Florida: A swing state no longer

“What the hell happened?” asked Michael Grunwald in The Atlantic. “How did a purple state suddenly become South Alabama?” In last week’s midterms, Florida turned from a swing state to a bright red MAGA stronghold. For the first time, the state’s registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats, 36 percent to 35 percent. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won reelection by 19 points. He even won in the Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County, where he’d lost by 21 points in 2018. Meanwhile, Sen. Marco Rubio beat his Democratic challenger by 16 points. Republican efforts to gerrymander districts, limit mail-in ballots and drop boxes, and roll back felon voting rights skewed the playing field in their favor—as did the ineptitude of a withered state Democratic organization. But “the magnitude of the Democrats’ wipeout” is far too great to solely blame on Republican voter suppression. Instead, it seems like “Florida voters found the DeSantis vision of a paradise where nobody will force you to pay income taxes, get vaccinated, or care about climate change extremely alluring.”

This purple-to-red transformation happened “gradually, and then all at once,” said Charles Cooke in National Review. Florida hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1994 or a Democratic legislature since 1992, but up to now, Republicans have “tended to win in nail-biters.” That’s no longer the case, and there are a host of contributing factors: more Republicans moving to the state, the growing social conservatism of Hispanics, and “DeSantis’ brand as a bulwark against nannyism.” In his victory speech, the governor “credited his pandemic policies, stressing ‘freedom’ over mandates, and ‘education’ over ‘indoctrination,’” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Those choices were “widely derided” nationally, but home state voters “rewarded him.”

This one election does not mean Florida is a red state “forever and ever,” said Robert Sanchez in the Miami Herald. State Democrats ran weak candidates and have lost traction with Hispanic voters. Republicans now have a slight edge in registered voters, but the number of Floridians unaffiliated with a major party is growing. More than half of them are under age 50—as are nearly half the state’s Democrats—while 35 percent of Republicans are over 65. There is real potential for a future leftward swing. “So, at least for now, maps may still paint the Sunshine State in a lovely shade of purple.”