Why Trump defied expectations in Florida

I am not aware of any plausible election model according to which President Trump could have afforded not to win Florida again. Since it now appears that he has done so, it is worth asking why the opposite outcome was widely predicted.

The polling aggregator and ersatz sports website FiveThirtyEight gave Joe Biden a 6-point edge in the Sunshine State as of this morning. Provisional results suggest the former vice president losing 50 to 48, an 8-point difference. If that holds, it's not within the margin of error. It wouldn't even be within the margin of error’s margin of error. Such an embarrassment in a crucial state would be an indictment of the mainstream polling industry.

How did Trump seemingly manage to win in spite of poor expectations? It appears to be the case that while he performed slightly less well than he did in 2016 with older white voters, he significantly improved upon his showing with Hispanics and African-Americans.

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The simplest explanation, however, is that Trump won the enthusiasm sweepstakes. Florida was the state of boat parades, one in which avowed supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory were plausible candidates for the House of Representatives. Just as it was always far fetched to imagine that the progressive Democrat Andrew Gillum was a shoo-in for the 2018 Florida gubernatorial election, the idea that Biden was going to perform significantly better there than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 was wishful thinking.