In the final week before Election Day, the two most recent US presidents will hold rallies in Florida, where a seismic political shift currently underway could alter the national political map for years to come.
President Joe Biden lands in South Florida on Tuesday to campaign for the Democrats. Donald Trump will host his own event for Republican Sen. Marco Rubio on Sunday in Miami.
The circumstances of their arrival have brought their own intrigue. With Democrats wary of welcoming Biden and his sinking approval rating elsewhere, the president will spend one of the final days before the election in a state that has been an afterthought for his party for much of the midterm cycle. Meanwhile, Republicans are speculating that Trump is holding court in the Sunshine State two days before the election, in part to needle Florida Gov. Ron DeSandis, a potential 2024 challenger who was not invited to campaign over the weekend.
In most election years, a visit by a high-profile politician to the Sunshine State would be the norm, if not expected. Trump and Biden each made several stops in Florida two years ago — including dueling rallies days before the 2020 election that were separated by hours and just 10 miles from the streets of Tampa. And four years ago, Florida’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races were decided in recounts.
But now, Republicans and Democrats are on opposite paths. Republicans believe they are headed for their most successful election night in a generation, benefiting from DeSantis’ record rally and wave of enthusiasm. Democrats, trailing in the polls and trailing in enthusiasm, are hoping for an unexpected shift in the political winds or could be left without a single statewide elected official in Florida for the first time since at least redistricting.
Here are four factors leading to the rightward turn of the state.
When Barack Obama won Florida in 2008, his historic campaign brought in a wave of new Democratic voters. Registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans in Florida by nearly 700,000, their largest advantage since 1990.
This gap has narrowed in recent years. But after the 2020 election, the upheaval has accelerated and has touched nearly every part of the state, from urban cores and their suburbs, to rural communities that line the Panhandle and dot Central Florida. Republicans have 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 voters overall.
As of last month, there were 5.3 million registered Republicans and just under 5 million Democrats in Florida, marking the first time in the state’s history that the GOP will have a voter advantage on Election Day.
“Voter registration has been a disaster,” said Thomas Kennedy, a member of the Florida Democratic National Committee. “Our messaging sucks.”
Kennedy called for the impeachment of Florida Democratic Party Chairman Manny Diaz.
One wild card remains. The fastest growing category of voters in the state are not Republicans or Democrats, but people who choose no party when they register to vote. There are 240,000 more Floridians registered as “no party affiliation” than there were in 2020.
Trump’s surprisingly strong performance among Latino voters helped fuel 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 he lost just 7 points to Biden after Hillary Clinton. 30 points in 2016.
Republicans picked up where Trump left off. More than half of their gains in registered voters can be attributed to the 58,000 new Hispanic voters who checked “Republican” on their forms. Democrats, however, are hemorrhaging support from those communities. The party saw a net loss of more than 46,000 Hispanic voters.
The turnaround is made all the more impressive because Democrats entered the election cycle fully aware of the trend and set out to counter it, promising a dedicated staff and approach focused on the disparate Hispanic communities scattered across the state. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist has chosen Carla Hernandez, an educator born to Honduran immigrants, as his running mate and led the ticket’s Hispanic outreach.
Those efforts so far have not translated into widespread 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 almost 11,000 voters there. Democrats lost nearly 58,000.
“We’re not all about identity politics. Hispanics buy groceries too,” tweeted Christina Pushaw, who directs rapid response for the DeSantis campaign. “Less these days, like everyone else, due to Biden inflation.”
It’s also worth noting that Republicans saw a slight but significant increase in registered black voters over the past two years, while Democrats lost more than 71,000, a quarter of which came from Miami-Dade.
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 foreigners have long been tempted to spend huge sums to relocate what was the country’s biggest battlefield. The 2018 election drew tens of millions in outside spending from both parties and their wealthy allies.
In this cycle, most of that money is coming to one side, the Republicans, and a lot of it is going to one person, DeSantis. The GOP leader is breaking fundraising records on his way to nearing a $200 million campaign for governor. The Republican Governors Association has invested heavily in helping DeSantis, donating more than $20 million this campaign cycle, and his political committee has collected more than 250 six-figure checks and small donations from every state.
Most of the big blue benefactors, meanwhile, have stayed on the sidelines, leaving Democrats struggling to advertise in the final weeks of the race. Democrats here worry that two decades of narrow defeats have hurt donors in Florida for the foreseeable future.
There are Democrats who in retrospect regret not using Bloomberg’s investment and other past donations to build a more viable party and register more voters instead of being dragged into a dogfight with winners every year with few wins.
“The other side of the coin, with Donald Trump on the ballot, how do you not throw everything at him to stop him? The stakes were so high that if you have a dollar left in your bank account, you didn’t try hard enough,” said a Florida state party operative who spoke on condition of anonymity for the party. “But going forward, we’re spending too much money on TV and direct mail. It just doesn’t take you that long. We don’t do the whole year, in depth. We are parachuting in two months before the elections. We advertise instead of doing the hard work.”
Florida’s population growth over the past decade has given the state an extra seat in the U.S. House after the results of the 2020 U.S. Census. The results will be felt next week. DeSantis has pushed for an aggressively partisan redistricting of state congressional districts here that could give Republicans an edge in as many as 20 of the 28 districts. Republicans currently hold a 16-11 advantage in Florida’s U.S. House delegation.
The additional congressional seat also means Florida will receive another Electoral College vote, bringing the total to 30. Already, Democratic concerns about their electoral viability in Florida have some worried that the party will not compete for the presidency here in two years.
Republicans have publicly stated that this is the outcome they are working towards.
“We have no excuse other than the biggest electoral victory we’ve ever had,” DeSantis said at a rally Sunday, before adding, “I really think the red tide is starting in the state of Florida.”
