000 votes.
Mr. Trump has his supporters here. Norma Samour, the owner of a shopping center, said she was a habitual Republican voter and would likely back Mr. Trump despite some mixed feelings. “He will make the United States more like it was 15 years ago,” said Ms. Samour, 56, who was raised in El Salvador and is of Palestinian descent. “People all over the world used to respect the United States.”
Yet the falloff Mr. Trump faces has, at a minimum, severely hindered Republican efforts to win statewide. Mr. Gimenez, the Miami-Dade mayor, said nominating Mr. Bush or Mr. Rubio would have allowed Republicans to challenge the Democrats’ dominance in South Florida.
“I don’t think the margin of defeat in Miami itself would have been as large,” Mr. Gimenez said. “Because of that, they may have been able to carry the state.”
North Carolina has a split political personality. Consider Debbie Holt.
A staunch supporter of abortion rights, Ms. Holt, 56, who owns a barbecue restaurant in downtown Raleigh, makes clear where she stands on other fronts in the culture wars with signs in her storefront window: “Stop profiling Muslims,” says one. Another: “Go To The Bathroom Where You Feel Best.”
Yet Ms. Holt is also an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump. “He don’t take any stuff, just like me,” she drawled in between ringing up lunch-rush customers, using a more piquant word for stuff.
Debbie Holt, an outspoken supporter of the Trump campaign, at Clyde Cooper’s Barbecue, the restaurant she owns in Raleigh. Credit Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times
Shannon White is as confused about her presidential preference as Ms. Holt is confident. A Mormon and Arizona transplant who usually votes for Republicans, Ms. White said she had no regard for Mrs. Clinton but doubted Mr. Trump’s adherence to any principles and was uneasy about his “abusive” language.
“I’m actually thinking more that I am going to go Libertarian,” Ms. White, 42, said after wrestling with a mannequin at the apparel store she and her husband recently opened.
For decades, this state has embodied contradictory impulses, simultaneously electing a racial hard-liner like Jesse Helms and New South Democrats like Terry Sanford and Jim Hunt. But, as its demographics shift, discerning which way the state will tilt in November seems harder than ever.
North Carolina may be the most evenly divided presidential battleground in the country.
Its two biggest population centers, Charlotte and the so-called Research Triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, have been transformed by an influx of political centrists from other states. The fastest-growing party registration preference is not Republican nor Democrat, but unaffiliated. The rural white “Jessecrats,” conservative Democrats who reliably cast ballots for Mr. Helms, are dying off. Elections are now won in the fast-growing edge towns like Cary, outside Raleigh, which natives joke stands for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.
Neither Mr. Trump, with his hard-edge nationalism, nor Mrs. Clinton, with a swirl of scandal surrounding her, is a natural fit for a state that hungers for political moderation but is increasingly disenchanted with the political class.
“They don’t like either party and they don’t like either candidate,” said Carter Wrenn, a veteran Republican strategist here. “It will just depend on which one they dislike less on Election Day.”
Polls show Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton begin the general election close to evenly matched. The surest sign of a jump ball: Democrats believe Mr. Trump starts with a narrow advantage, while Republicans believe Mrs. Clinton does. What they agree on is that, as at the national level, Republicans are largely coalescing around Mr. Trump and ruling out the possibility that Mrs. Clinton could run away with the state.
(NYT)
