Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign hosted more than 300 voter registration events throughout Florida Tuesday as part of its effort to sign up as many voters as possible before the state's Oct. 11 registration deadline.

  • Clinton campaign held 300+ voter registration events in Florida Tuesday
  • Many were held at college campuses
  • At FAMU, attendence was sparse  

The marquee registration events took place on college campuses, home to legions of Democratic-leaning students whose support for President Obama proved critical to his slim Florida victory four years ago. This time around, however, polls indicate Clinton is underperforming Obama among young Floridians and minorities, a cause for concern among some Democratic strategists.

At a voter registration event at Florida A&M University -- a historically black college that is a perennial campaign stop for White House hopefuls -- attendance was sparse, with workers struggling to entice students to sign up to vote.

One of the few students who did fill out a registration form, Adam Mattison said he felt on-campus enthusiasm for Clinton paled in comparison to outpourings of support for Obama in 2008 and 2012. But, he added, the choice in November strikes him as particularly stark.

"If Trump wins, I feel like America's going to go down, but for other people who are actually rooting for Trump, it may go up to them," Mattison said. "But, I feel like Hillary has a better chance because she knows what's going on in the United States."

While Trump has recently taken pains to temper his incendiary rhetoric about minorities, Clinton campaign operatives aren't worried so much about a defection of minorities to Trump's side. Their fear, expressed privately, is that African-Americans, Hispanics and young people in swing states like Florida won't turn out in sufficient numbers to provide Clinton with winning margins.

And even as Democrats throw their voter registration machine into high gear, Republicans argue theirs has been running full-bore for months - with impressive results. An aggressive GOP outreach operation has cut the gap between registered Democrats and registered Republicans in half. There were over 500,000 more Democrats in Florida in 2012; that figure now stands at fewer than 260,000.

"You can really see that Republicans are winning this election in the state of Florida and nationally and, so, we're hoping for big wins and we know that we're very excited for this come November," said Ninio Fetalvo, a Republican National Committee operative based in Tallahassee.