Is Florida truly a swing state now? That is the question after Florida Democrats were on the receiving end of a drubbing in 2022. USA Today looked at the reasons Florida has turned into a daunting task for our side.
Florida Republicans passed Democrats in voter registration numbers in 2021 and outpaced Democrats this year by 305,950 voters. Democrats held a 263,269 voter advantage in 2018. Republicans gained a net of 595,796 registered voters in the past four years, while Democrats gained 26,577. The number of unaffiliated voters, meanwhile, increased by a net of 443,891 in the past four years.
Registered Republicans dominate in rural, suburban and midsize counties, and Democrats have maintained advantages in urban areas. The 14 counties with Democratic registration edges include Broward, Duval, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Orange and Palm Beach counties. Democrats hold registration majorities in two counties: Leon County and neighboring Gadsden County.
DeSantis won 57% of the Hispanic vote, compared with 42% for Crist, according to exit polls by major news organizations. And he won not only the traditionally GOP-leaning Cuban-American vote but also Puerto Ricans, who historically tend to vote Democratic. DeSantis' strength with Hispanic voters helped him carry Miami-Dade County, a majority Hispanic county.
Since March 16, 2020, an estimated 394,000 active voters have flocked to Florida. According to voter and consumer data tracking firm L2, 193,300 Republicans and 96,900 Democrats have moved to Florida in that time.
These trends have probably continued since 2022, making flipping Florida a tough proposition.
Another reason why Florida has been a difficult place to win is a very weak state party that is more interested in pointing fingers than party building.
Democrats blame their current position on a cocktail of blunders.
Several Democrats pointed to infighting in the state party for years, with Kennedy noting it's had five different chairs since 2016, leading to incongruous leadership at a time when Republicans were gaining ground.
What's more, Florida Democrats were hit hard by a confluence of national factors that are magnified within the state, including slippage with Hispanic and non-college-educated white voters who hold immense sway in Florida and pushback against the prominence of democratic socialism, a philosophy that often doesn't resonate in a state where many immigrants have fled from communist dictatorships.
"When Democrats nationally start calling themselves democratic socialists, that pisses people off in Miami who are Cuban and Venezuelan and who fled socialistic countries and communist countries," added John Morgan, a major Florida-based Democratic donor. "When you got people out there going, 'I'm a democratic socialist,' in South Florida, that's just death. Then you couple that with that fleeting movement of 'defund the police.' Nobody wants to f------ defund the police."
The party has also struggled to field candidates who can compete in one of the most expensive states in the nation, with Morgan rattling off a list of qualifications that would be hard for most would-be contenders to meet.
"It has to be somebody so big that they transcend politics and that their name ID is at least good coming out of the gate and would draw different money than traditional politicians do," he said.
More broadly, though, the Democratic strategist pointed the finger at the national party and donors who they accused of writing Florida off in favor of alternate electoral paths and over disappointment in results in 2018 -- when Democrats narrowly lost Senate and gubernatorial races.
The last party chair before the current one was particularly scathing in his resignation letter.
[Ron DeSantis] second term as governor of Florida was less than a week old when a surprise letter from Manny Diaz, the chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, landed in the inboxes of his beleaguered colleagues. He was resigning.
It wasn’t his departure that was shocking so much as his parting message, a weary and withering critique of the organization that ended 2022 with zero statewide officeholders and DeSantis reelected by 19 points. Diaz wrote of his attempts to “build a united party without silos, focused exclusively on our purpose — to elect Democrats,” but mostly of his discovery of “a long-standing, systemic and deeply entrenched culture resistant to change; one where individual agendas are more important than team; where self-interest dominates and bureaucracies focus on self-preservation.”
Over 2,300 words, Diaz indicted the party’s priorities, messaging, and organizing strategy. A former Miami mayor and Michael Bloomberg ally who took control of the committee after the 2020 election, he reserved his harshest criticism for his party’s outreach efforts. They had been conducted largely via cell phone. “Supporters of relational canvassing argue that 46k ‘relational touchpoints’ are the equivalent of 348k door knocks,” he wrote. “You know what is ALSO the equivalent of knocking 348k doors? Actually knocking 348k doors.” He relayed the story of a 2021 City Council race in Jacksonville, when he learned that a local collective-bargaining agreement meant that party staffers would take off work the day before Election Day and that they refused to swap to an alternative day off. “Without the three-legged stool of adequate resources, boots on the ground and effective messaging, the FDP has been rendered practically irrelevant to the election of Democrats,” he lamented.
After reading all of that depressing backbiting and the statistics against us, you may wonder why I am even writing about this race at all.
Even at the potential rock bottom for Florida, there is a small glimmer of hope radiating through. There has been a surge of volunteers in Florida now that MVP Harris is at the top of the ticket. There is an abortion rights amendment that has a decent chance of passing. Even in conservative retirement communities, people aren’t afraid to show their support like they were before. Florida may be difficult now to win, but there is an appetite for a fight that was lacking in 2022 and even 2020.
The beneficiary of all this may be our Senate candidate, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, although she is also polling behind and outside the margin of error. 2024 is a test of whether or not Florida is still a swing state.
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Debbie Mucarsel-Powell for FL-SEN
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What’s the Big Idea?
The landslide results in 2022 for FL-SEN.
THIS STATE IS LIKELY REPUBLICAN, with an R+3 PVI
Welcome to the land of butterfly ballots and hanging chads. Florida seems to be perpetually on edge as a swing state, and never more so than the 2000 election. Scholars to this day still debate who won the state between Gore and GW Bush. 2004 was a bit anticlimactic, with President Bush narrowly carrying the state over Sen. John Kerry.
The next era saw former President Barack Obama win the state twice, albeit in a very narrow fashion. Whether it was the 2008 financial crisis, Obama’s appeal in the state, or horrid candidates such as Romney, for some reason Florida liked Obama more than any other Democratic candidate since former President Bill Clinton.
Except for one lesser statewide race, no candidate has been able to replicate the Obama coalition in the state. Trump narrowly won the state in 2016 despite Hillary Clinton contesting it. The 2018 blue wave election didn’t hit the state, as incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson lost by 10,000 votes to Medicare fraudster Rick Scott and DeSantis also won narrowly. This should’ve been the sign that something was wrong with Florida.
Trump expanded his winning margin in 2020 through a greatly improved result with Latino voters — especially in the Miami and Orlando areas. A 51.2% to 47.9% result is a landslide in Florida terms and it boded ill for our future statewide prospects.
The bottom fell out in Florida in 2022, as Gov. DeSantis defeated Rep. Charlie Crist and Sen. Rubio won over Rep. Val Demings by landslide margins. Rubio won by 57.7% to 41.3%, with 7.68M voters in total. That compares to 11.1M voters in the 2020 Presidential election. It is clear that Democratic voter enthusiasm was in the toilet in 2022. The hope is that the Democratic Party can rebuild from scratch in 2024 and contest the state again in the future. The abortion ballot measure may prove to be a catalyst to galvanize the voters into pulling the lever for Democrats again.
The primary election was last night, and the GOP cast 1.5M votes, while the Democratic primary garnered just over 1M votes. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Sen. Rick Scott didn’t have serious primary elections, so this is a decent proxy vote. It shows the uphill climb we have to parity in the state of Florida.
For these benchmarks, I took the best percentages from 2016, 2018, and 2020 and combined them. It seems that when we take a step forward somewhere in this state, we take two steps back somewhere else.
Here's where this Florida race will be won.
- Fort Lauderdale/Palm Beach: The southeastern part of the state needs to post HUGE margins for Mucarsel-Powell if she is to have a chance of winning. She needs to reverse the trends and run up the score in these two metro areas in order to have a chance, because other portions of the state are trending away fast. She will need 67% in Broward and 58% in Palm Beach Counties to have a shot. Miami is an exception that will be covered below.
- Orlando Metro Area: This growing and diverse metro area in central Florida is key to any chance she has of pulling off the upset. Mucarsel-Powell needs the positive movement in Seminole County (53%) and Orange (63%) Counties to continue, while she needs to reverse the drift to the right in Osceola County (60%).
- Tampa/St. Pete Metro Area: Mucarsel-Powell needs to post better margins here than both Clinton and Biden if she is to win the state. Hillsborough (53%) and Pinellas (51%) are the core counties in the metro area, but by no means are they the only ones. Pasco to the north is exurban and needs to remain at about 39% of the vote for our challenger.
- Tallahassee and Gainesville: Both these cities are home to college campuses and their votes have to be phenomenal come the fall. Mucarsel-Powell probably needs 65% of the vote in both Leon County and Alachua County to win. Gadsden County to the west of Tallahassee cannot be ignored either, as it is the most Democratic County in the state.
- Jacksonville: Duval County now votes for Democratic candidates again, and Mucarsel-Powell needs the positive trends to continue. She needs 52-53% of the vote here. She needs the counties surrounding it (Nassau, St. Johns, Clay) to not post such towering margins against her as well.
Here’s where we need to keep the margins down, or we lose.
- Miami-Dade: Miami is the place that moved sharpest to Trump between 2016 and 2020. Clinton got 63% of the vote here in 2016, while Biden only received 53% in 2020. Mucarsel-Powell needs to turn back the clock and win by the Clinton margins to have any chance of winning. That may be tough, as it is thought that Trump will win the county in 2024.
- Southwestern Florida: From Bradenton down to Naples, southwestern Florida is staunchly Republican in nature. Certainly, there are blue precincts in the cities, but the surrounding areas host conservative retirees. The area as a whole did tend to move our way between 2016 and 2020, and Mucarsel-Powell will have to hope this small trend works out in her favor.
- Ocala and the Villages: The golf cart parade was nice, but the truth is that the Villages is retiree central in the state and stubbornly conservative. Ocala does have some blue precincts adrift in a sea of red ones. Mucarsel-Powell cannot expect many votes from this area of the state
- Lakeland/Winter Haven: Another area chock full of retirees (sensing a pattern here?), the central part of Florida between Tampa and Orlando moved away from us in the last two elections. Mucarsel-Powell needs to find more votes in this area for sure, but she cannot rely on it to win statewide. The blue precincts are few and far between.
- Space Coast and Treasure Coast: Stretching from Brevard County in the north to Martin County in the south, the east coast of Florida typically votes for the GOP. Certainly, cities like Daytona Beach and Fort Pierce have blue precincts, but the red ones that have been built up in between the cities overwhelm them. Mucarsel-Powell will need to count on a small swing in our favor to continue.
- Northern Florida and the Panhandle: The old adage is “the more north in Florida you go, the more South it gets”. Other than some forlorn precincts in Pensacola, northern Florida is outright not inclined to vote for Democratic candidates of all stripes. Mucarsel-Powell needs to limit losses in this area or hope that the positive progression from 2016 to 2020 in the Panhandle continues.
Debbie Mucarsel-Powell: Our Last Best Hope?
If she cannot keep the state close given all of this enthusiasm, it is time to write off Florida.
Debbie Mucarsel-Powell was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1971. Her family emigrated when she was 14 to the city of Miami. In order to survive, the family rented a one bedroom apartment and Mucarsel-Powell worked at a donut shop. She wound up in southern California to finish high school and college but decided to return to the Miami area to work.
Before entering politics, Mucarsel-Powell worked at quite a few nonprofits in the Miami area. She worked at the Hope Center, Zoo Miami Foundation, and the Coral Restoration Foundation. She eventually joined Florida International University and had various roles in administration - especially in the College of Medicine.
Debbie Mucarsel-Powell first ran for office in 2016 by challenging State Sen. Anitere Flores. Despite Hillary Clinton doing well in the Miami-Dade area, Flores won this contest 54%-46%. Undeterred, Mucarsel-Powell then challenged Rep. Carlos Curbelo in Florida’s 26th Congressional district. She used the 2018 blue wave to win 50.9% of the vote and flip this seat. She would go on to lose the seat to Carlos Gimenez in 2020 by a 51.7% to 48.3% result.
How can Debbie Mucarsel-Powell win a gerrymandered and voter suppressed state? She talks about the issues with Molly Jong-Fast. It starts at the 22:00 mark and goes for about 15 minutes. She also goes on the MeidasTouch network twice to discuss the race for the Senate race.
THE key issue in Florida is the insane insurance rates for homes and the fact that many insurance companies are leaving the state. Basically, the number of hurricanes and the climate crisis has made Florida an insane risk for insurance companies. Mucarsel-Powell would vote for a federal program that would back insurance companies so they can have funding available to insure customers and not put those costs on the consumers themselves.
Given that Florida is “God’s waiting room” and her opponent is Sen. Rick Scott, protecting Social Security and Medicare is her primary issue. She helped write a bill to expand Medicare while in the House. She would likely support that and the Social Security 2100 Act if elected to the Senate. She supports the ACA and the Inflation Reduction Act which capped the price of many drugs for seniors.
A third issue that Mucarsel-Powell will be strong on is gun safety legislation. This issue is personal for her because she lost her father to gun violence in Ecuador when she was 24. After leaving Congress, she joined the gun safety group GIFFORDS to help lobby for the passage of legislation on this issue. She will work to get more enhanced background checks into law, as well as close more gun loopholes.
Standing against autocrats and brutal dictatorial regimes is an important issue in Florida - a haven for immigrants fleeing Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and other Latin American authoritarian states. Mucarsel-Powell agrees that defending democracy abroad is just as important as defending it at home. She is particularly vocal against the Venezuelan regime especially after the recent sham election keeping Maduro in power.
Finally, Mucarsel-Powell is unequivocally pro-choice. She would codify Roe into law, protect contraception access, and also make sure that IVF stays legal. She is concerned with the rapid rise in infant and maternal mortality that has occurred in Florida since it passed a radical six-week abortion ban. Health care decisions should be made by women - not politicians.
Debbie Mucarsel-Powell would be a tremendous upgrade over Sen. Rick Scott. She may be our best hope of defeating him.
Sen. Rick Scott: The Man With a Terrible Plan
You’d think being a Medicare thief and writing a plan to sunset Social Security would be disqualifying...
Rick Myers was born in Bloomington, Illinois in 1952. He was lucky to dodge an abusive, alcoholic father who divorced his mother in his infancy. His step-father adopted him which gave him the surname Scott. He was raised in the Kansas City area and his family struggled financially in his youth.
Scott would see the US Navy as a way to escape the poverty he grew up in. He enlisted in 1970 and served aboard the USS Glover as a radarman for 29 months. He used the GI Bill to go to college at UMKC to get a bachelor’s in business administration. Scott would later earn a JD from Southern Methodist University while working. He qualified to practice law in Texas in 1978.
Before entering politics, Scott had a long business career. It started when he revived two donut shops in his law school days. In 1988, he and Richard Rainwater would pool their money and borrow heavily to start Columbia Hospital Corporation. They bought two struggling hospitals in El Paso and eventually turned this investment into the largest for-profit hospital chain in the nation (Columbia/HCA).
Scott’s involvement in this hospital empire was terminated when the FBI raided several hospitals and doctors’ offices in 1997. It was discovered that Columbia/HCA defrauded the government of Medicare and Medicaid money and that Scott knew of this. He was ousted as CEO four months later and given a golden parachute. At the trial, Scott would plead the 5th Amendment 75 times while his former company paid over $2B in settlement money to the government.
Scott continued his business career as a venture capitalist after his ouster as Columbia/HCA CEO. He would invest in health care, manufacturing, and technology companies. His biggest win came with Solantic, an urgent care company that started with one clinic and mushroomed to 24 centers by the end of the 2000s. Solantic had to settle a discrimination lawsuit in 2007 stating that it refused to hire elderly or obese applicants for jobs.
Scott is one of the wealthiest politicians in Congress and in Florida. He is worth more than $200M. He claimed to have put his earnings in a blind trust during his gubernatorial days, but that was a lie and the trust was “blind in name only”. He terminated the blind trust in 2019 upon being elected to the Senate and actively sought to control his investments. This led to him violating the STOCK Act on insider trading in 2022.
Scott has a history of making controversial investments in companies not aligned with his political stances. One example is his investments in companies doing business in Venezuela and Russia while railing against the governments of both countries. His paper trail also linked him to the Cayman Islands tax haven although he denied using that location to dodge taxes. He invested in the company that bungled the SunPass toll road contract and defended their handling of the crisis.
Scott’s most controversial investment decision came as he spoke out against high-speed rail projects in the state of Florida. Yet he invested in All Aboard Florida, a private company hoping to build the same projects in the state. Only after this investment did Scott switch positions and seek public financing for these types of projects. He claims that he supports public-private partnerships and not “socialized” transportation.
Scott became politically active when the debate about passing the ACA happened early in the Obama administration. He founded Conservatives for Patients’ Rights to push moderate Democrats to enact health care legislation based on free-market principles. The political action arm of this organization ran $5M worth of ads advocating against the ACA.
Scott decided to run for governor of Florida on the crest of the Tea Party wave in 2010. He dispatched the more establishment choice in the primary by a narrow 46%-43% margin. It was a nasty campaign where Scott’s business career was dissected. He would defeat Alex Sink by about a 1% margin after spending around $75M of his own money.
Scott would run for re-election in 2014 against newly minted Democrat former Gov. Charlie Crist. For a second time, Scott cut a check to his campaign - this time not disclosing how much that check was. Once again, Scott would win by a narrow 1% margin as Crist struggled to win over Black voters that he antagonized during his tenure as a Republican governor.
Scott is known politically for being a weather vane and going with the political winds. During his time as governor and especially right before his 2018 run for the Senate, he was known for flip-flopping his political positions. This is what makes him difficult to defeat - he will moderate right before an election and then return to his hardliner ways after it.
One issue he has not wavered on is his rejection of climate change. Scott claims he is “not a scientist” and tries to dodge the issue entirely. It has been claimed that Scott ordered his government not to use the words “climate change” or “global warming” in official communications during his gubernatorial tenure - a charge Scott denied. As a reminder, Florida is the most vulnerable state to climate change in the nation and the effects are already visible in Miami.
Scott was term-limited as Florida’s governor in 2018 and won the race for Senate that year as outlined above. He has consistently been in the far-right faction in the Senate and his record there has been appalling. He’s even challenged Mitch McConnell for control of the GOP caucus - though that challenge fell flat. It is likely Scott will try and become the leader once again when McConnell finally steps down after the 2024 election.
Scott is extreme in his record of anti-abortion votes. He cheered the Supreme Court after it made the Dobbs ruling, claiming that it “defended human dignity, life, and federalism”. He also supported DeSantis when the current governor pushed for a six-week abortion ban in Florida. In an obscene example of hypocrisy, Scott claimed he supported IVF in a political ad the DAY after he voted against protections for the medical procedure!
Scott is an election denier as well. He objected to counting the electoral votes of Pennsylvania after the 2020 election but upheld the electoral votes of Arizona when an objection was made there. He also voted against establishing the January 6th Commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol. While he may not spout off election-related conspiracy theories, Scott supports the goals of annulling elections the GOP doesn’t win all the same.
Scott is in the news now for his Plan to Rescue America, also known as the Rick Scott plan. This terrible plan would reshape America much along the lines of Project 2025, which he also has dabbled in. Here are some of the particulars of the Rick Scott plan:
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All Americans would be forced to pay at least some income tax “to have skin in the game”.
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All federal legislation (including Social Security and Medicare) sunsets within five years and would have to be renewed by Congress to continue.
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The Department of Education would be shuttered and universities that practice affirmative action would be punished. A mandate to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in schools.
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Any “sanctuary cities” would have all of their funding stripped until they comply with draconian immigration laws. The Trump wall would have to be completed.
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Reducing the size of the federal government workforce and supporting Schedule F that Trump tried to start.
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Mandatory voter ID and more control over the election machinery by the GOP.
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Racist “law and order” policies for police and an increase in funding for local police forces.
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Allowing for legal action against social media companies for deplatforming them.
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Anti-transgender legislation and an expansion of “religious freedom” (to discriminate).
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Banning of “critical race theory”, “wokeness”, and DEI in schools and businesses.
It is clear that Sen. Rick Scott is one of the most dangerous politicians in the Senate and that it is paramount to defeat him before he amasses power and is in a position to pass his radical plan through Congress.
How Can You Help?
One of the most important ways you can help Debbie Mucarsel-Powell is through giving her campaign a donation. She’s not attracting the amount of cash needed to run in a huge state like Florida. Val Demings raised around $65M in 2022 but Mucasel-Powell has only raised a little over $12M so far. Scott has the ability to self-fund large amounts of money if necessary but he’s restricted himself to only $13M in self-funding so far. If we are to make this a race, we need to close this funding disparity ASAP.
If we cannot rely on donors, then we will have to rely on a grassroots effort to elect her to the Senate. Anyone with a cell phone can help Mucarsel-Powell out every Wednesday. That’s when the campaign reaches Floridians through text banking. There’s a potential for other days to be added to this event as well, so keep an eye out for updates to the schedule.
Yes on 4! Is running a campaign to get abortion rights enshrined into the Florida constitution. They have to clear 60% of the vote in order to get the amendment passed. If you choose to help the organization out you are also indirectly helping out Mucarsel-Powell.
Postcards for Voters is currently writing postcards for addresses in Florida. They are encouraging voters there to register to vote by mail and to check their voter registration. The campaign keeps churning through counties in the state so watch for any changes afoot. Progressive Muse posts more information in the Good News Roundup about this effort every day.
There is a HUGE effort to register voters on college campuses in Florida in the next few days. The “Dorm Storm” is working in alignment with Yes on 4! and the Florida Democratic Party to supercharge youth turnout. Campuses I’ve seen include University of Northern Florida, Florida State University, University of Florida, Florida International University, University of Southern Florida, and the University of Central Florida. I am sure I am missing a few because Florida has many institutions of higher learning.
The primary election for Florida was literally just last night, so canvassing for the general election has not yet started. It will definitely ramp up soon! I would sign up with the campaign to get updates or check Mobilize for canvassing opportunities if you are in Florida. I’ve included a link at the top and the bottom of this article for Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.
I’ve tried to give a balanced take on the state of Florida, but I am truly pessimistic about our prospects here. What is concerning to me is that Debbie Mucarsel-Powell isn’t raising enough money, nor is she polling above the 2022 baseline established (43%). Relying on outside forces (grassroots enthusiasm and the abortion amendment) cedes the ground to forces you cannot control.
Sen. Rick Scott is a dangerous person to have in the Senate. With his inexhaustible wealth, far-right politics, and ambition, we have to defeat him in an election while we still can. That may prove difficult, as the ratings aggregators rate this race as either “Likely Republican” or even “Safe Republican”. I have him rated as the 10th most likely Senate seat to flip.
This is a test of Florida. The question is what to do about the state if it is no longer a swing state after 2024. And no, Bugs Bunny cutting off the state in a GIF is NOT an option.
Debbie Mucarsel-Powell for FL-SEN
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