THE VILLAGES, Fla. — The golf carts lined up by the hundreds, festooned for former President Donald Trump fandom: a teddy bear with orange hair and a red tie. A Trump rubber duck. An inflatable Trump tube.
On Saturday, The Villages, Florida’s retirement mecca, was abuzz with a parade for Trump — even as Tropical Storm Debby menaced.
“If Trump could take a bullet,” said Tommy Jamieson, the parade organizer, referring to last month’s assassination attempt, “then we can take a little rain.”
The people of The Villages, a sprawling planned retirement community northwest of Orlando, know that they live in Trump Country. But a week earlier, supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, held a golf cart rally of their own.
So Trump’s backers — with some donning T-shirts that read “I’m voting for the felon” and “I’m voting for the outlaw and the hillbilly,” referring to Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio — set out to show them up.
To the uninitiated in Florida politics, the Harris parade showing, with about 500 golf carts, might have seemed as if Democrats had a chance to win over members of The Villages. It’s a place so unusual in its raison d’être that it attracts throngs of reporters every election cycle to find out what retirees think, because older people are among the nation’s most reliable voters.
But Villagers would be quick to shut down the idea that their community is starting to lean more liberal.
Jamieson, who founded the Villages MAGA Club two years ago, estimated there were about 1,000 carts Saturday.
Even if their turnout was lower, Democratic Villagers were still excited to see the level of support.
“About 250 people had signed up,” said Dennis Foley, 73, vice president of the Villages Democratic Club, which organized that parade. “So we were overjoyed that there was that much enthusiasm.”
The Villages is not just an electoral curiosity. With a population that has ballooned to nearly 145,000, it was statistically the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country from 2020 to 2023, according to the census.
Not even Harris’ supporters, successful as they feel their parade was, think The Villages could be flipped.
Yet to Democrats like Foley, winning The Villages is beside the point. It’s the energy that matters, in an election year that had little of it before Harris’ candidacy.
This article originally appeared in . c.2024 The New York Times Company
