TAMPA, FL — Three days from the presidential election, the most prominent surrogate for Kamala Harris in the state of Florida was the last woman to lose to Donald Trump: Hillary Clinton.
At a sleepy rally in Tampa on Saturday, Clinton delivered a 2016-esque smackdown of Trump. She was, at times, meandering, but she also sounded almost incredulous that she hadn’t woken up yet from the entire Trump era just being a nightmare.
“I hope that when she’s elected, people who have been totally caught up in Trump-mania will be able to exhale,” Clinton told the few-hundred-person crowd. “They can look around and they can kind of think, ‘Oh, OK, that’s over.’”
Her visit was the first of a Clinton doubleheader in the state the final weekend before Election Day: Hillary in Tampa on Saturday and Bill in Orlando on Sunday. (Hillary also happened to be scheduled in Tampa to talk about her latest book later in the day.)
But despite her professed enthusiasm about the chances of Democrats in Florida, the visits from the former standard-bearers of the party looked more like a final condolence prize to Democrats in a former swing state than a serious get-out-the-vote effort in the waning days of a campaign.
Harris last came to Florida in May as a campaign surrogate for Joe Biden, when the state got a flash of national Democratic attention after abortion was put on the ballot. She never came back as a candidate. Tim Walz also never made an appearance. The closest Florida got to a Harris visit was the two stops from her husband, Doug Emhoff. Even the bright red state of Texas got a recent trip from Harris, complete with a Beyoncé appearance and a crowd of 30,000 people.
Harris supporters at the Clinton event defended the campaign choice to NOTUS Saturday, acutely aware that they live in a very different Florida than the one when they were at the center of the political universe.
Visiting Electoral College battlegrounds is “a better use of her time,” a local retired OB-GYN doctor at the rally, Catherine Cowart, told NOTUS. “We learned that with Hillary Clinton. We know the vote isn’t determined by the country; it’s determined by those states.”
Another supporter painted a picture of a Harris stadium rally that could have been.
“We would have loved it. I think she could have filled Raymond James Stadium, I really do,” Hillsborough County Democratic Party Chair Ione Townsend told NOTUS after the rally. “But it didn’t work out, we’re not a battleground state, so she’s spending her time where she needs to.”
The eternal optimist of the state party, Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried, celebrated the choice to send the Clintons down.
“We have The Clintons! We have the first female major party nominee who, because of her election in 2016, I ran for office in 2018. She inspired women across the country,” Fried said. “We could not be more thrilled to have the Clintons here in the state of Florida, one last final rally cry to turn out the voters.”
Clinton lost Florida by just about 100,000 votes in 2016. Florida Democrats would love to pull a margin anywhere close to that, considering Republicans now have a million more registered voters in the state.
But as the best surrogate the state’s getting this final weekend, Clinton tried to drive turnout one last time with a recycled 2016-era pitch — a pitch embracing gender and history in a way that Harris has avoided.
“So that every little girl in America can look at the Oval Office, I’m talking to you,” Clinton said Saturday, pointing to a young girl in the crowd. “She can look at the Oval Office and say, ‘That is where I belong.’”
—
Claire Heddles is a reporter at NOTUS and an Allbritton Journalism Institute Fellow.