In 2018, the Dems had big dreams of keeping their U.S. Senate seat in Florida and capturing the governor’s mansion.
They lost both.
Now, they’re on the outside looking in – and while just months ago they were hoping to recapture both in next year’s midterm election, the situation is now looking bleaker than ever as voters flee the party and cash reserves sink.
“It feels a little bit like we’re kind of set up to fail,” an unnamed Florida Democratic official told The Hill. “It’s not any one person’s fault. A lot of these problems have existed for years. But for a party that has been decimated in the last few elections and especially the last one, I’m not seeing a sense of urgency yet.”
Politico notes that registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 700,000 voters in 2008.
Today, that advantage has been wiped out entirely, with the GOP just behind Democrats in registrations… and still gaining.
“Without a full-frontal, professional and accountable partisan effort to turn it around, sometime before the end of this year, there will be more Republicans registered in Florida than Democrats,” Florida Democratic operative Steve Schale wrote on his blog last week. “That has NEVER happened before. And, given their voters have higher turnout scores — this isn’t a great place to start.”
Some of those voters are undoubtedly “ancestral” Democrats, especially in the panhandle, who were registered with the party ages ago, but have long voted Republican, now finally making it official.
But much of it represents a statewide trend as Florida makes the switch from the ultimate swing state to deep red territory.
“We just live in a red state here,” Alex Sink, a former Democratic state official who once lost a bid for governor, told the New York Times in 2019. “I think it’s just tilted toward the Republicans now, and I hate to say that.”
The state has only tilted even more to the right since he made those comments.
While President Barack Obama won the state twice by slim margins in 2008 and 2012, President Donald Trump won it both times, narrowly in 2016 and in a near-landslide in 2020.
Today, the state’s population is rapidly growing with residents drawn by a low cost of living and no state income tax.
Many want to keep it that way… by voting Republican.
And Republicans in the state say they’ll keep recruiting those new arrivals.
“In a state like Florida, when you consider that you get 1,000 new residents a day, you really can’t stop,” Helen Aguirre Ferré, Republican Party of Florida’s executive director, told the Tampa Bay Times. “You have to keep going and you have to keep engaging.”
Another party leader was even more blunt with a prediction for where the state is going.
“We are going to flip Florida and we’re going to make Florida red permanently,” state GOP Chair Sen. Joe Gruters boasted to the newspaper.
Republicans not only have the momentum with voters.
They also have it with something even more important: Money.
The Hill reports that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is sitting on a $53 million war chest heading into his reelection effort next year… more than 20 times that of any of his Democratic rivals, including Rep. Charlie Crist (himself a former governor, when he was a Republican) and state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried.
That situation is even more bleak on a party level: The website states that the Florida Democratic Party has only about $406,000 in its federal account, versus $6.3 million in cash for the state’s GOP organization.
And they’re facing something else, and that’s the political headwinds of a national shift to the left within the party that won’t fly in Florida.
“This is not a progressive state,” former Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine, a Democrat, told The New York Times in that 2019 report. “And that, in my opinion, is representative of the state of our country today. Florida is America.”
That seems be even truer today than it was in 2019.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert.