How Republicans conquered Florida

This is the state of Florida. Hang on, I'm just going to zoom out. Okay. This is a chart of how every US state voted for president in the year 2000. Democrat states here, Republican states here, and then some really close states, and then, Florida. Maybe you know this story. One of the closest elections in American history... Show more

Florida, too close to call... In Florida, Bush clinging to a one-thirtieth of 1% lead... This is a wild, wooly and weird situation. George W. Bush won Florida that year by 537 votes and left Florida with a reputation as not just the quintessential swing state, but also a “bellwether” state that would predict how the election as a whole would go. And over the next few elections, it did, voting for Republicans, then Democrats, then Republicans... but then Republicans again, even though a Democrat won the election that year. And in the 2022 elections, which were sort of disappointing for Republicans overall, Florida would reelect its Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, in a landslide. Biggest win for a Republican governor in the state here in modern history. Show more

Republicans would also win two-thirds supermajorities in both houses of the state's legislature. And Florida Republicans have been busy. Banning transgender girls from female sports... So-called “don't say gay” law... “Stop woke act” bans race-related concepts... Show more

Bill that would ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy... What used to be a swing state is now deeply conservative... It's gotten even redder since the last election... Is Florida now a solid red state? Florida. I love this state. Today, the idea of Florida as a swing state feels like a distant memory. So what changed? So in this video, we're going to look at three explanations for why Florida turned red. But first, we should look at what “turned red” really means in this case. Because even though Florida has swung in presidential elections, for the past 20 years, every governor it's elected has been a Republican. Same with every attorney general it's elected. And this chart, which shows how Florida has voted in the past six presidential elections, seems to show a lot of variation: Republicans win some years, Democrats win others. But, and stay with me, if you add how the whole country voted onto this chart, and compare that with Florida, you see that in every election, Florida voted more Republican than the country in general. And if you just chart the gap between Florida and the US, that looks like this. And what we're interested in is this. This big jump, where Florida goes from voting about three or four percentage points more Republican than the country, to eight percentage points more Republican. The vicinity of about 2020. Anyone remember anything about that year? Between the beginning of the pandemic and the 2022 midterm Show more

elections, about 4 million registered voters in the US moved to a new state. About one out of every seven of those voters ended up in Florida. That's a lot. And if we look at what political party those new Florida voters are now registered to, we see a lot more Republicans than Democrats. And you can really see that if we compare it to the other states that also got a lot of new residents during the pandemic. So Georgia, California, North Carolina, Texas... There is an outlier here. That is a lot of Republicans moving to Florida during the pandemic. So that's our first explanation. And it's definitely one that conservatives have highlighted. A lot of people leave these other states and come to Florida because of the policies of the state legislature... Lockdowns have driven some people to Florida who just had enough... Show more

Florida’s policies were not nearly as restrictive as they were in New York and California, people remember that. But this story actually only gets us part of the way there. Because this margin is about 100,000 people. That's a lot. But in 2022, about 8 million people voted in Florida. Those new voters, not enough to really swing an election. So we need to keep looking. This is Miami-Dade County: the biggest county in Florida, and one of the most left-leaning. In 2016, it voted for Hillary Clinton by about 30 percentage points. In 2018, the Democratic candidate for governor won it by about 20 points. Then, in 2020, Joe Biden only won the county by about seven points. And in 2022, the Republican candidate for governor won in Miami-Dade County. This is a pretty big shift. But if we look at who lives in Miami-Dade, there's a clue. Nationally, Latino voters have mostly voted for Democrats in recent elections. And they also used to in Florida, which is about a quarter Latino, but not anymore. In 2022, the state's Latino voters went firmly for Republicans. Latinos in Florida are voting more Republican than before, and voting more Republican than Latinos elsewhere in the US. These are the seven states with the largest Latino populations in the US. Together they make up two thirds of the country's Latino population. And here is how those populations break down in terms of what the US Census calls “specific origin.” You can see two trends here. In the Southwest and Midwest. Latino populations are mostly Mexican. In the Northeast, they’re more Puerto Rican and Dominican. But Florida is a whole different story, with not just a large Cuban population, but sizable and growing populations from Venezuela and Colombia. And Republicans have gone after those communities hard, with messaging like this ad from 2020: [In Spanish] “As a Colombian immigrant, Florida represents the place where we enter this country to achieve the American Dream.” Or this ad from 2020, “Progresista” which linked Joe Biden to the socialist leaders of the countries many Floridians have come from. Show more

“I'm going to go down as one of the most progressive presidents in American history.” And you can see what might be the success of that approach if you zoom into Miami-Dade, to, for example, the city of Hialeah, which is about 75% Cuban. They have voted for Democrats at a lower and lower rate since 2016. Or the city of Doral, which is majority Venezuelan and Colombian. Same thing. For whom I vote? Republican, of course. Coming from Cuba, we all know what communism and socialism looks like. Donald Trump, the values he stands for, for me, it's the same values I share. Kamala, she’s horrible, she is socialist. Now, there's also been speculation that disinformation among Spanish-speaking Floridians played a role in 2020 and 2022, but that is kind of hard to quantify. And anyway, this chart kind of offers a simpler explanation. It shows us Republican spending on Spanish-language advertising in the 2022 governor's race, compared to how much Democrats spent. You might interpret this gap as, one side was going much harder than the other side. You wouldn't be wrong. Here is a kind of similar chart. This one shows all the money spent by the state parties in Florida since 2021. At the peak of the last election, Florida Republicans Show more

spent more than $60 million in a single quarter. Democrats spent a little less than 8 million. And get used to seeing big red bars, because it's hard to overstate how strong Florida's state Republican Party is. It's the best-funded state party in the country, and it's not even really close. In 2022, the Republican Party of Florida raised over $140 million. Florida Democrats raised 27 million. Especially compared to Florida Republicans, Florida Democrats are in bad shape. Florida has always had more registered Democrats than registered Republicans, but that ended in 2021. And not only that, there's actually a third group that's not far behind: registered voters with no party affiliation. If we just look at the new voter registrations since 2020, that group actually outnumbers registrations for both parties. Now let's separate it out by age. Look at how many younger people in Florida are registering as no party. Those are voters that the Florida Democratic Party is just missing. When the 2022 election results came in, iit wasn't just Governor DeSantis who won in a landslide. Senator Marco Rubio and the Republican candidate for attorney general ran up similar margins. It's just a bloodbath. Boom, boom, boom... One of the worst midterm elections for Democrats in decades... Really cannot be overstated how poorly Democrats performed... Look at how many people are here to see Ron DeSantis. Show more

Look at this.... I love him. We love him. We need in Florida. It’s great to be here, gathered in the red county of Miami-Dade. [Cheers] These are not the only reasons Florida has become a red state. There's the undeniable impact of Donald Trump, who currently himself lives in Florida and is also extremely motivating to a subset of voters that are very well represented there. Also, though, Republicans have just kind of run better campaigns, with more popular candidates. One thing that means is that Florida doesn't actually need to be a totally lost cause for Democrats. This chart shows how much the National Democratic Party, along with its Senate and House election committees, spent on candidates in Florida over the past few elections. In 2022, that spending on Florida dropped almost to zero. You can see the moment when national Democrats chose to kind of give up on Florida, and start spending that money elsewhere, in places where they had a better chance of winning. So, we don't know when Florida will swing back again. Or if it ever will. But if you wanted to imagine what that would look like, we do know where to start. Hi. Thank you for watching. I'm Adam, I made this video along with Melissa and Steph and Matt. And we made this video because we wanted to figure out a satisfying answer to the question of, how did Florida become a red state? We didn't really see one out there yet. And it took a fair amount of research. We had to call people, track down raw data, interview more people to help make sense of that data. We had to, you know, do journalism to it. We had to report it out. I don’t know if I’d call it groundbreaking work, Show more

but any kind of original reporting, compared to your standard rabbit hole of YouTube videos, Wikipedia articles, it just takes more time. It takes more resources. This is why a lot of what you can watch and read for free on the Internet is often either a repackaging of already-available information, or it is opinion. And it's also why a lot of the original reporting on the Internet increasingly is just blocked behind a paywall. This video is actually part of a larger project at Vox that was funded by Vox contributors: people who want to keep Vox's journalism free and help us do better and more ambitious work. The project is all about Florida. It's really good. We'll put a link to it in the description. If you would like to support us, you can go to vox.com/give-now. Any amount you give will help us keep doing journalism that you can watch for free. I cover the US, next year there is yet another election in the US, and we want to cover it in a way that feels relevant and fresh, but that also clarifies the stakes of it on actual people's lives, and we want it to be as accessible as possible. We have a goal of 85,000 total contributions by the end of this year, and to stay on pace for that requires 2500 new contributions this month. You can help get to that goal at vox.com/give-now. Thank you for staying with me for all that, and thank you again for watching. Show more

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