The Liberal Patriot: What's the Matter With Florida?
How shifting demographics and partisan composition have kept the Sunshine State out of reach for Democrats.
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/whats-the-matter-with-florida
Even as most other traditional battleground states gave Democrats plenty to cheer about in the 2022 midterm elections, Florida—long considered a swing state—broke heavily for Republicans. GOP success in the state wasn’t confined to just one or two races either: the party made gains up and down the ballot. Incumbent Governor (and recently announced 2024 presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis won re-election in a landslide as his party earned supermajorities in the state legislature, while Senator Marco Rubio also won re-election by a significant margin and Republicans picked up four U.S. House seats thanks in part to aggressive gerrymandering. And as if that weren’t enough, Democrats were locked out of all statewide offices for the first time since the Reconstruction era. These results didn’t necessarily represent a significant departure from the state’s recent history, however.
Republicans have controlled the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the state legislature since 1999. Moreover, since 2000, they have won 32 of the 39 contests for statewide office, including 15 by double digits. For their part, Democrats have won just one election for statewide office since 2012—the 2018 race for agriculture commissioner. Even so, Democrats’ growing weakness in Florida has been somewhat hard to process. The state was a presidential bellwether for much of the past century, and candidates for the nation’s top office have averaged a winning margin here of just one point since 2000. In the three midterm elections that took place in the 2010s, all of which clearly broke for one party or the other at the national level, top-of-the-ticket contests in Florida continued to be very close. This included near wins for Democrats in both the U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races in 2018, where they fell short in each by less than half a point. Though frustrating, these results were nonetheless a sign to many that the Democratic Party still had life and that Florida should not be written off moving forward.
While Democrats have found indisputable success at the national level in the last three cycles and been competitive in Florida over the past decade, the state has remained something of a white whale for them, often zigging toward Republicans while much of the rest of the country zagged toward Democrats. The narrow 2018 Democratic losses in Florida came as most other states experienced a blue wave. Many presidential battlegrounds flipped from Joe Biden to Donald Trump in 2020—or at least moved leftward from 2016—while Florida voted for Trump by a wider margin than the first time. Democrats stopped a red wave in key 2022 midterm swing states while at the same time Republicans routed them in the Sunshine State.
The results of last year’s midterms have already put a damper on many Democrats’ hopes of competing in Florida in 2024. There’s a bigger-picture consideration as well: many of the trends evident in the state should have theoretically made Democrats more competitive, not less. Florida’s population has boomed since the turn of the century, and it is among the top 10 most diverse states in the country. These factors have transformed states like Colorado and Virginia from red to blue during that time. Others like Arizona and Georgia look to be following suit as well. But not Florida. So, what gives? Why has this state not only continued to remain just out of reach for Democrats but begun trending even more red recently?
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getting FL's Hispanic nonvoters to vote is currently turning out more for the white man's, culturally protective, anti-immigration nativist party, Next to anti-immigration anxieties, the foundational Democratic/democratic! principle of pluralism that all our individual citizens and groups are equal and equally legitimate is dust under the refrigerator.
We're going to need the Republicans to persuade them that was a mistake.
incredibly complex realities that change daily. Certainly, fully investing in victory in every state produces plusses where they wouldn't have been and not finding a way to somehow do it has costs. 50-state strategies have been tried but always fell apart as the parties ran out of money and other critical resources near the end. Obama wanted to, started, in 2008, but... At least he won, and by a large margin.
Btw, every state (and territory) has a state Democratic Party and none are abandoned. But if we were not active, people in those states would not be "disenfranchised" by that. I often strongly disagree with choices others make, but I respect the reality that they do make them as they choose. I also absolutely believe that the duties and responsibilities of citizenship lie with individual citizens, not with political activists with a duty to influence them.
Reminds me. I believe I've literally never used the word "masses" or "sheep" to refer to people, not even in the late '60s when my circles included a bunch who did (while awaiting "the revolution" of course).
Also reminds me, though, that in 2000 the official final count gave FL to Bush by less than 600 votes. 
...campaigning in those abandoned states. Certainly there needs to be an understanding that we won't probably make much headway in a place like OK (where the last electoral map I saw was 100% red) and we need to conserve our resources, but every state deserves some amount of campaign organizing simply because even in OK there are Democratic voters to whom we need to listen. That's what I mean about disenfranchisement. As as we all know, even in "solid red" states, the cities are often full of Democrats.
The other thing that I neglected to mention (because I forgot about it myself until recently) is that in the 2016 election, something like 40% of the electorate didn't even vote. If we can pick up a significant fraction of those voters--and that usually means campaigning in "hostile territory"--we win. It seems like the really big mistake that a lot of Democrats keep making is trying to appeal to the 30% of the electorate who will follow Trump over a cliff. The energy and resources it would take to even get those people to listen for more than a few moments is certainly better spent on nonvoters.
Just to illustrate my point, recall how Trump made a lot of pie-in-the-sky promises to the workers in heavy industry. But to actually deliver on that would mean formulating what is known as "industrial policy"; something which as soon as it is mentioned brings immediate denunciation from the far-right about how we are devolving into a Bolshevik society. So Trump just makes a bunch of empty promises, and as soon as the speech is over, all the jobs get shipped to China anyway. (Well, I think a token hundred or so jobs got saved at the Carrier plant...).
But the ridiculous Trump cult is powerful enough that none of this matters to them. It really is all about "owning the libs" and not much more. So it will be a much better use of resources to pick up a good number of those 40% alienated nonvoters than to try to appeal to the chuds.
wired to care that much. But at least they're not committed to caring about unreal things for unreal reasons.
We just left Fox on in the background for a few hours. O. M. G. (It's been a while.)
