Tuesday’s special election for a seat in the Florida legislature has generated way more coverage than anyone could have predicted. That’s because first-time Democratic candidate Emily Gregory defeated her Republican opponent in a solidly Republican Palm Beach district that Donald Trump had carried by ten percentage points and that the previous Republican legislator had won by 19 percentage points. That’s because the district includes Mar-a-Lago. And that’s because Trump voted by mail in the election, though he’s made the abolition of voting by mail one of his highest priorities during his second term.
All this has required Republicans to improvise some explanations. As to Trump’s own violation of his no-mail-ballots diktat, the emerging Republican response is to change the subject (though not to the state of the economy). As to Gregory’s upset victory, which is the 30th Democratic success at flipping a Republican seat since Trump reoccupied the White House, the now-standard Republican response is that these are preponderantly low-turnout elections, thus conferring an advantage to disgruntled Democrats.
Florida Republicans enlisted their well-rehearsed condemnation of low-turnout elections in a cause dear to their hearts and electoral prospects this week, when the legislature sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis a bill that would require the state’s public-sector unions not just to win a recertification vote of all the workers they represent in bargaining (whether those workers are members or not), but to do so in elections where turnout exceeds 50 percent of all those workers. DeSantis is universally expected to sign the bill.
Florida law already decertifies any union that doesn’t receive dues from at least 60 percent of the workers it represents. The Republicans’ goal for both the existing law and the pending new one is to kill those unions, which are the linchpin of virtually every Democratic campaign in the state. That their goal is explicitly partisan is made irrefutably clear by their exempting police and firefighter unions from any of these requirements, since police and firefighter unions in Florida support Republican candidates and causes, while the unions of teachers, librarians, doctors, nurses, and other public employees tend, like their members, to support Democrats.
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But cops and firefighters aren’t the only Floridians whom Republican legislators have exempted from having to clear their voter participation hurdle. There’s themselves.
Indeed, if Florida legislators had to clear the same 50 percent turnout threshold to win election, the number of legislators might dwindle to single digits. Florida doesn’t conform to anyone’s definition of a high- or even medium-turnout state. In the November 2022 midterm elections, only 44 percent of adult Floridians cast ballots, despite the fact that Republican Gov. DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott were both on that ballot. The percentage of Floridians who bothered to vote for such down-ticket offices as the legislators’ was surely lower than the 40-some-odd who voted for governor and senator.
Elected officials of all stripes often calculate voter turnout as a share of registered voters, whereas the percentage I cite above is for all Floridians, registered or not, who are 18 or older. But the legislature’s new 50 percent standard for public-employee union certification voting is for all workers covered by union contracts, whether they’re members of the union that represents them or not, whether they pay dues to that union or not—in effect, the workplace equivalent of the total population denominator that produced the 44 percent turnout figure in Florida’s last midterm election.
If Florida’s Republican legislators had imposed their new standard on themselves—or even on the police and firefighter unions whose support they count on—they might have a somewhat more defensible position. Since they didn’t, since their legislation was as partisan as partisan can be, they couldn’t really object if a Democratic Florida legislature—allowing our imaginations to conjure one up, however improbably—instituted that 50 percent turnout requirement for legislative elections. And made it applicable solely to Republicans.
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