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(Trends Wide) — In the week leading up to midterm election day, the two most recent US presidents will hold rallies in Florida, where an unfolding seismic political shift may alter the national political map for years to come.
President Joe Biden landed in South Florida on Tuesday to campaign for the Democrats. Donald Trump will host his own rally for Republican Senator Marco Rubio on Sunday in Miami.
The circumstances of their arrivals have brought their own intrigue. With Democrats reluctant to welcome Biden and his approval ratings low elsewhere, the president will spend one of the last days before the election in a state that hasn’t been on his party’s mind for much of the cycle. midterm election campaign. Meanwhile, Republicans are speculating that Trump will be in the spotlight in the Sunshine State two days before the election, in part to embarrass Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 rival who was not invited to appear. weekend campaign stop.
In most election years, a high-profile politician’s visit to the Sunshine State would be the norm. Trump and Biden made several stops in Florida two years ago, including rallies days before the 2020 election, separated by a few hours and just 10 miles of highway from Tampa. And four years ago, Florida’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races were decided by a recount.
But now, Republicans and Democrats are on opposite trajectories. Republicans believe they are headed for their most successful election night in a generation, buoyed by DeSantis’ record fundraising and a surge of enthusiasm. Democrats, trailing in the polls and in enthusiasm, are expecting an unexpected turn of political winds or they could be left without a single statewide elected official in Florida for the first time since at least Reconstruction.
These are four factors driving the state’s shift to the right.
Democrats stall on voter registration as Republicans surge
When Barack Obama won Florida in 2008, his historic campaign brought a wave of new Democratic voters. Registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans in Florida by nearly 700,000, their largest lead since 1990.
That difference has narrowed in subsequent years. But after the 2020 election, the pushback has accelerated, affecting nearly every part of the state, from urban cores and their suburbs, to rural communities that border the Northwest and dot Central Florida. Republicans increased their numbers in 52 of the state’s 67 counties since Biden and Trump were on the ballot. Meanwhile, there are fewer registered Democrats in all but one county than there were two years ago: a net loss of 331,000 total voters.
As of last month, there were 5.3 million registered Republicans and just under 5 million Democrats in Florida, marking the first time in state history that the GOP has led voters on Election Day.
“Voter registration has been a disaster,” said Thomas Kennedy, a member of the Democratic National Committee in Florida. “Our messaging does not work.”
Kennedy has called for the removal of Florida Democratic Party Chairman Manny Diaz.
One wild card remains. The fastest growing category of voters in the state are neither Republicans nor Democrats, but people who do not choose a party when they register to vote. There are 240,000 more Floridians who registered as “no party affiliation” than in 2020.
Hispanic voters opt for the Republican Party and open the door to winning Miami
Trump’s surprising performance among Latino voters helped propel his 3.5-point victory in the Sunshine State in 2020. Perhaps nowhere was that dynamic more pronounced than in Miami-Dade County, where Trump lost by just 7 points to Biden after trailing Hillary Clinton there by 30 points in 2016.
Republicans have picked up where Trump left off. More than half of his gains in registered voters can be attributed to the 58,000 new Hispanic voters who checked “Republican” on their forms.
The Democrats, however, are losing support from these communities. The party suffered a net loss of more than 46,000 Hispanic voters.
The pullback is all the more surprising because Democrats entered the election cycle firmly aware of the trend and set out to tackle it, promising they would have dedicated staff and focused outreach to the disparate Hispanic communities that are scattered across the state. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist chose Karla Hernandez, an educator born to Honduran immigrants, as his running mate, and she has led the bid’s Spanish-language outreach efforts.
Those efforts have so far failed to materialize in broad new support, and heading into the election, Republicans believe they are poised to win Miami-Dade County for the first time since Jeb Bush was governor in 2002. Republicans won nearly 11,000 voters there; the Democrats lost almost 58,000.
“We don’t make everything identity politics. Hispanics buy groceries too,” tweeted Christina Pushaw, who runs the DeSantis campaign’s rapid response. “Less these days, like everyone else, because of ‘Bidenflation'”.
It’s also worth noting that Republicans saw a slight but sizeable increase in black registered voters over the past two years, while Democrats lost more than 71,000, a quarter of which came from Miami-Dade.
The Republican Money Advantage
In the final months of the 2020 election, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged $100 million to help Biden win Florida. The sum was remarkable, but outsiders have long been drawn to spend large sums to change what had been the country’s largest battlefield. The 2018 elections attracted tens of millions in foreign spending from the two parties and their wealthy allies.
In this cycle, most of that money is going to one side, the Republicans, and much of it is going to one person, DeSantis. The GOP leader is breaking fundraising records on his way to closing in on a $200 million campaign for governor. The Republican Governors Association has invested heavily to help DeSantis, donating more than $20 million this campaign cycle, and his political caucus has raised more than 250 six-figure checks, but also small donations from every state. .
Most of the major Democratic patrons, meanwhile, have stayed on the sidelines, leaving Democrats to fend for themselves in the closing weeks of the race. Democrats worry that two decades of narrow defeats have soured donor confidence in Florida for the foreseeable future.
There are Democrats who, in retrospect, regret not using the Bloomberg investment and other earlier donations to build a more sustainable party and register more voters, instead of being drawn into a winner-takes-all air war. every year, with few wins to show for it.
“The other side of the coin, with Donald Trump on the ballot, how can you not throw everything to stop him? The stakes were so high that if there’s a dollar left in your bank account, you didn’t try hard enough,” said one state party operator in Florida who asked to speak anonymously about the political organization. “But going forward, we spend too much money on TV and direct mail. You don’t get that much. We don’t do deep polling all year long. We parachute in two months before the election. We advertise instead of doing the work.” Lasted”.
The short-term and long-term effects of one more seat in Congress
Florida’s population growth over the past decade gave the state an additional seat in the US House of Representatives following the 2020 census results. The effects of that will be felt as early as next week. DeSantis here pushed for an aggressively partisan redistricting of state congressional districts that could give Republicans an advantage in as many as 20 of 28 districts. Republicans currently hold a 16-11 lead in Florida’s US House delegation.
The extra congressional seat also means Florida gets another Electoral College vote, bringing the total to 30. Democrats’ concern about their electoral viability in Florida has some fearing the party may not be able to compete for the presidency. within two years.
Republicans have publicly stated that this is the result they are working for.
“We have no excuses except getting the biggest election win we’ve ever had,” DeSantis said at a rally on Sunday, before adding, “I really think the red wave starts in the state of Florida.”
