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Writer's pictureThe San Juan Daily Star

Florida stopped being a swing state slowly, then all at once



Signs on the sidewalk guide voters to a polling site at Miami City Hall on March 19, 2024. For a variety of reasons, Florida’s days as a presidential battleground are bygone. (Scott McIntyre/The New York Times)

By Patricia Mazzei


Florida’s days as a presidential battleground are bygone. No longer do candidates drop in every few days during campaign season. No longer do voters get bombarded with their ads. Nor is there more than a whisper of doubt that the state will vote Republican.


Presidential elections in Florida used to be decided by the slimmest of margins — none slimmer than the 537 votes that, after an infamous recount, won George W. Bush the White House in 2000. Republicans and Democrats waged fierce campaigns during the two decades that followed as Florida, rich in electoral votes, became the largest swing state.


In the past four years, the Florida Democratic Party has withered and struggled to rebuild. Democrats have lost their edge in registered voters and are now outnumbered by more than 1 million Republicans. They have not won a statewide seat since 2018. National fundraising has all but dried up.


The loss of Florida as a source of electoral votes looms large as Democrats scrap for every last vote across seven swing states in the 2024 presidential election.


The reasons are in some cases structural and long-standing: demographics, partisan gerrymandering and legislative term limits. But others are of Democrats’ own making: an unwillingness to invest enough in the nuts and bolts of winning elections; fundraising divisions; and flawed assumptions about the growing Hispanic vote, according to an examination of voter registration numbers, campaign spending and more than two dozen interviews with political operatives from both parties.


What happens in November and in the next few election cycles in Florida will be a test for the country’s politics, as more people move to Sun Belt states and those states get more electoral votes. Democrats will have to make inroads there — a lot of them — to win the presidency.


“The story of Florida is not just the story of Florida,” said Raymond Paultre, the executive director of the Alliance, a group of Democratic donors in the state. “It’s the story of a progressive movement that’s struggling to make it in the South, that’s struggling to compete with younger voters of color, that is struggling to win with younger men.”


The shortcomings in Florida became evident in 2020, when national Democrats largely abandoned spending in the state.


Two years earlier, Democrats had run a moderate incumbent, Bill Nelson, for Senate, and a progressive, Andrew Gillum, for governor, covering all their political bases. Both lost after recounts. Nelson lost to Sen. Rick Scott, a Republican whose vast wealth has helped him win three statewide elections by 1 percentage point or less.


Florida started looking impossible for Democrats to crack.


While Democrats lost their footing, Republicans seized opportunities to reshape Florida’s electorate to their advantage. A torrent of conservative policies have followed, intended to cement the state as an anchor of Republican power.


The results have forced Democrats to try to remake their electoral pathways to victory, as Florida slipped away from them.


In 2020, Joe Biden won the White House, but the state went for former President Donald Trump, ending Floridians’ streak of voting for the winner in every presidential election since 1996. Trump’s victory in Florida that year, by a little more than 3 percentage points, was the biggest presidential margin in the state since 2004.


This year, polls show Trump ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris in the state by an average of 7 points.


Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who was elected in 2018 by less than half a percentage point, has taken credit for Florida’s transformation, though it took years to build. He won reelection in 2022 by more than 19 points, a thumping that he had hoped would fuel his presidential campaign and quash any notion that Democrats might soon be competitive again.


“This whole century, presidential elections, we’d be on razor’s edge about the state of Florida,” DeSantis told Republicans at a state party dinner last month. Now, he added, winning is “a layup.”


Organizational missteps


Democrats describe Florida’s political evolution as happening gradually and then all at once.


In 2012, the last time a Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama, won the state, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in Florida by nearly 1.5 million voters. Since then, every one of the state’s 67 counties has become more Republican.


By 2020, Democrats’ registration edge had fallen to about 97,000 voters. As of Sept. 1, the state, with about 16.1 million voters overall, has about 1 million more “active” registered Republicans than Democrats. The state has disproportionately listed more Democrats as “inactive” voters, said Daniel A. Smith, an elections expert at the University of Florida. Voters are deemed inactive if they have not voted, requested a mail ballot or updated their registration in two general elections.


Some new Republicans are party switchers — longtime registered Democrats who had probably been voting Republican for years — a realignment that has happened across the South. Others moved to Florida as part of a migration that began earlier but swelled during the coronavirus pandemic.


Yet political parties and their leaders also played a role.


The Republican Party of Florida is one of the country’s best funded state parties, owing to 25 years of Republican state government control. Crucially, the party runs its own voter registration program.


Democrats have not won a Florida governor’s race since 1994. Republicans draw legislative districts and have supermajorities in the state House and Senate.


Unable to wield much power, the Florida Democratic Party increasingly outsourced voter registration over the past decade to nonprofit groups. Decentralizing the party was intended to create an enduring progressive infrastructure, but despite raising millions of dollars, outside groups failed to register voters in large numbers. New state laws made it even harder for them to do so.


Decentralization also led to fundraising divisions. After Obama’s success in Florida, a group of Democratic donors sought more discretion over their own spending. Imitating a model that had succeeded in Colorado, they formed the Alliance, which channeled resources to progressive causes rather than to the party.


That change crippled a state party that, absent a governor to drive fundraising, relied heavily on individual donors, said Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist.


Strategic miscalculations


Florida Democrats thought their coalition would grow as the state became more Hispanic, a long-standing assumption in a number of states. In 2012, about 14% of registered Florida voters identified as Hispanic, compared with more than 18% this year.


Florida Republicans prioritized Hispanics starting in the 1980s, led by Jeb Bush, who chaired the party in Miami-Dade County and later served two terms as governor. As a result, Florida Hispanics, who were mostly Cuban American, usually voted Republican. As older Cuban exiles died, Democrats thought that younger generations would lean Democratic. Obama’s wins bolstered that hypothesis.


In 2016, Hillary Clinton won about 62% of Hispanics in Florida but still lost the state. Her campaign turned out minority voters but failed to limit losses in whiter counties, as Obama had done.


Florida’s booming suburbs and exurbs, especially in the Tampa media market, had become more Republican. People drawn to Trump — particularly older white voters and those without a college degree — proved plentiful in the state, which has many retirees and service workers.

Democrats had a Tampa problem. Soon, they would also have a Miami problem.


Hispanics comprise about 68% of the population of Miami-Dade County. Clinton won the county, Florida’s most populous, by 30 percentage points. Four years later, Biden won it by just 7 points.


From 2016 to 2020, Republicans relentlessly courted Florida Hispanics. Trump cut the ties Obama had forged with Cuba’s Communist government. As governor, Scott learned some Spanish and offered Puerto Ricans aid after Hurricane Maria. Sen. Marco Rubio — a Cuban American who speaks fluent Spanish — obtained sanctions against the Venezuelan government.


Working-class Hispanics suffered during the pandemic. Protests over police violence exposed a rift between Hispanics and progressive groups. Trumpism appealed to the demographic more broadly, it turned out, including to many who had voted Democratic in the past.


By 2020, younger Cuban Americans were voting more like their grandparents. An influx of new arrivals who had seen little improvement to life there during the Obama era favored Trump.


Can democrats rebuild?


Perhaps the 2022 midterms were Florida Democrats’ low point. Their nominee for governor, Charlie Crist, was a former Republican who did not inspire loyalty. Little national money trickled in. Turnout collapsed: About 600,000 fewer Democrats voted than in 2018.


This year, Nikki Fried, the state party chair, portrayed Florida as back in play. But operatives know their victories, if any, might be small: Improve turnout. Win some legislative seats. Keep the presidential and Senate races to single-digit margins.


“We’re not going to go from a 20-point drubbing in 2022 to ‘Everything is fine,’” said Beth Matuga, a Democratic consultant running state House campaigns.

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