Democrats still can’t burst through in state races
Progressives in Florida have long said if there were a “real” progressive candidate in the race, he or she would energize young and new voters in a way the usual centrists wouldn’t.
And yet, record-breaking turnout numbers weren’t enough to put Democrat Andrew Gillum over the top in the governor’s race, thanks in part to lower turnout in key South Florida counties and huge gains in smaller yet reliably Republican rural and suburban counties.
Now, even as they celebrate gains in the Legislature and other local races, Democrats and progressive groups are wondering what they need to do to turn out enough voters to ever win statewide again.
“Every cycle, we’re optimistic that we’ll really make some big plays,” said state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando. “Eventually, it’s going to happen. The demographics are changing in our favor, with young voters, African Americans and Hispanic voters. At
some point, we’re going to catch up with Republicans. And we came so close this time.”
The 62 percent turnout overall in Florida was the highest in 28 years for a midterm election with 8.25 million votes. Yet, Tallahassee Mayor Gillum lost to Republican Ron DeSantis by about 50,000 votes, and U.S. Sen Bill Nelson was behind Gov. Rick Scott by about 30,000 votes, probably triggering a recount.
All but six of Florida’s 67 counties saw the highest turnout in years for a midterm election on Tuesday, according to preliminary tallies from the Florida Division of Elections.
But while turnout reached 60 percent in Orange and 66 percent in Seminole, a former Republican stronghold which voted for both Nelson and Gillum, Broward County only reached 57 percent turnout and Miami-Dade did slightly worse.
Osceola County, the center of the Puerto Rican community in Florida, had 52 percent turnout.
Scott and DeSantis racked up big numbers in a number of Republican-leaning counties, many of which are made up of retirees from other states.
“Florida is typically not an outlier,” said Democratic strategist Steve Schale. “What happens here tends to happen elsewhere. And what happens elsewhere is [that] those people move here.”
Sumter County, about an hour northwest of Orlando and home of The Villages retirement community, had the highest turnout in the state Tuesday, at 78 percent. The other five that exceeded a 70 percent turnout rate were Jefferson, Collier, Franklin, St. Johns and Baker.
“The majority of people here are interested,” said John Calandro, Sumter County Republican chairman. “They talk a lot about politics … And quite frankly, they have the time. Even though there’s huge voteby-mail [numbers] – you don’t want to give up your tee time, so you fill out your ballot at home – Election Day was really good this year. We didn’t have long lines, but every poll was a steady stream of people.”
“Add all that up, you get 78 percent turnout,” Calandro said.
For young voters, despite large turnouts at early voting sites at universities including 5,118 ballots cast at the University of Central Florida, “It’s not an easy thing to vote in Florida,” said Olivia Bercow, spokeswoman for the voter outreach group NextGen America.
NextGen registered 52,000 young voters in Florida in 2018, part of a nationwide effort
funded by billionaire Tom Steyer. But getting young voters to go to the polls is always difficult.
“There’s tons of systemic barriers ... like a 30-day voter registration because they don’t have same-day voter registration,” she said. “And while they have pretty good early voting, it’s not unified across the state. It’s very confusing.”
The low turnout in Broward is especially vexing for progressives, home of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. The Feb. 14 shooting deaths there of 17 students and staff kicked off the March for Our Lives movement determined to bring out young voters to vote for gun reforms. But by the time November rolled around guns were not one of the main issues to voters in the election, according to exit polling done by the Associated Press.
“But remember, those voters are spread out,” Smith said. “They’re motivated to
go vote and they’re 18, 19 years old and they leave the geographic area to go to UCF or UF. They’re everywhere.”
Smith pointed to Democratic pickups in the Legislature, including Anna Eskamani in District 47 in Orange County, as proof Democrats were making gains even as they fell short statewide.
Asked if Democrats should go back to running moderates rather than Gillum-style progressives, Eskamani was clear: “Please no, don’t go back . ... It would be a mistake to run Democratic-lite candidates.”
Democrats, she said, need to make inroads in counties outside the big Democratic urban areas, where Democrats started “to come out of their shells after 2016. Andrew Gillum amplified that. And you can’t just saturate them in a one-way conversation. It has to be two-way.”