In what amounts to a test run for the 2020 campaign, both parties are pouring money into the state and testing the strength of Trump’s standing in a place that he won in 2016 by just 1.2 percentage points. But with the president saddled with a low approval rating — a Gallup survey on Monday saw a net rating decrease of eight points over the past week — Trump’s last-minute push in Florida could prove to be a gamble.
The already heightened atmosphere has only grown more tense in the days after Cesar Sayoc was arrested in Plantation, Fla., and charged with sending pipe bombs to more than a dozen Democrats who have been repeatedly targeted for criticism by Trump.
“The tonal quality of it is one more reminder to those suburban Republican women why they left the Republican Party,” said Rick Wilson, a longtime Florida-based GOP consultant and a Trump critic. The danger for Republicans is that recent events remind those voters, he said, that “they don’t want to be associated with the crazies and the people Donald Trump inspires to do things like this.”
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