Where past and future collide

DAMARIS OLLER came to America from the Dominican Republic in 1974, worked hard, lived legally and raised two children. But she did not become a citizen—because she saw no need to—until last April. “It was because of that man,” she explains at the El Jibarito café in Kissimmee, in central Florida, where she serves tasty slow-roast pork, plantains and beans. “I was afraid that if Donald Trump becomes president I’d be kicked out the country.”

Ms Oller is the Hispanic voter of Hillary Clinton’s dreams. Frightened and disgusted by Mr Trump’s promise to deport 11m undocumented people, and by his slandering of Mexicans as rapists and the Spanish language as unAmerican, she says she will vote for the Democratic nominee as if her life depended on it: “Estoy con ella” (“I’m with her”). She is also a Floridian Hispanic, which makes her one of the most important voters in America.

Florida is the biggest swing state, with 29 electoral-college votes up for grabs, so more likely to determine who wins on November 8th than any other. Shifting from red to blue to red, then blue again, Floridians have picked the winner in the past five elections. And if Mrs Clinton can muster a big turnout among Hispanics—only around 25% of whom say they are for Mr Trump—they will probably pick her.

Once staunchly Republican, Hispanic Floridians were already turning deep blue, as the community gets younger and less dominated by conservative Cuban-Americans, even before Mr Trump’s obscenities. In 2012 60% of them backed Barack Obama, which helped him win the state by less than one percentage point. A subsequent increase in the Hispanic population, partly driven by a massive influx of Puerto Ricans propelled by the economic crisis on their island, should help Mrs Clinton emulate that success. She would probably then become president. Because while she, at a pinch, could lose Florida and still triumph overall—provided she wins one or two other big swing states, such as Pennsylvania and Virginia—Mr Trump’s lower threshold in the electoral college means he does not have that luxury. Lose Florida, and he is probably toast.

Hence the huge effort Mrs Clinton has been putting into the Sunshine State. Her campaign has opened 57 field offices there, staffed by several hundred paid employees, and plans to spend $36.6m on television advertising, especially in central Florida—the epicentre of the battleground state. There, along the densely populated route of the interstate highway that links Tampa to Daytona Beach, the state’s ethnically diverse and Democratic-voting south meets its more conservative, whiter north—and Florida’s elections are traditionally settled. Yet Mrs Clinton is currently getting a poor return on her efforts. Last month she was around five points up in Florida. Now she and Mr Trump, who has spent little on his campaign by comparison, are tied.

In part, this illustrates what a weirdly deadlocked condition Florida is in. It is where America’s past and future collide—a destination for aged middle-class white sun-seekers and working-class Hispanics, a place where pick-up trucks flying Confederate flags roar through Spanish-speaking enclaves. As a political counterweight to the growing Hispanic population, the influx of white pensioners, who are likelier to vote Republican and to vote at all, largely explains why Florida’s Republican past is proving so unyielding. Of the 1.46m people added to the state between 2010 and 2015, 46% were aged over 65, and most of those were white. That is a group Mr Trump should win handsomely.

At a rally held in an airport hangar in Melbourne, south of Daytona Beach, on September 27th, the enthusiasm of his supporters was impressive. It was his first appearance since the debate with Mrs Clinton, which many in the huge crowd felt he had fluffed—but none seemed to care. “He dropped the ball, but then he’s not a professional politician, and that’s what we need,” said Josh, a self-described professional hunter. “It’s time we had an honest person in the White House,” said his wife, Susie, a housewife. When Mr Trump’s vast, Trump-branded plane landed and came sharking towards the hangar, the huge crowd surged towards it, phone cameras raised, mouths gaping. When their champion (and he alone) stepped from the plane’s belly and surveyed the Earth, like some visiting alien in a business suit, they gasped in wonder. The contrast with Mrs Clinton’s smaller, more downbeat rallies is hard to exaggerate. No wonder her supporters, in Florida and elsewhere, are worried.

The polls suggest she is on course to lose white Floridians by around 20 points—almost as badly as Mr Obama did in 2012. Despite the Trumpian bogey, she is meanwhile getting only around 55% of Hispanics. She is also slightly lagging Mr Obama’s imposing 95% success rate with black voters, the state’s third-biggest ethnic group. Mrs Clinton’s best hope of winning Florida is to compensate for these shortfalls, and counter Mr Trump’s more fired-up supporters, with a brilliant voter-turnout operation. To that end, her campaigners are labouring to help tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans, who have settled in and around Orlando, to register to vote.

It is a laborious task; on an afternoon in the arcades and Puerto Rican cafés of Kissimmee, with one of Mrs Clinton’s registration teams, no one was added to the electoral roll except Ms Oller. Grumbling also abounds about Mrs Clinton’s campaign; it is said to be making too much of Mr Trump’s remarks on immigration, which Puerto Ricans, as American citizens, only care about up to a point. That may well be so; though carping about a campaign, five weeks before an election, is often a proxy for shaky confidence. That would be understandable. Florida is shaping up to be a nail-biter.