National headlines have been focused on how several Southern states, like Georgia and Texas, went Democratic during the midterms. But there was a large exception: right here in Florida.
While the races were close, Florida Republicans won all the top-of-ticket state races, as well as retained control of both the state House and Senate.
“Statewide was always going to be a challenge for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is, you know, our candidates throughout spent five or six to one,” said Steve Schale, a longtime Florida Democratic consultant.
Schale says one of the biggest factors why Democrats didn’t win in Florida was the spending discrepancy. While states like Texas and Georgia saw large amounts of national and state Democratic Party money for the last several years, Florida has seen far less.
“I firmly believe had David Jolly had the same kind of money that the governor-elect of Texas had in her race, he would have won,” Schale said. “I'm not going to blame that on Washington or the DGA or any of these groups. I just think, like institutionally in Florida, we have to develop a bigger donor base for candidates to be able to compete.”
Outside of money, though, there are fundamental population shifts happening in the South that made this possible.
Texas has one of the youngest median ages in the country, with San Antonio ranking number one in net gains for Gen-Z residents. Half of people moving to Georgia are under 45, and 100% of its population growth was driven by non-white residents.
Those groups went for Democrats hard. In Georgia, voters aged 18–29 supported the Democratic Senate nominee by a staggering 56-point margin.
Florida is a different story.
While the state’s population has grown, that growth has been fueled mostly by older residents, who disproportionately vote Republican. In several recent years, the state actually saw a net loss of Gen-Z residents, with cost-of-living concerns and job opportunities in other states contributing to the trend, according to research by the Florida Chamber of Commerce.
Areas in the state that saw the largest blue shifts, along with congressional and state legislative pickups were around Tampa Bay and Orlando: two regions that have seen younger population growth.
“I don't love this phrase, but there's the phrase demography is destiny, demographics is destiny,” said Sean Foreman, a political science professor at Barry University.
Foreman says the different demographic trends in those three states are sending them in different political directions.
“I think that's what we saw in Georgia and Texas. Is that the demographic changes over the last 10 years were evident at the ballot box this time. Add to that the enthusiasm amongst minority voters, especially African Americans in Georgia and Latinos in Texas to go out and vote for Democratic candidates. That's why we saw those changes there, where which we didn't see in Florida. We're not we're not seeing the same population shifts here. In fact, we're seeing the population become more conservative by the choices people are making when they vote with their feet,” he said.
The South has been the fastest-growing region in the country in recent years. Schale says that who it’s attracting — non-white voters and college-educated white voters — could transform the math for Democrats in the South over the next several years.
“If you look at all of the southern states, Florida included, you know, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, these are all states where you know there's a fairly low percentage of the white population that you have to win to win the state, assuming you have good, robust turnout among African American voters. You know, for a long time that was sort of a very non-college, blue-collar type of voter that we struggle with increasingly in these Southern states,” he said. “It's not just younger people; it's younger people who look more like cosmopolitan Democrats. They're college educated. They're more, you know, they're more sort of center-left in the way they view the world. And so that that population growth makes that, you know, in a place like Mississippi, where that number is maybe 30% of the white vote, you know, you now have a much different looking white population that you can go talk to.”
For now, Florida remains an exception to the South's shifting political landscape. But as a new generation of voters comes of age, whether the Sunshine State stays red may depend as much on who moves here as who runs for office.
