This diary is aimed at readers unfamiliar with the politics and demographics of Florida. I am a native Floridian, a voter since 1972, and currently live in north central Florida. I have also lived in the panhandle, Jacksonville, and Tampa. As someone from north Florida, my perceptions of reality might be somewhat skewed. While I try to keep up with politics in central and south Florida, people with first-hand knowledge could probably provide better insights on matters there. I also apologize for the length of this diary. It was written for several venues and not exclusively for Dkos.
First, it’s hard to poll Florida. It’s an incredibly diverse state with a multitude of population pockets. The much talked about, but often misunderstood, Villages is one and Little Haiti in Miami is another. There is a sizeable Puerto Rican contingent in Osceola County, south of Orlando. We have Cubans, of course, and migrants from probably every Latin American country. We have rednecks galore throughout north Florida and Jews galore in south Florida. We still have a small rural county, Gadsen, with a majority Black population, once part of the vast Black Belt that stretched from Louisiana and into the Carolinas. We have far too many military bases. Depending on how you want to count them there are at least four major metro areas. All of it creates challenges for pollsters, and they have been proven wrong on many occasions.
Current active voter registration in Florida breaks down as 32.7% Democrat, 38.5% Republican, 26.4% independent, and 2.4% other parties. There are a million more active Republicans than Democrats and that is a hard number to overcome in any statewide election. The large number of independents is odd given that Florida is a closed primary state. They are the wildcard in any election. It used to be said that independents were mostly right-wingers who refused to join the GOP. That is not as true as it once was as many of the Tea Partiers moved into the GOP column after 2008. Retirees moving into Florida are the major factor in GOP growth.
But most of the gap is the result of Democratic decline rather than GOP growth. At a time when Florida’s population continues to grow, active Democrats fell from 5,315,954 in 2022 to 4,359,354 in 2024. In the same period, GOP numbers rose by 167,000. Where did 1M Democrats vanish to in the space of two years? Some are part of the 1M inactive voter list. Inactive voters are defined as voters who did not vote in two consecutive elections and then failed to respond to verification mailings. They have not been stricken from the rolls and will be back in the active column if they show up in 2024. How do the inactive numbers break down? It’s hard to say because the Florida Dept. of State doesn’t provide the data on its website, and each county has some leeway to determine who’s active and who’s not. Given the abysmal Democratic turnout in 2022, it would seem likely that the breakdown skews Democratic. But that cannot account for all 1M voters. Many simply have left the state or moved elsewhere in the state and did not reregister.
Much has been said about the Cuban vote in Florida. Yes, they are still largely GOP, but the animus towards Democrats (Kennedy’s supposed betrayal at the Bay of Pigs) has diminished over the years and Cuban Americans, to the extent that you can still identify them, have become more liberal. They are increasingly hard to identify because we are now multiple generations from the Cuban Revolution and the more established populations have integrated into the general population. There is also a constant influx of Cuban arrivals, and one wave isn’t necessarily the same as another. The earliest to arrive were overwhelmingly white and newer arrivals are often Black. The great grandchildren of the first wave speak Spanish poorly, if at all, and often intermarry with non-Cubans. You will find south Florida GenZ’s with hyphenated names like Gomez-Goldstein. In many ways, the older Cuban American population tends to mirror Italian Americans more than other Latinx populations.
The GOP has had a stranglehold on political power in Florida since 1998 when it captured both the executive and legislative branches. Subsequent to that election and the 2000 census, Black Democrats made an unholy alliance with the GOP to gerrymander the legislative districts so that Black candidates were guaranteed safe districts and the GOP would have a supermajority. The GOP kept its end of the bargain until DeSantis decided in 2022 to eliminate one of the Black congressional districts. All the state’s supreme court justices have been appointed by the GOP as well as all other appointed positions including the governing bodies of the state universities.
As Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker (Spiderman for the non-Marvel readers), “With great power comes great responsibility.” The GOP’s response to Uncle Ben today would be, “With great power comes great grift.” Until DeSantis, the GOP showed some restraint in its grifting. Under DeSantis, it has been unrestrained. Much of the grift is disguised by culture wars. Was the decision to eliminate Disney’s special district a response to Disney’s support for its LGBTQ+ employees or was it a way to create a new state board with hefty taxpayer funded salaries? Hard to tell really. The same is true with the destruction of New College in Sarasota. Yes, the GOP destroyed a small liberal arts college they disdained, but their efforts to transform it into another Hillsdale College seem to have floundered. In the meantime, the new president, a former GOP leader, is bringing in an obscene salary of $1.3M a year while the school’s budget has mushroomed as it transitions to a sports college. Something similar is happening at another small public college in Lakeland. That school has a graduation rate of about 30%, but its new president is poised to bring in $1M in salary. And then there were the revelations about Ben Sasse’s outrageous spending at the University of Florida. This is on top of his bloated salary which he still receives even though he stepped down as president. The grifts go on and on and are noted as much for their brazenness as their scale.
Lately, though, the GOP antics have begun to rile people. It turns out that not everyone is into large scale corruption. The success of Moms for Liberty was short-lived, and many were recently tossed from local school boards even in conservative counties. Of course, there are sex scandals to go along with grift. (Orgies with underage women, a thruple, and gay porn.) People are also upset about the GOP’s decision to supplant local governance with state governance. Gainesville, a blue dot in a sea of red, had its municipal utility confiscated by the state, and it has now become a potential source of major grift. So much for GOP small government. Insurance rates are skyrocketing along with housing costs making the state an unattractive place for many. Hurricanes Helene and Milton will bring climate change back into the picture and could further dampen enthusiasm for GOP policies.
On the other hand, retirees still flock to Florida while younger residents move elsewhere. Retirees have been moving to Florida since the 1920s, but the most recent retirees have been upscale white Boomers, the core of Trump’s base, and there seem to be no end of them. Most have landed in several interior central Florida counties as well as coastal communities. These counties were formerly red and rural, and now they are red and exurban. The Villages are the most famous of the retirement communities, but the Villages are among the less affluent. Median home prices there have dropped to $379,000 and HOAs (which are called something else in the Villages) are low. As you may know, it also hosts a large and active Democratic group. But the Villages remain a GOP bastion, and the more affluent retirement communities are even redder.
So where is the Democratic Party in all this? In 2022, the Florida Democratic Party was both literally and figuratively bankrupt. In the 2022 election, Democrats simply failed to vote leading to DeSantis’s landslide reelection and even more losses in congressional and state legislative races. After the election, it was revealed that the party was deeply in debt. While things seem to be improving, we still get things like this from a recent post by Bethesda 1971:
Jackie Kellogg (FL House District 113) is running against a Republican incumbent in a very flippable District, where Democratic registration is about 57-40% over Republicans and Joe Biden won the district by 12 points in 2020. She is a true progressive, supporting women’s reproductive rights, public education, sensible gun control, environmental protection, workers rights, equal rights for all and other progressive issues. Her opponent, incumbent Republican Vicky Lopez, has unaccountably been endorsed by the Democratic Chairman of the Miami-Dade County Commission, the South Florida AFL-CIO, and the local teachers’ union.
I won’t say this is typical, but it seems to happen more often in south Florida than elsewhere in the state. But, perhaps my north Florida bias is showing.
Recent Democratic progress has often come from organizations outside the state party structure including 140 Florida Blue, Florida Rising, El Vecino, and People Power for Florida. But county party organizations are also showing some life again. The state party chair is Nikki Fried, and she is, at the very least, visible. But her decision not to hold a Democratic presidential primary this year proved catastrophic in several cities that use the primary for local elections. Her motivation was unclear, and there was speculation that she was trying to curry favor with the Biden administration. If so, it didn’t work out like she planned. (Fried is also from South Florida.)
So where does that leave us in 2024 and the presidential and senate races? I believe Florida will become bluer in this election, but I don’t see how Harris and Murcasel-Powell can overcome the 1M active voter gap. It should also be noted that Harris is not contesting Florida and Murcasel-Powell is woefully underfunded. Republicans currently lead heavily in early voting. The GOP is polling 5% above its active voting percentage, Democrats are only 2% above, but independents are running 8% below their active voter percentage. Unless there is a massive shift in the final days this election will be a repeat of 2022 and another Florida GOP blowout. Local races could be different, though. There are three purplish counties that bear attention: Jefferson, Manatee, and Sarasota. All three experienced GOP attacks on their school systems and all three successfully defeated them. It will be interesting to see if that generates a backlash vote. Central Florida has been trending Blue in recent years and we could make gains there. A realistic outcome in this election would be a pickup of 1 or 2 CDs for the Dems and maybe 6-7 state house seats. That would be a nice setup for the 2026 statewide elections and a rejuvenated Democratic Party. Still, it’s been a strange election year and stranger things could still happen.
If you would like to know more about Florida politics, I would recommend Jason Garcia’s Substack Seeking Rents. It’s not behind a paywall. For updates on voter turnout, the University of Florida’s Election Lab posts daily.