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COVID Migration has Solidified Florida as a Red State

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The National-level red wave that was predicted to occur on Tuesday may not have materialized, but Republican victories in Florida far exceeded even the party’s best expectations. Why was Florida an outlier, particularly in the performance of far-right candidates? The most likely reason seems to be migration patterns that occurred during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Florida voting numbers have always been a bit tricky to parse. For decades, many former "Dixiecrats" or "blue dogs" remained registered Democrats while mostly voting Republican. Since 2000, there have also been periods where many Republicans have seemed to register as independents in some sort of issue-based protest move without actually changing their voting patterns.

However, the sharp uptick in registered Republicans over the past two years has largely mirrored the boom in Americans relocating to the sunshine state, many of whom were very public in terms of their reasons for choosing the state: they liked Florida’s lax COVID restrictions, and they liked the rhetoric of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

From 2020-22, a Republican registration spike saw the party gain a registered voter advantage for the first time in the state’s history. There are now around 330,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats in Florida. As recently as 2008, Democrats held an advantage of 700,000 registered voters. That’s an enormous shift over such a short period of time.

Another important dynamic has been the so-called voter enthusiasm gap, which heavily favored Republicans in 2022. When you consider that not only were there more registered Republicans than Democrats in 2022 but that they also turned out at a 14 percent higher rate last week, it is not surprising that nearly every major race ended much less competitive than predicted.

President Trump won Florida by 3.5 points in 2020. The DeSantis campaign had said that they hoped to beat that number on Tuesday. DeSantis wound up winning in a complete landslide, besting moderate Democrat Charlie Crist by a staggering 19 points. No one really thought that Crist was going to win, but even those most optimistic about DeSantis were not predicting a double-digit win, let alone a whopping 19.4 percent spread while taking liberal strongholds like Palm Beach County.

Congresswoman Val Demmings was supposed to have a much better chance against Republican Marco Rubio in a pivotal Senate race. Demmings was routed by a staggering 17 points, despite having garnered tremendous financial support from both inside and outside of Florida.

Crist’s Congressional district in Pinellas County was gerrymandered to be more friendly to Republicans, but that was only supposed to make it a competitive seat. Instead, far-right Republican Anna Paulina Luna defeated Democrat Eric Lynn by 8 points to flip the seat red. In other words, yes, Florida's Congressional map was heavily gerrymandered earlier this year, and at DeSantis' insistence, but there's little evidence that it would have made much of a difference because of the turnout differential.

Nationally, the story was very different, however. Heading into Tuesday, Republicans seemed poised to easily flip both chambers of Congress on disciplined messaging that targeted voter anxiety on inflation, energy prices, crime, and the border. Meanwhile, Democrats had seemed to bet the ranch on voter disapproval of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and Republican candidates who supported President Trump's efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power following his loss in 2020. Polling on voter concerns seemed to favor the Republican strategy, and Democrats were roundly criticized for failing to deliver better economic messaging.

When results came in, however, Democrats vastly outperformed expectations. We still don't know who will win control of the House as of press time, as so many races are closer than expected and still being counted. What’s more, candidates supported by Donald Trump did not fare particularly well on Tuesday, with far-right high-profile Trump endorsees like Dr. Oz losing, while Congresswoman Lauren Baubert (R-CO), and Herschel Walker (R-GA) headed to a recount and runoff, respectively. We could end up with a split Congress, with Republicans gaining a narrow lead in the House and Democrats maintaining razor-thin control of the Senate, should they win two of the three races yet to be called.

Trump’s biggest charge for 2022, Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who was leading in the polls heading into the election, looks likely to lose, although votes were still being counted as we went to press. Perhaps more importantly, candidates for state attorney general in three states who denied the validity of Trump’s 2020 loss were defeated. Overall, it was a bad night for those who pushed the so-called big lie.

Meanwhile, candidates who had received the ire of the former president, such as DeSantis and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, cruised to victory. In most cases, Trump favored far-right candidates in the primaries who backed him on his bogus election fraud claim. But while he was able to put them over in the primaries, where more extreme voters tend to dominate, it seems to have been at the expense of electability in the general election. This might finally provide establishment Republicans–long wary of publicly breaking with Trump despite fears that he was hurting the party–with a path away from the former president. Right now, DeSantis is looking like their most likely vehicle.

The best indicator in terms of the impact of Roe being overturned is a look at ballot measures, all of which were decided in favor of reproductive freedom, even in deeply conservative states like Kentucky and Montana. Michigan, which also had an abortion measure on the ballot, saw larger than expected turnout in a big night for Democrats. In other words, Republicans may have finally delivered for a very passionate and vocal portion of its base, but they seem to have done so at the expense of a much larger voting bloc.

Outside of Florida, Republicans seem to have blown an enormous opportunity in which exit polling showed that around 7 out of 10 voters were dissatisfied with the course the country is on–never a promising sign for the party in power. Given everything Democrats had going against them and the historic trend of midterms during the first term of a new presidency, Democrats are breathing a huge sigh of relief. It almost seems as if voters said, No, we don’t like the current policies being offered by your party, but we reject the alternative with prejudice.

In Florida, however, it looks like, during the great COVID migration, we gained a vastly disproportionate number of those that did buy into the far-right’s 2022 messaging. That shift, along with the low quality of candidates Democrats were able to offer in the sunshine state and the fact that the party has no depth on their bench whatsoever, will likely alter the political realities of our state for years to come.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of ourweekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County governmentsince 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Clickherefor his bio. His 2016 short story collection, Casting Shadows, was recently reissued and is availablehere.

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