South Florida, including FL-26, is one of the most difficult areas to survey in the country. The district has a unique electorate with voters who are ethnically and culturally unique from one block to the next. It is extremely important to understand a diverse electorate in order to survey it properly, and then to ultimately model it accurately.

The initial modeling showed a dead-heat congressional district. In August, the ballots and Joe Biden image models were already statistically tied. We created a Path to Victory to guide voter contact efforts to turn out and secure likely Republican votes, hold unique supporters of the Republican nominee Carlos Gimenez, and persuade high-propensity swing voters.

Our after-action review of our GOTV Framework and the Gimenez base universe shows just how valuable turnout was to this winning campaign. Calculating expected electorate share against actual we can see the difference targeted creative and field programs truly made. The net shift between the Gimenez base universe and the Mucarsel-Powell Democrat base universe was two points, with Gimenez’s share increasing and Mucarsel-Powell’s share decreasing.

In the middle of the electorate, we defined three unique segments: 11,171 voters where Carlos Gimenez significantly overperformed a generic Republican; 14,980 Cuban voters who were persuasion targets (58% nonpartisan); and 28,917 persuadable Democrat-leaning voters, 55% of whom were non-Cuban Hispanics and 61% non-partisans. Our after-action analysis showed Gimenez overperforming and Mucarsel-Powell underperforming in precincts with a higher share of persuasion targets.

Our persuasion work at the individual level gave us critical findings. Conventional wisdom from DC would suggest that issues like the Venezuelan Maduro regime would be an effective persuasion message in South Florida, where many voters have family who have emigrated from or still live in socialist Latin American regimes. In fact, we found among Cuban voters in this district at the individual level, our persuasion targets were more affected by a message on tax policy than the Maduro regime. This level of detail and testing real data against cultural assumptions made a huge positive impact on our ability to defy that conventional wisdom and achieve historic wins in Miami and surroundings.