Trump's top Florida strategist says win shows Republicans should be a 'big tent' party
MIAMI — President Donald Trump's big victory in Florida should serve as a lesson that the GOP can and should be a "big tent" party, Trump's top Florida campaign strategist wrote Friday in an open memo laying out the strategy used to get Trump reelected in the nation's biggest battleground.
Susie Wiles, who ran Trump's 2016 and 2020 campaigns in Florida, wrote that Trump's latest effort "should be the model for other battleground states in future cycles."
"The lesson is simple: In order to form a consistent, winning coalition, Republicans, in the words of President Ronald Reagan, must provide a big tent and give reasons for all demographic groups to join," she wrote.
Trump's Florida win may not have helped the president win reelection. His hopes for another four-year term were thin Friday as vote counting in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona yielded unfavorable results in tight contests.
But Wiles said Republicans can take lessons from Florida, which Trump won by 1.2 percentage points in 2016 and by 3.4 percentage points in 2020. Much of that improvement, Wiles noted, came from Democrat-heavy counties in diverse areas, including Miami-Dade County, where the president's performance seemed to help Republican candidates flip two U.S. House seats.
"The president's campaign particularly focused on non-traditional Republican voter groups, which included: conservative Jewish voters, parents of school-aged children attending the state's charter schools, Hispanics (including non-Cuban Hispanics), and Black voters in targeted Florida counties," she wrote.
After losing a second election to then-President Barack Obama in 2012, the GOP postelection analysis was that the party needed to do more to win over minority voters. Trump's ascendancy seemed to put that ideal on hold, as he campaigned in 2016 on hard-line immigration policies and white America grievance politics.
But Trump's performance in Miami-Dade in 2020 reflected gains across the spectrum. He went from splitting the heavily Cuban-American city of Hialeah in 2016 to winning it with two-thirds of the vote, improved 41.4 percentage points in the heavily Venezuelan-American city of Doral, and doubled his support in Miami Gardens, Florida's largest majority-Black city.
The campaign also reconnected with voters who aren't necessarily Republicans, but identify with Trump "as a brand," Wiles said. And it continued to capitalize on Trump's ability to hold massive rallies, which she said tend to be heavily attended by voters who are not Republicans, and people who in some cases aren't even voters.
_Miami Herald
