Florida-- What A Mess!

I haven’t wanted to write much about Florida this cycle— too depressing. The GOP swept the field, won every statewide office (by a lot) and gained supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, won parts of the states where Democrats have been in control and gained 4 additional congressional seats.

Tuesday night, a gloating right wing hack at the National Review, Charles Cooke, noted that “the blow-out victories by DeSantis, Rubio, and other Republicans confirm that the Sunshine State’s fading purple hue has all but disappeared.”

Even as the red wave was stalling everywhere else, Cooke exalted that though Florida has been tough for the Democrats for 3 decades and that the Sunshine State has not elected a Democratic governor since 1998; has not elected a Democratic legislature since 1994; and that the last year in which a Senate or presidential candidate won here was 2012, it has often still been tough for the party the stands for greed and bigotry. No more nail-biters, he screeches.

He wrote that “the GOP prevailed in the Florida governor’s races by just 1 percent in 2014 and 1.2 percent in 2010. In 2016, Trump eked out a win by 1.2 percent. In 2020, that number was 3.4 percent. Four years ago, in races that both went to mandatory recounts, Ron DeSantis won the gubernatorial contest by 30,000 votes and Rick Scott won the Senate race by just 10,000. Between 1992 and 2016, voters in Florida filled in 48,263,173 presidential-election ballots. In that time, the difference between the Republican votes and the Democratic votes was just 17,753— or 0.0004 percentage points of the total. Those 17,753 went to the Democrats. Now? Something has changed. No longer can Florida be seen as a swing state. This is Republican ground. Tuesday night, Ron DeSantis blew out Charlie Crist by 19 points … and counting. This feat was echoed by Marco Rubio, who won by 16; by the Republican candidates for attorney general, chief financial officer, and agriculture commissioner, who all won by ten points or more; in the state legislature, which seems likely to feature Republican supermajorities in both chambers; and by the Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, who won 20 of their 27 races. For the first time in a long time, Republicans didn’t just win in Florida; they won big in Florida. And how! The GOP flipped Miami-Dade County— which Hillary Clinton won by 29 points, and which Joe Biden took by seven. It flipped Hillsborough County, Duval County, Pinellas County (Charlie Crist’s home county), Palm Beach County, and Osceola County— all of which went for the Democrats in 2020. Of Florida’s 67 counties, only Broward, Orange, Gadsden, Alachua, and Leon stayed completely blue.”

Even the worst MAGA crackpots were judged the lesser evil in races against Democrats! Take Charlie Crist’s old district— very gerrymandered old district. The partisan lean was R+1, just right for a conservative Blue Dog like Crist, but the new partisan lean is impossible for a Democrat: R+12. (The PVI is now R+6.) One of the most extreme MAGAt candidates running for Congress anywhere, Anna Paulina Luna, trounced Democrat Eric Lynn:

Fellow MAGAt Lauren Boebert, a few hours before she suddenly discovered that about of of her own constituents hate her guts and would vote for virtually anyone to get her out of office so she couldn’t keep embarrassing them, celebrated the Luna win:

But Luna’s victory in a gerrymandered district doesn’t fully explain why Florida has become redder. Not even the sheer incompetence of one of the worst Democratic state parties explains that. How about the Republicans’ ability to create so massive a feeling of inevitability that the 10-15% or so of voters who decide how to vote based only on hoping to be on the winning side, now is a dependable GOP bloc in the state! And, I think some Florida voters just want to see a Floridian in the White House, as sick as that sounds.

And money isn’t helping. The FEC reports 3 weeks before Election Day show that Val Demings’ campaign had spent $68.2 million to Marco Rubio’s $46.7 million. On the other hand, DeSantis, eager to prove a point, outspent Charlie Crist massively. As of August DeSantis had spent 172 million to Crist’s puny 15 million, not counting either candidate’s affiliated SuperDuper PAC. Compare the huge amount Demings spent to the small amount Crist spent. Then look at their vote totals:

Gubernatorial race:

• DeSantis- 4,609,112 (59.4%)

• Crist- 3,102,136 (40.0%)

Senate race:

• Rubio- 4,469,885 (57.7%)

• Demings- 3,197,133 (41.3%)

Demings spent over 4 times more than Crist and got less than 100,000 votes out of it. Makes you stop and think about her tepid, issues-free campaign. Michael Grunwald called his Florida coverage today The Democratic Party’s Broccoli Politics. He also noted what a swing state Florida used to be-- but is no longer. "DeSantis," he wrote, "bludgeoned former Governor Charlie Crist by an astonishing 19 points on Tuesday, a pretty decent night for Democrats running almost everywhere except Florida. Senator Marco Rubio was also reelected in a huge blowout, while Republicans swept every state office and claimed unprecedented supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Republicans even romped in the urban Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County, where DeSantis lost by more than 20 points in 2018. My heavily Democratic Miami neighborhood sits in one of Florida’s most Democratic state-assembly districts, but a Republican convicted of fraud the last time she held public office will be my new representative. My Republican congresswoman, Maria Salazar, whose reelection was once considered a toss-up, coasted to victory by 15 points... So what the hell happened? How did a purple state suddenly become South Alabama?"

The pitiful turnout of Florida Democrats probably had less to do with voter suppression than voter depression. Republicans have controlled Tallahassee since 1998, consistently winning narrow statewide elections when Florida actually was a swing state, even when Democrats did well nationally in 2018. This is the attitude problem: Biennial heartbreak gets frustrating for volunteers, donors, and voters. Diaz told me Democrats have been dropping their party affiliation “in droves,” and it’s easy to see why casual voters would get tired of identifying with a losing team.

The national Democratic establishment also seems tired of identifying with this losing team. After Donald Trump won Florida for the second time, expanding his margin to 3.4 points while making major inroads in Miami-Dade, Democratic groups that spent $58.7 million in the state in 2018 spent only $1.4 million in 2022. DeSantis raised more than six times as much as Crist.

Did the money dry up because the situation was hopeless, or did the situation become hopeless because the money dried up? Probably some of both, but in any event the state party is now in shambles. Since 2020, the number of registered Democrats declined in all but one of Florida’s 67 counties, and they were outnumbered by registered Republicans on Election Day for the first time ever. Anyone involved in Florida politics will also tell you that the GOP does far more voter outreach, not only during election season but all the time.

The party’s inability to engage voters seems especially egregious with Latino voters, which helps explain the tectonic shift in Miami-Dade. Again, a big part of the problem seems to be that Republicans actually show up in Latino communities.

Scott visited Puerto Rico eight times as governor, and held six events at a Venezuelan restaurant in Doral; the senator he narrowly unseated in 2018, Bill Nelson, once told a Democratic operative that he wasn’t reaching out to Latino media because he wasn’t going to get the Cuban vote. In fact, Cubans are only a third of Florida’s Latino voters, something a U.S. senator should have known about his own state, and Barack Obama nearly won the Cuban vote in 2012. The problem extends beyond Cubans and Miami-Dade; exit polls suggested that DeSantis even won the Puerto Rican vote, and his surprising victory in heavily Puerto Rican and reliably Democratic Osceola County supports that.

It’s hard to know how much of the Democratic Party’s struggle to attract Latino voters is blocking and tackling, and how much is political messaging and substance. While Spanish-language radio here is full of right-wing misinformation portraying Democrats as socialists and Communists, the smears might pack less punch with exiles from Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, and Nicaragua if Democratic surrogates took to the airwaves to fight back. When Biden extended protections to migrants fleeing Venezuela, he did not make a big deal about it, and neither did his party.

Democrats have also struggled to respond to Republican attacks on cultural issues. While Florida Latinos are more liberal than their reputation suggests on kitchen-table economics— Obama ran Spanish-language ads touting the Affordable Care Act in South Florida when it was unpopular almost everywhere else— polls suggest that they were uncomfortable with Democratic support for the Black Lives Matter movement, with calls to defund the police, and with other progressive stances on social issues. The Cuban American Democrat running to be my state senator featured her wife prominently in her campaign literature, and invited supporters to a get-out-the-vote drag party. She lost by eight points in a district Biden won.

Democrats can’t win Florida if they can’t win around Miami, and they can’t win around Miami if they keep hemorrhaging Latino votes. But their biggest problems are in heavily white, heavily Republican communities such as the Villages, Fort Myers, Naples, St. Augustine, and Cape Coral, because those are the state’s fastest-growing communities. In 2016, 10 of America’s fastest-growing metros were in Florida, and nine of them voted for Trump, a Boomer-skewing partisan influx that has only accelerated as the state has become more of a MAGA magnet.

If Democrats want to do something about this problem, they can’t think of it as an inevitable fact of life in the Sunshine State; they need to ask why the Republican Party is so attractive to newcomers, and why Florida is so attractive to Republicans. My two cents, as I wrote in an essay about Cape Coral after Hurricane Ian, is that the sugary DeSantis vision of a Free State of Florida paradise where nobody will force you to pay income taxes, get vaccinated, care about climate change, limit your water consumption, or build your house in a safe location is extremely alluring. It promises ice cream when Democrats are mostly offering broccoli.

Don’t get me wrong: We should all eat our vegetables. The DeSantis approach is irresponsible, a formula for crumbling infrastructure, climate chaos, recurring droughts, and $100 billion storms like Ian. It’s also a formula for budget gaps, if Democratic suckers in Washington don’t send billions of dollars to plug them. But we’re a species of short-term thinkers, so now-mine-more politics works well. And if Democrats can’t figure out a way to punish Republicans for insurance crises, water crises, and other consequences of their neglect of the future— or come up with some short-term goodies of their own— the MAGA magnet could be entrenched for the long term.

Change is certainly imaginable. Fernand Amandi, a Democratic strategist in Miami who helped Obama do so well with Latinos in the state in 2012, says that after that election, Republicans realized their path back to the White House depended on making sure that didn’t happen again. “They got serious, and they’ve been on the ground nonstop for the last 10 years,” Amandi told me. “Democrats went to celebrate the inauguration and never came back.” He said his party needs its own 10-year plan— “and it needs to start tomorrow.”

But that does not seem likely. Biden showed that Democrats can win the White House without Florida, and his team seems to be planning to try that again. For the foreseeable future, the ultimate swing state will be just another red state.

Are Democrats' nominating bad candidates? Yes, that's a big part of it for sure. Crist is a Republican calling himself a Blue Dog Democrat and Demings is a self-obsessed political hack with nothing to offer anyone beyond her own careerism. Candidate quality, as Mitch McConnell pointed out-- albeit in regard to Blake Masters, J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, Don Bolduc, Kelly Tshibaka and, of course, Herschel Walker-- counts... even for Democrats. Demings and Crist had virtually the same number of votes in every county-- no substantial variation anywhere regardless of his immense amount of spending compared to his. What does that say? Lousy Democratic candidates are incapable of persuading any voters of anything and they all get the same voters who just identify as Democrats. In Florida, that is no longer enough to win.