Priorities USA, a major Democratic super PAC, formally declared Florida one of the battlegrounds for the 2020 election, which means digital campaign ads are coming soon and won’t ease up until after a president is picked.
Florida, along with Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, will be flooded with digital ads in the ramp-up to the election that will pit Republican President Donald Trump against the eventual Democratic nominee, Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, said during a conference call with reporters Tuesday.
“Those four states will be critical in terms of developing a path to 270 (electoral votes). It will be places that we invest in early, aggressively and through the end of next year,” Cecil said.
Within the next couple of weeks, the spending in the four states will be between $300,000 and $450,000 a week, and eventually the outreach will go into television ads and ground operations, Cecil said.
Florida even has its own Priorities Florida, which will be gathering personalized stories that will be converted into ads focusing on the economy, health costs, climate change, immigration and foreign relations.
“We know that more and more people are moving online,” Cecil said. “We know the cost of Florida advertising gets more expensive every year. And so our program will begin online.”
In announcing the Florida focus, Priorities USA also released a survey that showed Latino voters predominantly favor Democrats in Florida over Trump. But that advantage is “somewhat soft,” in part because of the strong economy.
The initial ads are intended to showcase how working families haven’t benefited under the economy during the Trump administration.
Cecil said Priorities USA projects that if the election was held now, the Democrat nominee would secure 278 electoral votes to 260 for Trump, but those numbers can easily swing depending on how certain demographics turn out.
Trump won 304 electoral votes in 2016, including carrying Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
“We know there is a motivated group on both sides. In our projections of the Electoral College, we are projecting a higher turnout of both Democrats and Republicans,” Cecil said. “We think it is a mistake, and I think we saw that in some respects in Florida in 2018, to assume that conservatives on the Republican side will stay relatively static and only Democrats will increase their turnout.”
STILL SEEKING SPACE
Florida still wants to land the command for Trump’s Space Force.
Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez was in Washington, D.C. this week for space-related chats, including a sit-down Tuesday at the Pentagon with Lt. Gen. David Thompson, the vice commander of the U.S. Air Force Space Command, and a congressional roundtable on Florida’s space industry a day later.
“This morning, I shared how Florida is focused and uniquely equipped to expand our aerospace industry with a bipartisan group of members of Congress,” Nunez tweeted Wednesday.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Space Force dreams are not shared by the U.S. Air Force, which doesn’t have a Florida location on its list of potential sites for the command, which for now will remain within the Air Force.
Thompson, whose resume includes two years as commander of the 45th Operations Group at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, is responsible for all Air Force space missions and space-related activities.
Nunez, who also serves as chairwoman of Space Florida, the state’s aerospace arm, met with officials of private aerospace manufacturer SpaceX on Tuesday.
STATUE DEBATES FLARE AGAIN
Florida may be heading for more debates on statues.
A protest march is in the works for Tavares next month against a plan to relocate a 9-foot bronze statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith from the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C. to the Lake County Historical Society and Museum.
The statue of Smith has represented Florida in the National Statuary Hall since the 1920s. But it is being replaced by a statue representing civil- rights leader and educator Mary McLeod Bethune.
The change was made after the 2015 shooting deaths of nine African-American worshippers at a historic church in Charleston, S.C. The shooting set off a nationwide backlash against Confederate symbols.
Meanwhile, state Rep. Geraldine Thompson, D-Windermere, has told Florida Politics she will revive efforts to remove one of the two marble obelisks from the front green of the Old Capitol in Tallahassee.
Thompson is targeting a monument that was dedicated in 1882 according to the state Department of Management Services, and has been in its current location since 1923. The obelisk says its intent is, “To rescue from oblivion and perpetuate in the memory of succeeding generations the heroic patriotism of the men of Leon County who perished in the Civil War of 1861-1865.”
Already coming out swinging in support of the monument’s preservation is Save Southern Heritage, an organization created in 2015 in response to “knee-jerk Anti-Southern institutionalized bullying.”
"How yesterday's veterans are treated today signals how today's veterans will be treated tomorrow, and advancing this hateful proposal would send a chilling message to those in harm's way that their service might be second-guessed when they are dead and gone and can no longer defend themselves,” Save Southern Heritage spokesman David McCallister said in a prepared statement.
TWEET OF THE WEEK: “The controversy swirling around Governor Rosello had become a serious distraction & a major impediments to our efforts to provide assistance to our fellow American citizens in #PuertoRico. I am hopeful his resignation will bring an end to this nightmare.” --- U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) on the resignation of Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello.
