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I saw the phrase, “Obama owns the sunshine” as the headline of Time magazine’s (January 29) article reporting the result of the latest NBC News/Marist poll of registered Florida voters, which shows President Obama’s statistical edge over all four Republican Presidential candidates.

I can easily imagine the implication of the phrase, “own the sunshine,” and I thought it is an idiom. But as I checked Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster online dictionaries, there was no entry of “own the sunshine” as an idiom in any of them. GoogleNgram registers “Your own sunshine,” of which usage started circ 1860, peaking in 1910-20, tapered off until it started to pick up around 2000, but not “own sunshine.”

Is “own sunshine” a Time’s coinage, or just a set of word?

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Florida is known as The Sunshine State, so they just dropped the word state in trying to say he does very well in Florida.

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    Gee, I haven’t come to think of at all that it's the nickname of Florida! Taking this opportunity, I downloaded 50 state nickname list from www.50stetes.com, but it seems pretty tough job for the old to learn nick names of all states. Anyway thanks a lot.
    – Yoichi Oishi
    Commented Jan 30, 2012 at 3:11
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    @YoichiOishi - The good news is that most state nicknames aren't terribly well known, even among Americans. Florida happens to be one of the exceptions. Most of the others are known because the college sports teams share that name (Tar Heels, Buckeyes, etc.) though ones like 'The Empire State' and 'The Garden State' are well known.
    – Dusty
    Commented Jan 30, 2012 at 3:23

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