When Hillary Clinton delivered a national security speech Tuesday at the University of South Florida in Tampa, it was the fifth time that she has visited the city this year. Her rival is no less frequent a visitor. Tampa sits at the western end of the Interstate-4 corridor and Clinton and Donald Trump both know that the 132-mile, traffic-slammed slab of asphalt that stretches across the center of the Florida peninsula is in many ways the road to the White House.
Trump and Clinton have popped up along the I-4 corridor so much, in fact, they virtually qualify for a Florida resident discount at the theme parks.
Clinton met with survivors of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando and picked a rally at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa to deliver a fiery response to Trump's convention acceptance speech. On top of big rallies Trump held in Tampa in June, July and August, the real estate mogul met with pastors in Orlando and held a rally in Kissimmee in August. His chief Florida strategist, Karen Giorno, told an interviewer that the I-4 corridor is “what we call the big enchilada. You have to win it.”
The highway—stretching from the sprawling suburbs of Tampa, through the fantasylands around Orlando to NASCAR fans’ nirvana in Daytona Beach—rounds up more than 40 percent of Florida’s registered voters. Its residents cover the political spectrum from die-hard right-wingers to hard-core left-wingers to swing voters who switch their allegiance with each election. The advertising dollars spent here by the campaigns tell just how precious this slice of the electorate is: the Orlando-Daytona Beach-Melbourne TV market ranked number one in the entire nation in ad spending for the presidential race in August, with $8.1 million, according to NBC News. Second place went to the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Sarasota market, with $7.6 million.
“It’s a microcosm of Florida, and of America,” explained historian Gary Mormino, author of the book Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams.
Since 1964, Florida has voted for the winning presidential candidate every time but one (1992, Clinton v. Bush), and since 1924 not one Republican candidate has won the presidency while losing Florida. As The Guardian noted in 2012: "They say that whoever wins the I-4 corridor wins Florida, and whoever wins Florida wins America."
To explain how this highway became the hinge of a crucial swing state, we have to rewind to Nov. 22, 1963—but not for the reason that date's usually remembered.
That morning, a group of businessmen climbed into a private plane (borrowed from the entertainer Arthur Godfrey) in Tampa and took off. Their leader was an avuncular man with a graying mustache and a serious nicotine addiction. Walter Elias Disney had a vision and he wanted to see for himself if a parcel of land in Central Florida could match it.
He was nearly born nearby. His parents had been married in rural Lake County in 1888, but by the time Walt Disney came along, the family had left Florida to move to Chicago. While Disney made a fortune drawing a mice and ducks and putting them on the movie screen, he branched out into the amusement park business because he wanted to get away from the vagaries of Hollywood. However, his California wonderland drew customers from only the western half of the nation. He needed an eastern branch to conquer America.
Disney had already rejected Niagara Falls, St. Louis and Washington for his East Coast Disneyland, according to Richard Foglesong’s Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando. Now, flying over the alligator-infested swampland of Central Florida, Walt looked down and said, “That’s it.”
The swamp didn’t bother him. Nor did the citrus groves that gave Orange County its name. What he liked was the pavement nearby: Interstate 4, then under construction, would connect Interstate 75 on the Gulf coast with Interstate 95 on the Atlantic coast. Meanwhile the toll road known as Florida’s Turnpike was running north to south except for a jog to Orlando, then a town of 400,000 people, where it crossed I-4.
“The freeway routes, they bisect here,” he explained.
When the plane landed, Disney's entourage saw people were weeping in the streets, which is how they found out President Kennedy had been killed in Dallas. The New Frontier was over, but that didn’t affect Walt’s vision for Florida. His crew went to work creating a dredge-and-fill dreamland that would attract tourists the way magnets attract iron filings.
Disney died five years before the park that bears his name threw open its gates in 1971, so he never knew that he had changed not only the physical landscape, but also the political one.
When I-4 first opened in 1965, said University of Central Florida historian James C. Clark, author of Presidents in Florida: How the Presidents Have Shaped Florida and How Florida Has Influenced the Presidents, the Orlando Sentinel dispatched a photographer to cover the opening ceremonies. “He was able to go out and stand in the middle of the road and snap a picture without being in any danger,” Clark said. You definitely can't do that any longer. Orlando's metro population now tops 2.3 million people, and thousands of cars and trucks jam the lanes every day and night, to the point that the Florida Department of Transportation is now planning an expansion project called “I-4 Ultimate.”
Disney's decision to build in Central Florida drew a horde of competitors who were intent on cashing in on the phenomenon he’d started. Universal Studios and Sea World are the big names, but there’s a horde of smaller attractions lining I-4, including one called the Holy Land Experience, where Jesus is crucified every day for the paying customers.
That influx of theme parks marks where the changes began.
Before Disney World arrived, I-4’s route included only conservative voters—many of them farmers, retirees and small business owners who all strongly opposed unions.
But the theme park employees are union members. Suddenly Central Florida became full of Teamsters, explained Jane Healey, who won a Pulitzer as editorial page editor of the Orlando Sentinel. Those Teamsters tend to vote Democratic, she pointed out.
Meanwhile, many of the creative folks brought by Disney and the other theme parks identified as what we now call LGBTQ, she said. They helped launch Gay Days at Disney World in 1991, and it’s now one of the largest gatherings of gays in the world. Many settled in or near downtown Orlando, remaking that area. They, too, tend to vote Democratic. In 2003, a Democrat named Buddy Dyer won election as mayor in part because he endorsed passage of a gay rights ordinance, she said. (His subsequent indictment on an alleged campaign law violation, suspension from office and reinstatement following the charges being dropped are just normal Florida political events.)
But the third factor that shows how Disney disrupted the American electoral process is the most intriguing one of all.
Plopping down so many tourist attractions along one highway drew lots of hotels and motels to provide Mom and Pop and the sugared-up kids with a place to crash—all the Sheratons, Marriotts and Holiday Inns, not to mention the quirky ones that Disney itself offers with ginormous swans and dolphins on top. Those hotels and motels attracted thousands of Puerto Ricans to Central Florida seeking better paying jobs in a state that has no income tax. Some came from colder climes up North, but plenty more came straight from the island.
Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and its residents have been free to travel to and from the mainland without dealing with the immigration authorities since 1917. But the South's history of racial discrimination discouraged many Puerto Rican families from settling in Florida. The few who did find their way to Florida worked as cutters in the sugar cane fields, a hard way to make a dollar.
Once Walt's kingdom arose from the swamps, though, they poured in by the thousands, and found a warm welcome in the Sunshine State. Florida’s Puerto Rican population grew from slightly more than 2 percent of all stateside Puerto Ricans in 1960 to more than 14 percent by the year 2000, according to a study by Jorge Duany of the University of Puerto Rico and Félix V. Matos-Rodríguez of Hunter College.
One savvy Florida developer, Landstar Homes, put on an aggressive marketing campaign on the island that enticed families to leave the island and move to its Buenaventura Lakes subdivision in Central Florida’s Osceola County. They targeted Puerto Ricans in New York and Chicago, too. Soon other developers followed suit. Now about 271,000 Puerto Ricans live in Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties, according to the Sentinel.
The ones coming from the island had no family tradition of voting Republican or Democrat, Healey explained. Those parties don't exist in Puerto Rico, because voters in the territory are not allowed to cast ballots for president in the November elections. So when they arrived in Florida, they were, politically speaking, “a clean slate,” she said.
At first neither political party recognized what this bonanza of new voters might mean, said David Colburn, a University of Florida history professor and the author of From Yellow Dog Democrats to Red State Republicans. Once they did, though, they began signing up new voters as quickly as they could, and candidates began paying the area more and more visits, he said.
Their impact began being felt in 2004, when former Orange County chairman Mel Martinez beat better known Anglo politicians to become the state's first-ever Hispanic U.S. Senator, Mormino said. Although Martinez himself is Cuban, “the Puerto Ricans won that one for him.”
Since then, though, their votes have swung back and forth between the parties, making their support unpredictable.
“They are the true swing voters,” Healey said.
In recent years the Puerto Rican exodus from the island has swollen from a trickle to a flood as people flee a rocky economy, a government in crisis and the spread of the Zika virus. As they arrived in Florida, they were frequently met by Clinton campaigners helping them register to vote.
Some of the Puerto Rican boom, Colburn said, has been balanced out by the influx of white seniors, particularly at The Villages, the fastest-growing metro area in America and the largest gated over-55 community in the world. Built on a site that once held pastures, orange groves and a mobile home park northwest of Orlando, it's now occupied by more than 100,000 residents in an area bigger than Manhattan, In 2005, they set a Guinness record for the world's longest golf cart parade. The Villagers are reliably Republican and likely to vote for Trump, even though his campaign canceled his only scheduled appearance there in May a mere seven minutes before it was supposed to start. True to Villages style, his supporters held a golf cart parade for him in March. One cart featured a blond combover on top.
The corridor's unpredictability is what makes it so vital to the election, and guarantees that the candidates will continue to pop up all over I-4 over the next two months.
“Of the state's 67 counties, it's possible to say today how 60 of them will vote,” explained Clark, the University of Central Florida historian. The four southeast counties—Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe—always go to the Democrats. So do Alachua County, where the University of Florida is located, and the counties around the state capital of Tallahassee, home of Florida State University and Florida A&M, he explained. The rest of the state usually votes Republican.
The only real question is how the seven counties along I-4 will go, Clark said. President Obama took four of the seven in 2008 and 2012, while former President Bush took five of the seven in 2004. And one of the most reliable bellwethers of those counties is Hillsborough, where Tampa is located, which went for George W. Bush twice and then turned around and did the same for Barack Obama.
At this point, no one is predicting which faction of I-4 voters will prove most powerful and swing the election – and Florida's 29 electoral votes – to one of the candidates. But all in all, Colburn said, “It's part of what makes life in Florida so interesting.”