South Florida Secession Could Give The 2016 Presidential Election To The Democrats?


The South Florida secession may just be a resolution passed by the City of South Miami, but if the measure were to ever be taken up by the U.S. Congress and the State of Florida the repercussions could be felt immediately and it’s even possible the 2016 presidential election could practically be handed to the Democrats on a silver platter.

In a related report by the Inquisitr, the political nature of the South Florida secession was apparent from the start. Conservative Republicans tend to disagree with global warming while progressive Democrats believe climate change science is telling them that South Florida will sink into the ocean within our lifetimes. According to Mayor Phillip Stoddard, that’s the reason they had to propose such a drastic measure like having South Florida secede.

“It’s very apparent that the attitude of the northern part of the state is that they would just love to saw the state in half and just let us float off into the Caribbean… They’ve made that abundantly clear every possible opportunity and I would love to give them the opportunity to do that.”

Although global warming and the rising oceans were the focus of the resolution, the 2016 presidential election cannot be too far from the minds of these politicians. After all, the six states with the most electors are California (55), Texas (38), New York (29), Florida (29), Illinois (20) and Pennsylvania (20), making Florida’s winner takes all votes quite the prize for any potential POTUS. The top three in that list are almost guaranteed to vote for certain political parties, but in the past Florida has been considered a wild card. Splitting up Florida could have the potential to change that voting dynamic since South Florida tends to vote Democratic while North Florida votes Republican.

Normally, each state is allocated a number of electors in the electoral college equal to the number of its U.S. Senators (which are always two) plus the number of its U.S. Representatives. Overall, there is a total of 538 electors based upon the 435 representatives and 100 senators in Congress, plus the three electors allocated to Washington, D.C.. The number of electors may change each decade according to the size of each State’s population as determined by the U.S. Census. Keep in mind that Florida’s population is growing faster than New York, which may eventually give the state more electoral votes, although the census is not scheduled to take place until 2020. But if the Miami area does in fact succeed in having South Florida secede from North Florida then it might be presumed this would be a special situation and electoral votes would be assigned ahead of 2020.

So what would the numbers look like? South Florida has 67 percent of the Florida population, which means they would take 18 electoral votes based upon representatives, giving them 20 in total once you consider the two senators. This leaves North Florida with 11 electoral votes after the South Florida secession takes place.

Such an event would change Florida from being a toss-up state, where both Democrats and Republican target the undecided, to a race where both North and South are pretty much in the bag for the Republicans and Democrats, respectively. The difference is that the the Democrat-leaning South Florida would give the Democratic party a decided lead in any close presidential election.

As an example of how the 2016 presidential election could be affected by a difference of only nine electoral votes, let us consider the year 2000 when George W. Bush’s 271 electoral votes beat Al Gore’s 266 votes. Let us assume the Florida secession had already taken place and Bush took North Florida and Gore won South Florida. This would have meant Gore would have become President with 286 electoral votes, and Bush would have had stayed in Texas due to his 253 votes.

Do you think the South Florida secession is a good idea? What do you think about the argument over climate change and the rising ocean levels?

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