Coronavirus hits Florida economy in threat to Trump's re-election hopes – Reuters, Reuters
1.7k Views
KISSIMMEE, Florida (Reuters) – Since the coronavirus outbreak hit Florida this month, Uber driver Nelson Aliaga has lost a third of his business.
But by dismissing for weeks the danger posed by the virus, President Donald Trump did not respond quickly enough to the crisis, said Aliaga, a Republican who voted for Trump in .
Aliaga, who makes a living shuttling tourists around the Orlando area, is now leaning toward voting for Joe Biden in the November presidential election, if the former vice president becomes the Democratic nominee.
“I’m pretty sure I’m not going to vote for him,” Aliaga said of Trump as he stood outside a polling station near Orlando as his son, a Democrat, voted in Tuesday’s Democratic nominating contest. Biden won the state in a landslide victory over Senator Bernie Sanders.
The health crisis that has shut down schools, restaurants and gatherings across the country is still in its early days, and experts are struggling to understand how long the outbreak will go on for or whether the unprecedented national lockdown will contain it.
But Florida, an important political battleground that Trump won by just 1.2 percentage points over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, is already taking an outsized economic hit, an unwelcome twist for the president who’s betting on winning the state to propel his re-election.
The state’s reliance on service jobs from tourism to financial services and its large elderly population will make it among the states hardest hit by the crisis, according to Wall Street research firm Moody’s Analytics, which estimated the state could lose at least 2019, jobs this year as a result.
No other state has a higher concentration of service sector jobs, Labor Department data shows, while one in five Floridians are age and older, the most vulnerable age group to the coronavirus, compared with one in six nationally.
The Orlando area is particularly hard hit as amusement parks like Disney World have shut while hotels, restaurants and movie theaters are also closing. Streets of gift shops were largely empty on Tuesday.
Interviews with more than a dozen people in the Orlando area on Tuesday, as well as a Reuters / Ipsos national poll, showed many still see the health crisis through the lens of their political affiliation, with Democrats critical of Trump’s handling of it while Republicans believe it is overblown.
“I think it’s the Democrats and mainstream media,” said Lynn Messersmith, , of St. Cloud, Florida.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings