Is Florida in play? Or is it fools gold for Democrats?

Throughout this election, operating assumptions have been that there are seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Campaigns, political parties, super PACs and the like have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into these swing states and been rewarded with a sky-high stack of polls suggesting the races there are too close to call.But have they ignored other possible battlegrounds in the fight for 88 electoral votes up for grabs?One of polling guru Nate Silver’s lieutenants, Eli McKown-Dawson, argues that’s potentially the case, saying their “model thinks Florida is the 7th-likeliest tipping point state — ahead of states like Nevada where the race is much more even but the number of electoral votes up for grabs is smaller.”Indeed, Florida has 30 electoral votes — five times as many as Nevada and more than any single state conventional wisdom regards as a battleground.And there are structural indications both Republicans and Democrats recognize the battle for the Sunshine State may be a dogfight, despite Republicans having over a million more active registered voters than Democrats after the pandemic led to party switches and an influx of COVID refugees.For starters, Friday former President Barack Obama, who carried the state in 2008 and 2012, endorsed Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell in her race against former governor Sen.Rick Scott.The RealClearPolitics polling average shows a 4.3 point spread in favor of the incumbent.The endorsement from Obama, who is stumping for the Kamala Harris campaign down the stretch, is a sign national Democrats, historically reluctant to engage in one of the few states where 2022’s “red wave” manifested as advertised, may play in Florida after all.Of course, the Senate race isn’t the main event, and it’s still an open question whether Harris or Tim Walz campaigns in the state given that they’ve only sent surrogates thus far — especially w...