On Tuesday, Barack Obama campaign manager David Plouffe sent a video to reporters laying out the political landscape with less than 50 days until the election. In it, he made a startling pronouncement: the Obama campaign was going to spend a total of $39 million in Florida, a state that, while classified as a battleground, is considered a long shot for the Democrat.
"Bush won Florida by 380,000 votes in 2004. If you look at the number of registered African-Americans who did not turn out in '04 it is over a half million; 900,000 registered young voters didn't turn out. There are over 1.4 million voters who we consider base voters who didn't register. Obviously there are a couple million more registered targets," explained Plouffe. "We have enough base voters in Florida to win the election if we can just turn them out. "
The "under the hood" peek at Obama's Sunshine State operation was met with general surprise. Such a budget, after all, would come at the expense of other battleground states that seemed much more promising.
In actuality, the Obama campaign has long seen Florida as fertile turf. Indeed a high-ranking adviser to the Senator told the Huffington Post several weeks ago, explicitly, that they envisioned more opportunity there than in Ohio and would be focusing their efforts likewise.
Another aide to the campaign said that Plouffe understood the Senator's chances in Florida. In addition to the million-plus registered voters who had not turned out in 2004, the campaign was targeting up to another million of African-Americans, youth and Latinos who were unregistered. In addition, Obama's aides have spearheaded a faith outreach drive to woo the large swath of religious voters who reside, primarily, in the northern part of the state. All these groups, the high-ranking official noted, were targeted heavily in Ohio back in 2004, making the margin for growth there far narrower.
And if Kerry's 400,000-vote loss to Bush in 2004 was a baseline, he added, then there were obvious avenues through which Obama could make up that ground.
"A few years ago the state party was in debt. They got creamed in '02, and '00 was demoralizing," the aide said. "Kerry campaigned here but he did it too late. In places like North Florida he got killed. That won't happen this time around. There are pockets in North Florida where 20 or 25 percent of African-Americans chose Bush over Kerry."
There are, of course, variables to this equation. For starters, because Democratic candidates agreed not to campaign in Florida during the primary, Obama was not able to woo voters (he did fundraise) in the state until this spring. He started really organizing a ground game only in July. As such, the campaign has just under 50 offices there as opposed to the nearly 70 it has functioning in Ohio.
The McCain campaign, meanwhile, has clearly invested in Florida as well, with the Senator recently making a stop in Jacksonville and previously appearing multiple times alongside the state's governor, Charlie Crist. The GOP, moreover, has been willing to push the envelope in the Sunshine State. On Tuesday, it was reported that the Republican National Committee, authorized by the McCain campaign, was sending out mailings confusing Democratic voters by telling them "We have you registered as a Republican."
Earlier in the week, it was discovered that the Republican Jewish Coalition had commissioned a poll in Florida and elsewhere that phrased questions designed to make Obama look like a stooge of the Palestinians.
On the flip side, there is Sarah Palin. The Alaska governor may be a boost to conservative hopes throughout the country, but in the Sunshine State her candidacy may be a liability. There is a sense of skepticism within the Jewish community over her religious affiliations, as well as allegations that she supported Pat Buchanan's run for the White House in 2000. Palin, the McCain campaign has noted, voted for Steve Forbes in that election. Nevertheless, Jewish community's concerns (stoked, it should be noted, by the Obama campaign) could prove the difference in what is shaping up to be yet another closely fought election.