exactly.
Manmademan are you assuming that the Hispanic vote Rubio is getting is going to be lower due to new Hispanics voters not answering polls and/or suppressed Cuban turnout?
It's not much of an assumption, it's absolutely true.
There has been a massive, massive influx of new residents to florida from PR since 2012. A million citizens in 4 years is ASTRONOMICAL.
to put this in perspective, there were only 1.3 million cuban americans in florida TOTAL as of 2013.
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/...013/ph_2015-09-15_hispanic-origins-cuba-04-2/
There are right now almost certainly more puerto ricans of hispanic origin in florida now than there are cubans. This was not the case in 2012. And PR latinos favor the democratic party by lopsided 70/30 margins BEFORE the Trump business. Support for the republican party is even less now- trump has no shot at getting anywhere near 30% of the PR vote. Nationally his favorability with hispanics is closer to 15.
Ticket splitting cubans are absolutely not enough to overcome this.
Consider also how likely polling is done. Many pollsters (but not all) rely heavily on past voting history to determine who is a likely voter. Given that none of those 1 million PR latinos was around for the 2012 election (and most people skip midterms) few to none will make it past a LV screen.
Ok, but what about those that don't rely exclusively on past voting history? There are pollsters that take a more nuanced view, sure. But how many of them are polling in spanish? Recent immigrants from PR are heavily spanish speaking, much moreso than florida cubans are- many of those are US born and the ones that aren't have been here for many years now.
There is no reason at all to assume that polling for latino preferences is anywhere near accurate in Florida for 2016. A tie or a slim lead among likely voters for Rubio has a very good chance of being a loss for him.
