How a swing state became a MAGA stronghold

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SARASOTA, Florida — Roberto Reyna was born in Panama but grew up in the Miami area and always hoped to move back to South Florida to be closer to family.

He was living in Boston when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and made him anxious about his finance career.

Reyna, 54, was “in between opportunities” with work at the time and Massachusetts’ COVID restrictions were much tougher than Florida's, which seemed to offer more jobs in his field.

Meanwhile, Reyna’s wife had offers to work in Florida as a nurse. The pull of family, jobs and COVID politics led the Reynas to make the move in November 2020.

“They really took the lockdown super seriously (in Massachusetts) and they shut everything down,” said Reyna, who now lives in the Miami area. “I didn’t see that kind of closure in Florida. From a professional standpoint, that was appealing.”

Around the same time, Florida began to shift further to the right politically.

Voters such as Reyna help explain why.

Once America’s preeminent battleground state, the presidential election has barely registered in Florida this year.

Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris have campaigned little in the state, and presidential advertising spending here is a fraction of what it was in years past.

While polls show Harris is within striking distance, it likely would take a significant investment of time and money to make the state competitive, and Trump is favored to carry Florida after narrowly eking out a one percentage point victory in 2016.

Many factors have contributed to the dethroning of Florida as the nation’s largest swing state, experts say.

Among them: More Republicans moving to the state than Democrats, a huge GOP voter registration advantage, national political realignment shifting more non-college educated voters toward Republican candidates, a growing Hispanic population that is trending more conservative, a weak Florida Democratic Party and major GOP figures who have put their imprint on the state.

“There are patterns that have been more favorable towards the Republicans in Florida,” said Florida Atlantic University Political Science Professor Kevin Wagner.

Once more politically purple than anyplace in America, the state has come to exemplify the Republican Party’s MAGA makeover.

It is home to Trump, the MAGA leader, and Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has done more than any governor to carry the GOP’s new culture war agenda, starting with the battles over COVID policies and continuing through education fights and all manner of crusades against “woke.”

Florida now seems almost unrecognizable from the state that delivered George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 by just 537 votes.

DeSantis won re-election by 19 percentage points in 2022, beating his Democratic opponent by 1.5 million votes. Trump also tripled his margin of victory in Florida in 2020.

The latest USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll in the state showed him ahead of Harris by only by 5 percentage points, within the poll's margin of error, meaning the gap could be wider or could be even smaller.

Still, the story of Florida's rightward shift is one of a changing GOP that appeals to the type of voters, either newcomers or long-timers, who typically support Trump.

It’s also a story of a state Democratic Party that completely collapsed, and is struggling to find a way forward in the epicenter of MAGA America.

“Personally, I think you have to say we’re a leaning red state ‒ at least that," said former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink. "The question mark is: Are we a red state?”

Drifting right While the big GOP victories in Florida over the last two election cycles have attracted attention, the state has been trending red for decades.

A Democrat hasn’t held the governor’s mansion since 1998 – 26 years ago.

Both chambers of the Florida Legislature have long been controlled by Republicans.

Democrats managed to pull off some big wins over the last 20 years that made the state seem more competitive, though. And most statewide races have been extremely close in recent decades.

Barack Obama carried Florida in both 2008 and 2012.

Democrat Bill Nelson represented Florida in the U.S. Senate from 2001 to 2019, and Democrats also held lesser statewide offices.

Sink won a statewide campaign for chief financial officer in 2006 and then ran for governor in 2010, losing by just a single percentage point.

It was the beginning of an incredible run of tight races in Florida, with every contest for governor and president decided by a percentage point or less between 2010 and 2018, when DeSantis was elected by the closest margin of any governor in Florida's history.

During that period, Florida Democrats had a sizeable voter registration advantage over Republicans and they still came up short in most races.

The situation is now reversed, and the GOP has one million more registered voters in Florida than Democrats out of 13.5 million total voters. It’s an “incredibly” daunting figure, Sink said.

“I mean, you can only overcome so much,” she added.

Sink believes Democrats made strategic blunders in not prioritizing voter registration, including during the COVID-19 pandemic when the party stopped going door-to-door and the GOP did not.

“It was a huge mistake,” she said.

She also sees other factors at play in Florida’s rightward shift, though. It coincided with the pandemic, and DeSantis’ push to keep schools and businesses open after brief shutdowns early on.

DeSantis touted the “Free State of Florida.” His management of the state during the pandemic has been mythologized by conservatives, who often claim that his policies lured more right-leaning voters to the state in search of freedom.

“From 2020 to 2022 if … you were COVID scared you didn’t move to the state of Florida, we were the Wild West,” said Ryan Tyson, a leading GOP pollster and political consultant who has worked with DeSantis.

There is some data to support this.

More Republicans moving to Florida Data from the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research shows Florida added 1.1 million people between 2020 and 2023 as the state, long a magnet for population growth, attracted many Baby Boomer retirees and the workers needed to service them.

The state also drew a new population of migrants — people who could work remotely and live anywhere thanks to pandemic-induced changes to business operations.

This surge of new residents has been weighted more toward the GOP.

Between Jan. 1, 2020 and Aug. 1 of this year, 666,525 people who were registered to vote in another state moved to Florida and registered to vote, according to data provided by L2, a company that analyzes voter and consumer data. Of those movers, 331,646 are Republicans, compared to 156,922 Democrats and 177,957 nonpartisan voters.

“Florida has gotten more Republican – anyone who says otherwise isn’t being honest,” Steve Schale, a Florida-based political operative who ran Obama’s campaign in the state in 2008, wrote on his blog recently.

Some of these voters were at least partially drawn by DeSantis’ policies.

“It wasn’t the determining factor, but it made the decision easier,” Reyna said of DeSantis’ approach to COVID, which also is one reason he cast his ballot for the governor in 2022.

Sink recalled sitting near two couples at a restaurant and overhearing two men talking to each other.

“The guy said to the other guy: ‘We moved here from Ohio because we like Ron DeSantis,’” Sink said.

How many voters were drawn by DeSantis’ policies isn’t clear, though. And having 174,724 more Republicans than Democrats moving to the state since 2020 doesn’t explain how DeSantis won by 1.5 million votes.

“There are undoubtedly people who moved here because they appreciate the governor’s policies related to COVID, that is undeniably true,” Wagner said. “But Florida’s a very big state with millions of voters and one does not win by 19 points based on people who moved to the state.”

DeSantis won over groups of voters who historically have supported Democrats, including women and Hispanics. That helped him flip two counties – Miami-Dade and Palm Beach – that have long been Democratic strongholds.

Miami-Dade is the nation’s largest Hispanic majority county.

Political realignment comes to Florida Florida’s Hispanic vote is pivotal.

“We are increasingly becoming a Hispanic state,” said BEBR Director Christopher McCarty.

Hispanics made up 26.8% of Florida’s population in 2020 but are projected to be 28.2% of residents next year, according to BEBR, an increase of 772,000 people.

Many Florida Hispanics trace their roots back to South America and Central America instead of Mexico, and they often are more conservative than the nation’s Hispanic population as a whole. In recent years there has been a large influx of Venezuelans fleeing that country’s oppressive socialist dictator.

Many of these voters are staunchly anti-socialist and view the Democratic Party as more sympathetic to socialist views, McCarty said.

Reyna said his family was “blacklisted” from visiting Panama at one point by the regime of military dictator Manuel Noriega. The high school he attended was predominantly Cuban Americans and most of the students were the children of people who fled repressive socialist leader Fidel Castro’s regime, he said.

“You can’t swing a dead cat in South Florida and not hit somebody who has a story similar to this,” said Reyna, a Republican who plans to vote for Trump this year.

Some see the Florida GOP’s increasing success with Hispanics and other groups as part of a larger, nationwide political realignment, though.

“I’d argue at least some, if not most of that is due to national trends that play themselves out here," Schale wrote of Florida becoming more red. "Republicans have made gains with Hispanics – they have made gains with Black Men – and they have made gains with non-college white voters ‒ and Florida is home to large, and growing populations of all the above.”

Underlying this realignment is the GOP’s increasing success with working-class voters of all races under Trump, who has combined a populist economic message with aggressive anti-immigrant rhetoric, a mix of hot-button cultural issues and some unorthodox views for a Republican, such as supporting recreational marijuana legalization in Florida.

Republicans have leaned on these issues to attract more voters without a college degree, while Democrats are winning college-educated voters. Florida's median household income in 2022 was $69,303, according to Census data, which is below five of the seven states considered key battlegrounds this cycle.

Florida’s economy still largely is based on lower-wage service sector jobs that often do not require a degree. Some higher-wage remote workers have been relocating to Florida since the pandemic, but it hasn’t been enough to significantly change the state’s workforce, McCarty said.

“We’ve got a long way to go to really make a huge dent in converting our business model from what it’s been,” he said.

Are demographics destiny? As Florida’s demographic and economic profiles increasingly seem to favor the GOP, it could be difficult for Democrats to compete.

The 2024 election could be especially pivotal.

Another big Republican victory could discourage national Democrats from investing in the state going forward, Sink said, making it extremely difficult for the state party to mount the intensive voter registration, persuasion and turnout operation needed to be competitive.

“This particular election is going to tell us a lot about who we are as Floridians,” she said. “A lot. This is the year we’ll know."

Leading Florida Democrats have been sounding a hopeful message, dismissing past election results as the product of an unusual confluence of circumstances.

They note that Democrats simply didn’t turn out to vote in large enough numbers in 2022, when DeSantis won in a landslide.

GOP turnout that year was 67%, while Democratic turnout was just 52%. That means Republicans made up 46% of those casting ballots in the election, according to an analysis by Florida State University's LeRoy Collins Institute, despite comprising just 36% of the electorate.

“This was a failure by Democrats to motivate our base, the party completely collapsed,” said Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried.

Now Fried is tasked with rebuilding the party. She has the distinction of being the last Democrat to hold statewide elected office in Florida, having won the race for agriculture commissioner in 2018.

Fried argues DeSantis went too far right and has prompted a backlash, pointing to Democratic victories in Duval and Miami-Dade mayoral races, DeSantis-backed school board candidates losing this year and a successful signature drive to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot this year that would overturn the governor’s six-week abortion ban.

“He took the state in such an extreme direction in 2023 and now you’re seeing that pendulum swing back,” Fried said.

GOP leaders are confident the state will stay red.

“Nobody is fired up for their policies,” Florida GOP Chair Evan Power said of Democrats.

Amidst the rhetoric coming from both sides, the lack of spending by the Trump and Harris campaigns in Florida indicates neither believes the state is competitive.

According to data from ad-tracking firm AdImpact that was analyzed by NBC News, the presidential campaigns spent just $1 million on ads in Florida in the first three weeks of September compared to $47 million during the same period in 2020.

More money is flowing into the U.S. Senate contest between Republican Sen. Rick Scott and Democratic challenger Debbie Mucarsel-Powell as Democrats search for a path to retain control of the Senate, but it hasn’t received the attention that past Senate races have in Florida.

Wagner said Democrats are caught in an “unwinnable situation” in Florida. The state is so large, in order to compete they would need to spend massive amounts of money, taking away resources from other key states.

Florida Democrats are dependent on the national party to help fund big statewide races. Tyson, the GOP pollster, said the DeSantis campaign knew that if the governor ran up the score in 2022 it would dissuade Democrats from playing in Florida.

That appears to be what’s happening.

“It becomes difficult for them to catch their breath for a while,” Tyson said.

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