President-elect Donald Trump dominated in Florida on Election Day.
His 13% victory over Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a big jump compared to 2020 when he had about a 3% lead over President Joe Biden. That change came in part because Trump received more votes this cycle, but another part of the equation is that Democrats hemorrhaged support in places that were previously their strongholds.
Democrats won 11 Florida Counties in 2020. This time around, they only won six. In most of the ones they lost, it wasn’t because Trump got more votes than in 2020, but that Harris underperformed Biden by significant margins.
Even in counties she won, like Broward and Palm Beach, Harris’ total was lower than Bidens--by 100,000 and 50,000 votes respectively.
Barry University Political Science Professor Sean Foreman said he thinks divisions in the Democratic party and failure to paint a clear economic vision likely caused previous Democratic supporters to stay home.
“They didn't put the resources here to mobilize people and get them out to vote. So basically, they gave up on Florida. And so the results speak for themselves,” he said.
Miami-Dade Democratic State Senator Shervin Jones thinks his party created a stronger vision for the future than Republicans, but he said that message failed to penetrate into everyday conversations.
“The question is, was that translating to people's kitchen tables and the conversations that they were having with their families about their wallet and their finances, and obviously it from the results we see, the answer probably is no,” he said.
In recent years, Florida has seen hundreds of thousands of people moving in and out. That has created one of the most fluid populations in the country and has been linked to spiking Republican voter registration in the state. University of South Florida Professor Emerita Susan MacManus said Republicans have shifted their outreach efforts to meet the changing population, while she thinks Democrats have fallen behind.
“In a state this is highly mobile, as Florida, people moving in and out all the time, and moving even within one county or one street to another, that the people who are in charge of get out the vote efforts, be cognizant and attentive to the changing demographics of the population that they're trying to reach. It was pretty evident that Florida Democrats did not do a lot of deep dive into the changing demographics of Florida in various places, some better than others, and they suffered the turnout consequences,”
After two blowout elections for Republicans in Florida, experts say it is looking more and more like Florida is a red state, with state Democrats struggling to swim against the red wave.