The VP appears pretty popular in the Villages.
The Villages is a 55-plus retirement community located in Sumter County, Florida that has not voted for a Democratic candidate in a general election since 2000. In 2020, Donald Trump won 67.8% of the vote compared to Joe Biden’s 31.7% in the county. In 2016, Trump won 68.8% to Hillary Clinton’s 29.5%. In 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama carried the state, 63% of ballot castors in Sumter voted for John McCain and 67.2% for Mitt Romney, respectively. In other words, it’s an extreme Republican-stronghold—which makes new enthusiasm for Kamala Harris there not great news for Trump!
Over the weekend, hundreds of golf carts paraded around the Villages in support of Harris’s candidacy, reportedly creating a traffic jam as they showed their excitement for the VP. “Young people are energized and so are we,” resident Joyce Wiegand told Villages-News. Said her friend Karen Wink: “Kamala isn’t just for young people, she’s for all of us. She supports Social Security, Medicare and health care. That matters to us.”
It still is. These articles are very misleading. The Villages is absolutely gigantic. As nice as it is that some of the Democrats living there are fired up and making themselves visible, they are still well in the minority. Ultimately, my hope is that enough of them show up on election day and keep showing up so that as the Boomers die and the following generations take over, the political makeup there starts to change.
To anyone reading this article, please don’t let “good news” lessen your urgency to vote.