MIAMI — As election results rolled in Tuesday night, a popular narrative about President Donald Trump's victory in Florida began to take hold: He made massive gains in Miami-Dade County over four years ago, cementing a statewide win.
But that oversimplifies things. Even if Democratic nominee Joe Biden had won Miami-Dade by the same margin as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, Biden still would have lost Florida by about 170,000 votes.
Across the state, Trump had a higher margin of victory than he did in 2016 — when he won Florida by just 1.2% — in at least 50 of Florida's 67 counties, according to a Miami Herald analysis.
Ultimately, those statewide gains allowed Trump to coast to victory — at least by Florida standards — with a lead of over 3% after most results had been reported. It's the biggest Republican win in a Florida presidential race since 2004, when incumbent George W. Bush beat Democrat John Kerry by about five points in the state.
The largest swing in Trump's direction was indeed in Miami-Dade, where Clinton had won by 30% in 2016. Biden won the county by just 7 points.
But Trump gained ground elsewhere too, including in other parts of South Florida. In Broward County, the largest Democratic stronghold in the state, Trump lost by 30 points — 6 points less than his margin of defeat in 2016. That difference was significant in a county where nearly one million votes were cast.
Trump also made a big dent in the Democratic margin in Osceola County, a Central Florida region where more than half of residents are Hispanic. Biden performed well in the county's heavily Puerto Rican cities of Kissimmee and Poinciana, taking over 60% of votes between them. But Trump had a stronger performance in other parts of the county, taking 43% overall while Biden took 56%.
That was a big net gain for Trump over 2016, when Clinton won 61% of the vote in Osceola to Trump's 36%. The county represented a net loss of over 11,000 votes for Biden on Tuesday.
Exit polls showed Trump taking about 47% of the Hispanic vote in Florida versus Biden's 52%, a substantial bump for Trump that helped seal his Florida win.
In 2016, exit polls suggested Trump won about 35% of Hispanic voters and Clinton won 62%. Republican presidential candidates didn't top 42% among Hispanic voters in Florida in the previous two elections.
"This, I think, can be attributed to the permanent campaign that the Trump campaign engaged in when it came to Florida," Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based pollster and Democratic strategist, said in an interview on MSNBC Wednesday. "Florida was the crown jewel. They have been going after Hispanic voters here for five years."
Amandi said the Democratic approach was instead to "parachute in over the last two and a half months," which "proved to be too little, too late here in Florida."
The polls showed Trump making slight gains, specifically with Cuban Americans, a group that appears to have played a big role in boosting the president's numbers in Miami-Dade. Across Florida, exit polls suggested Trump won the Cuban-American vote by 15 points, two more than in 2016.
Biden did relatively well overall among the state's White voters, exit polling showed, with 38% support versus Clinton's 32%. And with Black voters, exit polls put Biden at a dominant 89%, up from Clinton's 84%.
Those gains helped Biden improve on his numbers in several counties, including Orange County in Central Florida and Duval County, home to Jacksonville, in Northeast Florida. Biden won Duval by three percentage points after Clinton lost it by a single point in 2016, marking the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had won Duval since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
But it wasn't enough.
"(Trump) has been focused on the Hispanic vote through every day of his presidency, and it paid off for him very handsomely last night," Amandi said.
