FLORIDA HOUSE PHOTO
Democrat Tom Keen won a special election to the Florida House despite being outspent 2-1.
This article appears in the April 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
After the 2022 midterms, Florida seemed like a lost cause for the Democrats. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won a second term, flipping multiple counties that President Joe Biden took in 2020. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) beat Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) by more than 15 percentage points. GOP voter turnout was strong at 67 percent compared to the Democrats’ 52 percent.
But the red wave that washed over Florida in 2022 brought home some unpleasant facts for the Democratic Party. Florida’s congressional delegation has two longtime GOP senators and a majority of Republican House members. The GOP has controlled both houses of the state legislature for more than two decades, and those majorities now are more than willing to do the bidding of DeSantis—which reinforces the pervading sense of doom. “It’s hard to suggest there are stakes when the Democrats aren’t really competing in Florida,” one anonymous Democratic consultant told ABC News.
At least this is how the GOP spins its dominance of the state’s political scene. It would be convenient for the party to have the voters—who once exercised their swing-state powers, going twice for George W. Bush and twice for Barack Obama—accept this seemingly permanent Republican majority. It diverts attention away from the party’s preoccupation with culture-war politics at the expense of pocketbook issues like the high cost of housing, a governor who has blown millions of dollars on a failed presidential campaign, and the other serious issues gripping the state. Some, like abortion access, mirror the controversies in other Republican strongholds. Others are unique to Florida, which has some of the highest insurance premiums in the country.
The divisive political landscape that the GOP has created makes them vulnerable. Hot-button issues invigorate their loyal voters, but they alienate independents who make up nearly a third of the Florida electorate and whose numbers are growing. To further complicate life for Republican leaders, the Florida GOP is also in disarray after a sex scandal and rape allegations forced the removal of the state party chairman. Combine that episode with dysfunction in the Michigan GOP and elsewhere, and there are growing indications that there are serious problems brewing in battleground states.
Undeniably, the Florida Democratic Party is outmatched by Republicans in a number of ways, from campaign contributions to registered voters. Yet there are signs of life within the FDP. The bigger question, then, is whether personnel changes, strategic spending and messaging, and grassroots campaigning can harness the energy of the current political moment to pull together a stronger showing in November and make future elections competitive.
RECENT DEMOCRATIC VICTORIES SUGGEST THAT THE PARTY is not, as DeSantis put it last year, a “dead, rotten carcass.” In January, Democrat Tom Keen clinched a victory in the state House race for District 35, which includes sections of Orlando, Florida’s fourth most populous city. Both Democrats and Republicans showered dollars on this race, but Republicans outspent the Democrats 2 to 1. In the end, Rep. Keen narrowly took the seat by roughly two percentage points.
In 2023, Donna Deegan, a Democrat and a longtime local television anchor, became the first female mayor of Jacksonville, the state’s largest city. Until this “major upset,” Jacksonville had been the largest city in the country with a Republican mayor. Deegan, a Jacksonville native, was able to pull together a bipartisan coalition to win the highly contested race. Deegan stressed her desire to promote greater transparency in the mayor’s office and to restore a sense of community after last year’s racial unrest in the city. She beat her Republican opponent by four percentage points.
“The Democrats are in a position where they’re gonna need to grind it out, make gains where they can [and] show that they have life,” Matthew Isbell, an elections data consultant for Democrats in Florida, told the Prospect.
The divisive political landscape that the GOP has created in Florida makes them vulnerable.
But perhaps the party’s biggest hurdle is the fact that Republicans are consistently able to raise more money. There are nearly 800,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats in the state. In the 2020 election season, the Florida GOP collected about $43 million in contributions, compared to the Democrats’ roughly $14 million. In 2022, that gap only widened, and though contributions plummeted after the election, Republicans still outpaced Democrats through the end of 2023.
After the 2022 drubbing, former Miami mayor Manny Diaz stepped down as the state Democratic Party chair. He delivered a scathing appraisal of the party’s inner workings in his resignation statement: “We cannot win elections if we continue to rely on voter registration to drive turnout, build field operations only around elections, and expect to get our vote out without engaging voters where they live; listening to them and earning their trust.”
Nikki Fried, the former state agricultural and consumer services commissioner, succeeded Diaz. Fried, who failed to win the 2022 Democratic nomination for governor, seemed to agree that the FDP needed to completely revamp its operations. She pledged to rebuild the FDP “from the ground up.”
In March, Fried started in on the party’s spring cleaning, suspending the chairs of the Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Franklin County Democratic Parties. According to a Politico report, the Miami-Dade chair, Robert Dempster, was canned due to allegations of irregularities at county meetings and in filling committee vacancies; Mindy Koch of Palm Beach reportedly failed to cancel contracts that Democratic Party’s executive committee had not agreed to; and Carol Barfield, chair of the Franklin County party, allegedly misplaced one membership list and a year’s worth of financial audits. “Florida Democrats are serious about creating the infrastructure and party apparatus we need to take back our state, restore our rights and freedoms and re-elect Democrats all the way up the ticket. The country is counting on us,” Fried said in a statement.
Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, praised Fried’s moves, but the jury is still out on whether these changes are enough to convince donors that the party is worth fresh investments.
The furor over abortion could sway some races in the Democrats’ favor. Florida voters will likely consider a proposed state constitutional amendment that would permit abortions up to viability, about 24 weeks. The organizers of the amendment campaign, Floridians Protecting Freedom, collected nearly one million verified signatures, more than the 800,000 needed to put the initiative on the ballot. That process has been held up by a legal challenge from the state GOP that questioned the clarity of the initiative language. In February, Chief Justice Carlos G. Muñiz expressed skepticism about the lawsuit, noting that “people of Florida are not stupid.” The court has yet to rule on the challenge.
JOHN RAOUX/AP PHOTO
Jacksonville was the largest city in the country with a Republican mayor until Donna Deegan’s upset victory in 2022.
Climate change has intensified Florida’s severe storms, leading to catastrophic damage on the coasts, most recently in Southwest Florida after Hurricane Ian. The cycles of building and rebuilding in areas prone to flooding and wind damage have contributed to the flight of major insurance companies, driving up property insurance rates to historic levels. Florida homeowners pay the country’s highest average home insurance premiums. In 2023, the average annual premium was $6,000, 42 percent more than in 2022, according to the Insurance Information Institute. For many, Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the state-created insurer of last resort, is the only option. Citizens currently holds over 1.3 million homeowner policies, and is now the largest homeowner insurer in the state.
But many Florida consumers, especially people who have experienced hurricane damage or losses, have fallen prey to “takeouts.” A Washington Post investigation found that insurance startups have descended on the Florida market, picking up thousands of policies at one time. The practice, a solution that Florida lawmakers devised to reduce the pressure on Citizens, has further contracted an already stressed market and left Floridians paying high prices for subpar insurers.
In February, Florida lawmakers proposed retooling Citizens’ operations so that the company would cover all Floridians, a daunting proposition.
With all of this turmoil, DeSantis’s approval rating has dropped slightly since the beginning of the year. Keen, the state representative, told the Prospect that voters repeatedly voiced—unprompted—their displeasure over restrictive abortion laws and high insurance premiums. Rep. Keen’s campaign ran ads that continuously emphasized his GOP challenger Erika Booth’s support for the GOP’s six-week abortion ban.
“[The] feedback that we received was that the Republican Party here in Florida were not addressing those two key issues. They just flat out weren’t doing it, and I did it,” says Keen. GOP messaging, Keen adds, was lackluster, and focused on the wrong things.
Keen says that he personally knocked on over 3,000 of the 7,000 doors that his team canvassed in the district. This sort of grassroots discipline can be a game changer for a campaign in a state with such a large number of independents. As of 2023, there are 3.5 million independents, 4.3 million Democrats, and five million Republicans in the state.
FDP county parties told the Prospect that messaging discipline will be extremely important in this upcoming election. “We all worked together with the same goal of making sure that Tom won that special election and to send a strong message that we are back and we can win tough races in swing seats,” says Samuel Vilchez Santiago, chair of the Orange County Democrats, which includes sections of District 35. “I really haven’t seen the level of message discipline that was displayed in many other races in the state of Florida.”
As Jim Rosinus, the interim chair of the Democratic Party of Lee County in Southwest Florida, told the Prospect, “We have found that, in this area at least, while certain voters are nervous about voting for a ‘D,’ they like our policies and positions and will vote for those.” Santiago says that the Orange County Democrats are focusing on congressional seats that Biden won in 2020 but that the GOP currently hold.
Democrats are also focusing on increasing voter turnout, registering Democratic voters whose registrations have lapsed, and spreading the word about absentee or mail-in ballot options.
Perhaps sensing the heat, DeSantis and Republican state lawmakers have begun to walk back unpopular policies. After the Alabama Supreme Court decision in February that raised questions about legal liabilities involving in vitro fertilization (IVF), the Florida legislature suspended consideration of a bill that had been dubbed the “fetal personhood bill.” The bill would have defined a fetus as an unborn child and extended civil negligence protection laws to a fetus (which would have allowed parents to receive financial compensation in case of death of the fetus).
DeSantis and the GOP’s grip on power in Florida may have reached its zenith. Anger over developments on issues like abortion and insurance has given the Democrats an opening. But the Florida Democratic Party can’t adopt a scorched-earth approach to seats they have no chance of winning. In 2024, it’s all about the long game—setting the table for future gains. “Democrats have less room for error, that’s for sure. “You have to be smarter with things,” says Isbell, the political consultant. “It will force the Democrats to be strategic about which races they’re going to target.”
