Florida Democrats this weekend will begin doing the groundwork to harvest the state's 30 presidential electoral votes for Vice President Kamala Harris in November and deny former President Donald Trump a second term.
Sunday marks 100 days to Election Day, and Democrats will rally around that milestone in cities from Pensacola to Miami with a series of training sessions, phone banks, an ice cream social and a mile-long golf cart caravan.
On Friday, the campaign kicks off a “100 days of action weekend” to mobilize a surge of volunteers that appeared after Harris became a presidential candidate.
The idea is to build community among the newcomers and expand the Democrats' base, according to Florida Democratic Party officials and Harris campaign staffers.
Trump is favored by the experts to win Florida in November. An aggregation of polls by the FiveThirtyEight website gives the former president an 8-point lead in the state.
But with nearly 30% of Florida voters not affiliated with the either the Republican or Democratic parties, Democrats believe that if they deploy an army of grassroots volunteers to make phone calls, knock on doors and engage in public displays of support, they can flip the state in November.
“We are working for every vote in this state ... it’s one we are determined to win,” said Jasmine Burney Clark, director of the Harris campaign in Florida.
That's a tall order, considering Republicans overtook Democrats in the number of registered voters statewide at the end of 2021, and now are on track to have a lead of one million by the time of the November general election.
Undaunted, Clark said 7,000 Floridians signed up as campaign volunteers in the 72 hours after Harris became a candidate. It's a surge of newcomers that veteran Democrat campaign workers said they have not seen since former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.
The plan is to activate more than 2,600 of the newcomers this weekend.
'I have never seen anything like this'
Jennifer Griffith, chair of the Pinellas County Democratic Executive Committee, was floored when she issued a call earlier this week for volunteers to work a phone bank Saturday, 266 people responded by Thursday afternoon.
“I have never seen anything like this,” said Griffith, who has been with the DEC since 2017.
“We had to expand to a second shift on Saturday and add two more for Sunday because more people are trying to sign up. The maximum capacity for our office is 55 people,” Griffith said.
Biden won Pinellas County by 1,200 votes in 2020.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio dismiss Harris as a California leftist who is too liberal for Florida. DeSantis on Wednesday said Harris had been “disastrous” as Vice President, and was more liberal than Biden.
“She wanted to get rid of all private health insurance, and said, ‘Let’s just junk all that,’ “ he said.
Rubio told Fox News if Harris were to become president the country “would be destroyed. In the end, she’s a radical California left winger and people need to know about her record.”
Andrea Evans-Dixon, a St. Petersburg volunteer for the weekend of action, said Harris brings an "energy" that has been missing from the Democratic Party.
Harris is campaigning on reproductive rights, Trump’s legal history, and against the economic policies included in Project 2025, a blueprint for a Trump presidency put together by former Trump advisors, which Harris said would threaten the middle class. Trump has distanced himself from the proposal.
Related coverage: 'Lab rats?' GOP's Project 2025 looks to have been test-marketed in Florida
Griffith, Evans and Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried said there is a clear difference between Harris’ policy proposals and Trump's. Those distinctions will be highlighted in phone calls. More than 25% of the names on the phone banks’ to-call list are no-party affiliated voters.
Others targeted are voters who have been moved into the inactive voter list. The plan is to reactivate the disengaged voters and recruit the NPAs to the Democratic column.
The last Democratic presidential candidate to win Florida was Obama in 2012. The last Democrat to win a statewide election is Fried, who won the Agriculture Commissioner's race in 2018.
Fried said Democrats have a chance to stop a string of statewide losses by expanding its coalition of voters. She points to the 2023 elections, when Democrats won the Jacksonville mayor’s office and flipped an Orlando-area Florida House seat. No-party-affiliated voters broke for Democrats by more than 65%.
“They represent one-third of Florida voters (actually 28%) and will play a decisive role in November,” said Fried in a video call with reporters.
No-party voters tend to be politically moderate, professor says
The NPAs and disengaged voters are predominately moderates, according to St. Petersburg College political scientist Tara Newsom. Her research finds that, as a group, they are dissatisfied with politics.
Newsom, director of the school's Center for Civic Learning and Community Engagement, said nationwide polls show NPA voters motivated by economic and education issues, and support choice and privacy in family planning – topics Trump seems to ignore, she said.
“Harris offers a stark contrast to Trump, who is embracing an ultra-right messaging that sounds like the party of grievances, which makes the optics of Harris much more moderate,” Newsom said.
She added that Democrats can also frame Harris’ promotion to the top of the ticket as responding to voters saying they want a fresh approach.
The Democrats’ “action weekend” is part community-building with meet-and-greets, and other activities for the new volunteers, and voter outreach with phone banks and town hall meetings.
More: These Florida Democrats have endorsed Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out
They begin Friday morning with meet-and-greets in Pensacola, Fort Walton Beach, and Panama City. In Quincy, Gadsden County Commissioner Brenda Holt will host a "Black Leaders Roundtable" in Quincy.
Saturday, the Harris campaign will deploy 1,765 volunteers to 16 phone banks – two in the panhandle staffed by 400 volunteers, and two in Central Florida targeting Hispanics – to introduce Harris as a presidential candidate to voters not affiliated with a political party and to encourage those who have fallen off the active voter rolls to start voting again.
The campaign intends to rally its new volunteers in preparation for the fall campaign with a roundtable discussion in Temple Terrace, a voter recruitment training session for senior citizens in Wilton Manors, Coral Springs neighborhood canvassing, and 100 golf cart owners in a caravan parading through The Villages.
Sunday, the Tamarac Jewish Coalition will host a postcard writing session, the Delray Beach Democratic Women’s Club will combine an ice cream social with a phone bank, canvassers will work neighborhoods in Miami and Miami Gardens and phone banks will be calling 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 and is on X as @CallTallahassee .
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Election 2024: Kamala Harris campaign to launch Florida ground game this weekend
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