Kamala Harris addresses Florida grassroots in race against Donald Trump

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Democrats continue their campaign in Florida as the GOP looks to gain a lead of 1 million registered voters in the November general election.

James Bel
| Capital Bureau | USA TODAY Network–Florida

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Florida Democrats this weekend begin preparations to secure the state’s 30 electoral votes in November for Vice President Kamala Harris and deny former President Donald Trump a second term.

Sunday marks exactly 100 days until Election Day, and Democrats will be rallying around the milestone in cities from Pensacola to Miami with a series of training sessions, conference calls, an ice cream social and a caravan of golf carts stretching more than a mile long.

On Friday, the campaign kicks off a “100 Days of Action Weekend” to mobilize a wave of volunteers that emerged after Harris became a presidential candidate.

According to Florida Democratic Party officials and Harris campaign staff, the idea is to create a community among the newcomers and expand the Democratic base.

Trump is the favorite to win Florida in November, according to experts. A collection of polls from the FiveThirtyEight website gives the former president an 8-point lead in the state.

But with nearly 30% of Florida voters unaffiliated with either the Republican or Democratic party, Democrats believe they can take over the state in November if they deploy an army of volunteers to make phone calls, knock on doors and make public statements of support.

“We are working for every vote in this state … it is a state 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 in the state at the end of 2021 and are now on track to have a million-strong lead by the time the general election takes place in November.

Clark, undeterred, said 7,000 Floridians signed up as campaign volunteers in the 72 hours after Harris became a candidate. It’s a wave of newcomers that veteran Democratic campaign workers said they haven’t seen since former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

The aim is to activate more than 2,600 newcomers this weekend.

‘I’ve never seen anything like this’

Jennifer Griffith, chair of the Pinellas County Democratic Executive Committee, was shocked when she put out a call for volunteers to conduct a Saturday phone campaign earlier this week. As of Thursday afternoon, 266 people had responded.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Griffith, who has worked at the DEC since 2017.

“We had to expand to a second shift on Saturday and add two more for Sunday because we have more people trying to sign up. The maximum capacity for our office is 55 people,” Griffith said.

Biden won Pinellas County in 2020 by 1,200 votes.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio have dismissed Harris as a left-wing California politician who is too liberal for Florida. DeSantis said Wednesday that 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 get rid of all that,’” he said.

Rubio told Fox News that if Harris were to become president, the country would be “destroyed. At the end of the day, she is a radical left-wing Californian and people need to know what her record is.”

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 so far.

Harris campaigned on reproductive rights, Trump’s legal record and against the economic policies in Project 2025, a blueprint for a Trump presidency put together by former Trump advisers that Harris said would threaten the middle class. Trump has distanced himself from the proposal.

Related news: ‘Laboratories?’ GOP’s Project 2025 Appears to Have Been Marketed in Florida

Griffith, Evans and Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said there is a clear difference between Harris’s policy proposals and Trump’s. Those differences are highlighted in phone calls. More than 25% of the names on the phone bank’s call list are voters who do not align with a party.

Others targeted are voters who have been moved to the inactive voter rolls. The plan is to reactivate the disengaged voters and recruit the NPAs into the Democratic column.

The last Democratic presidential candidate to win Florida was Obama in 2012. The last Democrat to win a state election was Fried, who won the race for Agriculture Commissioner in 2018.

Fried said Democrats have a chance to reverse a streak of losses across the state by expanding their coalition of voters. She pointed to the 2023 elections, when Democrats won the Jacksonville mayoralty and flipped a Florida House seat in Orlando. Nonpartisan voters voted Democratic by more than 65%.

“They represent a third of Florida voters (actually 28%) and will play a decisive role in November,” Fried said in a video call with reporters.

According to professor, voters who do not choose a party are usually politically moderate

The NPAs and disengaged voters are overwhelmingly moderate, says Tara Newsom, a political scientist at St. Petersburg College. Her research shows that as a group, they are dissatisfied with politics.

Newsom, director of the school’s Center for Civic Learning and Community Engagement, said national polls show NPA voters are motivated by economic and education issues, and they support choice and privacy in family planning — issues that Trump appears to ignore, she said.

“Harris is a stark contrast to Trump, who embraces a far-right message that sounds like the party of grievances, which makes Harris look much more moderate,” Newsom said.

She added that Democrats could also see Harris’s elevation to the top of the ticket as a response to voters indicating they want a new approach.

The Democrats’ “action weekend” is part community building with meetups and other activities for the new volunteers, and part voter engagement through conference calls and town hall meetings.

More: These Florida Democrats Endorsed Kamala Harris After Biden Withdrew

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.

On Saturday, Harris’ campaign will deploy 1,765 volunteers to 16 telephone centers — two in the panhandle with 400 volunteers, and two in central Florida focused on Hispanics — to introduce Harris as the presidential candidate to voters who do not affiliate with a political party and to encourage those who have fallen off the active voter rolls to vote again.

The campaign plans to mobilize its new volunteers in preparation for the fall campaign with a roundtable discussion in Temple Terrace, a voter recruitment training session for seniors in Wilton Manors, a neighborhood campaign in Coral Springs and 100 golf cart owners traveling in a caravan through The Villages.

On 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 campaign, polling stations will hit the streets in neighborhoods in Miami and Miami Gardens, and phone campaigns will make calls from Jacksonville, Sarasota and St. Petersburg.

James Call is a member of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at [email protected] and can be found at X as @CallTallahassee.

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