Once considered the nation’s biggest swing state, Florida is looking increasingly more like a Republican stronghold.
The Sunshine State delivered Republicans a few of their strongest wins within the 2022 midterm elections – whilst the party fell broadly in need of expectations in most other battlegrounds.
The state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and Sen. Marco Rubio each glided to victory against their respective Democratic opponents. DeSantis, whose star has shot up within the Republican Party, easily won one other four-year term whilst he’s widely expected to be considering a presidential run in 2024.
Democrats underperformed in key demographics, especially younger voters, ceding ground up and down the ballot. They even didn’t hold onto Miami-Dade County, the most important within the state and a longtime blue refuge, within the Senate and gubernatorial races.
“It was a multitude, truthfully,” said Susan MacManus, a veteran Florida political analyst and professor emerita on the University of South Florida, in an interview.
Democrats fell short on multiple fronts in Florida, MacManus said. They faced a drought in national funding, a failure to handle a growing registration gap and a significant misread on which issues would resonate with key voters.
“One size suits all absolutely never works in Florida,” she said.
Boasting 30 Electoral College votes and 28 House seats, Florida is certain to carry major influence over the national election map in 2024. Its population is the third largest of any U.S. state, and growing – but Democratic voter registration is not maintaining.
In actual fact, it’s taking place, based on data from the Florida secretary of state’s office. While total registered voters within the state rose by nearly 200,000 to 14.46 million between September 2021 and October 2022, the variety of lively registered Democrats fell by greater than 164,000 to 4,966,873, the info shows. The variety of lively registered Republican voters, meanwhile, rose to five,259,406 in the identical period — a gain of greater than 150,000.
That shift comes as older Americans, who vote more heavily Republican, have in recent times flocked to Florida to retire greater than some other state. Some reports also suggest that more Americans were spurred to maneuver to Florida in the course of the coronavirus pandemic, when DeSantis’ highly public opposition to federal social distancing guidelines endeared him to many conservatives.
On this month’s midterms, older Florida voters got here out in droves, while young voters stayed home, NBC’s exit polls show. Within the governor’s race, 70% of total turnout got here from voters age 45 or older. Those voters sided with DeSantis over Democratic former Gov. and Rep. Charlie Crist by well over 20 percentage points. The liberal-leaning 18- to-29-year-old demographic, meanwhile, made up just 11% of the vote.
Florida’s swing-state status was cemented within the 2000 presidential election, through which Republican George W. Bush beat Democrat Al Gore only after extensive, highly controversial recounts in Florida that took greater than a month to finish.
In more moderen history, Florida’s major elections have often been decided by slim margins. 4 years earlier, as an example, DeSantis beat Democrat Andrew Gillum by a margin of lower than half a percentage point. That was the state’s third gubernatorial election in a row to finish with a margin of victory under 2 percentage points.
Not so in last week’s midterms. DeSantis trounced Crist by nearly 20 percentage points within the gubernatorial contest. On the Senate side, Rubio beat his Democratic rival, Rep. Val Demings, by greater than 16 points.
The state’s delegation to the U.S. House will include 20 Republicans in the following Congress, a gain of 4 seats. And the GOP prolonged its gains within the Florida state Legislature, clinching supermajorities in each chambers.
To make sure, Florida has long been a tricky environment for Democrats. The state has gone red in eight of the last 11 presidential elections. Its last 4 governors have been Republicans and its House delegation has leaned toward the GOP since 1988.
But probably the most recent midterms marked an unambiguous rout for Florida Democrats, especially when put next with the party’s stronger-than-expected performance almost all over the place else.
“I feel Democrats may be higher off looking harder at Mississippi than Florida,” veteran Democratic strategist James Carville told MSNBC within the wake of the midterms.
Potentially accelerating Florida’s political shift is former President Donald Trump, the de facto leader of the GOP, who made Florida his everlasting residence before leaving the White House in 2021.Â
Within the 2020 race, Trump lost the national popular vote by a wider margin than he did in 2016 (when he also lost the favored vote, but won the Electoral College). But in Florida, his margin of victory increased.
Trump, who in 2015 announced his presidential bid from Trump Tower in Recent York City, on Tuesday night launched his third campaign from Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort home.
Nationally, the Democratic Party apparatus and its biggest donors appeared to lose hope of turning the tide in Florida, reportedly spending small fractions of what that they had invested in previous cycles.
The state can also be home to a demographic phenomenon that advantages Republicans. Unlike in much of the remaining of the country, Latino voters in Florida break for the GOP.Â
In NBC’s national exit polls, Latino voters across age and gender lines voted more for Democrats. But in Florida’s elections for Senate and governor, more Latinos voted for DeSantis and Rubio, exit polls show.
Analysts often point to Florida’s high population of Cuban Americans, a bunch that consistently trends more conservative than other Latinos, to clarify the trend.
But MacManus noted that more Florida voters of Puerto Rican descent sided with Republicans, as well.
Whether or not Florida is destined to change into a competitive state once more, it could not occur by the 2024 cycle.
“Everybody I confer with says it may take some time,” MacManus said.
