MIAMI _ Good Cuban-American girls aren't supposed to do what Mariam Velez was doing the other night. She tapped her smartphone, calling dozens of voters for Hillary Clinton.
"My dad won't drive me here; I pay for the Ubers," said Vela, 15, a high school sophomore volunteering at a phone bank. "I bring back Hillary souvenirs, and he just kind of scowls at me."
For more than five decades, the fealty of Florida Cubans to the Republican Party was a given, and they often delivered the state to GOP presidential candidates. That strength is fading, though, as U.S. relations with the communist-controlled island nation normalize, and Florida's Hispanic population becomes more diverse.
Democrat Clinton has pulled ahead in an average of recent Florida polls amid Donald Trump's troubles with sexual assault accusations and his feuding with fellow Republicans, but the state's 29 electoral votes are still considered to be in play. Last week, both candidates, as well as their vice presidential running mates, campaigned in Florida.
Among the battleground states, Trump needs to win at least one of the bigger prizes, Florida or Pennsylvania, to have a realistic chance of building an Electoral College majority.
To win Florida, Trump will need to maximize his vote among Cubans in Miami-Dade County to balance the growing strength of the Democratic-leaning Puerto Rican vote, concentrated in central Florida near Orlando, along I-4.
A recent Florida poll of Hispanic voters, for Univision, showed the challenge: Clinton was close to the 60 percent vote share that President Barack Obama got in carrying the state in 2012 _ and, for the first time, she and Trump were tied at 41 percent among Cuban-Americans.
"That's bad news for Donald Trump," said Anthony Williams, special projects director at the Bendixen & Amandi polling firm in Miami. "Younger Cubans are much more progressive, less interested in Fidel Castro and the embargo, more interested in pocketbook issues."
Democrats have been carrying Miami-Dade, with a Hispanic population of 68 percent, by increasing margins. The Democratic presidential nominee carried the county by 48,600 votes in 2004 (John Kerry), 139,300 votes four years later (Obama) and 208,500 votes in 2012 (Obama).
The Cuban vote in 2012 split 51 percent to 49 percent for Republican Mitt Romney, closer than it had ever been, Williams said.
At midmorning one day last week, Cuban men were bantering and arguing politics as they always have at the counter of the Versailles restaurant in Little Havana, eating flaky empanadas and drinking cafecito, a powerful jolt of espresso to the brain stem with a film of sugarcane cream on top. Outside, somebody was smoking a Robusto.
"No progressives. We like capitalism," said Antonio Roque, 79, declaring his intention to back Trump. "Mrs. Hillary, she wants to give everything away for free. The Democratic Party has grown into the party of socialism over the years."
He worries that Clinton will increase the national debt, and "our grandchildren will pay the consequences."
Francisco Cortina, a retired accountant and a Republican, bemoaned his dilemma. "I don't like either one," Cortina, 84, said. He decried Trump's comments: "Mexico is going to pay for the wall? That's crazy."
But Clinton is too liberal. "I have no choice," he said.
Emiliano Antunez, a conservative political consultant with a stable of local and state legislative candidates, predicted that Trump would lose Florida.
"There is too much anarchy in the Republican Party here," said Antunez, 54, who just changed his voter registration from GOP to independent in protest.
Establishment types who backed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush or U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio for president say they won't vote for Trump, Antunez said. "At this point, Republican women are jumping ship. Hillary is going to win, and the party will implode."
In the bungalow Friday night in Miami's Coral Way neighborhood, 30 teenagers divided into teams bent to their cellphones, calling names of voters identified as Clinton supporters and trying to persuade those who answered to take a volunteer campaign shift for the final push. When they recruited one, someone jumped up to ring a cowbell taped to the wall next to a scoreboard.
"They're very competitive," said Nikita Leus-Oliva, 15, a sophomore from Coral Gables, who has been volunteering for the campaign since the summer and organized the phone bank, her second, at her house. Her friend Pablo Hanono helped put it together.
Leus-Oliva said she was motivated to work for Clinton because of Trump's anti-immigrant stands. Her parents emigrated from Argentina, and her father built a notary business.
"If Donald Trump had been president when my dad was trying to move here, my dad wouldn't have been able to do what he does now," she said. "He started as a waiter, and he worked six days a week. He'd get home at 3 in the morning, and he moved his way up to be a business owner."
Hanono, who is Cuban, said his parents are relatively tolerant of his support for Clinton because they recognize they came to the United States to escape an oppressive government.
"They understand I have to be independent. ... This is the country I'm in, and we came here for the sole purpose of having independent political thoughts," said Hanono, 16.
He also is descended from Syrian and Turkish Jews who fled to Cuba as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling around World War I, and sees dangerous overtones in Trump's harsh tone toward Muslims.
In that respect, he has something in common with exile Carlos Bautista, a retired stationery engraver who senses an authoritarian streak in the GOP nominee that reminds him of Argentina's Juan Peron, Fidel Castro and other dictators.
"He's the classic bad guy in all the old movies," said Bautista, 76. "To me, he is an animal. He don't care about nothing or nobody but himself. ... Too much power in one person is bad, very bad."
