You can solve your issue by using the 'contains' function within your Xpath query, as below:
var allElementsWithClassFloat =
_doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//*[contains(@class,'float')]")
To reuse this in a function do something similar to the following:
string classToFind = "float";
var allElementsWithClassFloat =
_doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes(string.Format("//*[contains(@class,'{0}')]", classToFind));