Florida Keys ran red for Trump in presidential race

With a 79 percent voter turnout in Tuesday’s presidential election, Monroe County turned red for Donald J. Trump over Hillary Clinton with 54 percent backing the Republican nominee.

Florida hasn’t gone to the GOP ticket since George W. Bush snapped up its electoral votes in 2004 by winning 52 percent of the vote over Democrat John Kerry.

In the Keys, only Key West united to vote for Clinton/Kaine. The Democrats easily won each of the city’s 10 precincts with more than 53 percent of the vote. In the historic black neighborhood of Bahama Village, 79 percent went to Clinton over Trump.

But north of Mile Marker 5 was Trump country, helping him collect 21,885 votes over Clinton’s 18,949. In Monroe, 42,932 of 54,749 registered voters took part in the presidential election.

Overall, 43,310 voters cast ballots with more than half doing so before Nov. 8.

Trump’s winning streak in the Keys started on Big Coppitt Key and picked up each precinct — in Sugarloaf Key, Marathon, Big Pine Key — all the way north to the Ocean Reef gated community, according to the detailed results provided by Monroe County Supervisor of Elections Joyce Griffin.

In Monroe, Clinton received 41 percent of the vote, as almost five percent chose other parties, such as Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who won 2.63 percent of the total votes cast, of 1,129.

But even if every vote cast for parties other than the Democrats and the GOP had gone to Clinton, it wouldn’t have been enough to beat back Trump.

In the Keys, 2,098 voters looked outside the two dominating political parties for a president. Trump topped Clinton by a 7-point margin, or 2,936 more votes.

The swing state of Florida, like the Keys, painted itself Republican red after having gone blue for Obama in the 2008 and 2012 elections.

In 2012, the Florida Keys went to President Barack Obama by a whisker — 158 votes — against Republican nominee Mitt Romney, after Obama enjoyed a more decisive win among Monroe County voters in 2008 over the GOP’s ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

This story was originally published November 12, 2016 at 3:50 PM with the headline "Florida Keys ran red for Trump in presidential race."