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Coronavirus is surging in Florida. So is anxiety over Trumps chances with senior voters - L.A. Focus Newspaper

It's a vote he regrets, he said, and a mistake he hopes to correct in November.

"He blew it," Dudley said, not mincing words as he assessed Trump's first term. "We were so excited in the beginning. A businessman to run our country like a business and it hasn't happened."

The searing sentiment of Dudley, 77, illustrates one of the rising worries inside the Trump campaign: losing the senior vote, a reliably Republican constituency for two decades.

Here in Florida, people 65 and older made up 21% of the vote in 2016. Trump won that group by 17 points over Hillary Clinton. But now, one poll after another shows Joe Biden either tied -- or with an edge -- among senior citizens in key battleground states and nationally.

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"We've got to get a new guy. Our President is erratic," said Dudley, who has largely voted Republican for nearly six decades. "All he's succeeded in doing is juicing up the stock market. Now that's gone to pot because of the coronavirus."

The worries over losing the senior vote come as coronavirus cases climb nationwide, four months before the general election. And here in Florida, summertime signs of anxiety are plentiful, as a record-setting 10,109 cases were reported Thursday. The administration's handling of the crisis was raised again and again during interviews with older voters -- a group more vulnerable to serious illness from coronavirus -- here this week. Several people pointed to the pandemic as only their latest disappointment of the Trump presidency, with some using words like "embarrassment" and "laughing stock to the world" to describe their view of the President.

"I hoped that I would be wrong in not voting for him and that he would turn out to be a great president, but it didn't happen," said Marsha Lundh, 77, a Michigan retiree living here and a lifelong Republican who plans to vote for Biden in November.

She said that defeating Trump would add stability to the country and the world.

"We're very divided in every way," she said. "Everything could have been handled better and should have been handled better. Now is a chance to change things."

Paula Schelling left the Republican Party because of Trump, after voting for GOP candidates for much of her life. She changed her registration to "no party affiliation" and also plans to vote for Biden.

"I had to change parties. I could not do this anymore," said Schelling, 74, a retired teacher. "As I saw his interactions with foreign countries, how they were laughing at us, it just fortified my thoughts."

For Trump, there is virtually no path to reelection without winning Florida, a state where seniors have outsized influence. The key battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin also have large elderly populations, which has top Republicans sounding the alarm about the erosion of support among older voters.

"It wasn't going to be easy anyway, but coronavirus has turned this into a perf

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