A Tight Trump-Biden Race in Florida: Here’s the State of Play

Elections in Florida are won by running up margins in favorable terrain while losing more closely in hostile precincts. Joseph Biden visits the state on Tuesday for the first time since claiming the nomination.

As Linda Kanner hoisted groceries into her Volvo outside the Publix in this affluent Gulf Coast enclave last week, she unleashed a stream of invective toward President Trump to explain why she would “vote for Mickey Mouse” before an incumbent whose conduct she finds appalling.

A Midwestern Republican retiree like many voters here, Ms. Kanner is supporting Joseph R. Biden Jr., instead of shunning both major-party nominees as she did in 2016, because she finds him a more palatable option than she did Hillary Clinton.

Across the state in Miami, though, it’s Mr. Biden’s apparent slippage with Hispanics that’s garnering the most attention and has Democrats wringing their hands. Republican officials, and Mr. Trump himself, have repeatedly made overtures not just to Cuban-Americans who have been an enduring part of their coalition but to non-Cuban Hispanics, a growing and potentially pivotal voting group.

Mr. Biden is just as unlikely to win Longboat Key, in sleepy and mostly white Sarasota County, even with the support of voters like Ms. Kanner, as Mr. Trump is to prevail in Miami-Dade County, the pulsating and diverse Democratic hub across the state. Yet Florida, and the White House itself, could hinge on the two candidates’ ability to narrow their losses in such forbidding locales.