DeSantis win in Florida midterm election undercuts swing-state status

Once considered the nation’s biggest swing state, Florida is looking more and more like a Republican stronghold.

The Sunshine State delivered Republicans some of their strongest wins in the 2022 midterm elections – even as the party fell broadly short of expectations in most other battlegrounds.

The state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, and Sen. Marco Rubio both glided to victory against their respective Democratic opponents. DeSantis, whose star has shot up in the Republican Party, easily won another four-year term even as he is widely expected to be considering a presidential run in 2024.

Democrats underperformed in key demographics, especially younger voters, ceding ground up and down the ballot. They even failed to hold onto Miami-Dade County, the largest in the state and a longtime blue refuge, in the Senate and gubernatorial races.

“It was a mess, honestly,” said Susan MacManus, a veteran Florida political analyst and professor emerita at the University of South Florida, in an interview.

Democrats fell short on multiple fronts in Florida, MacManus said. They faced a drought in national funding, a failure to address a growing registration gap and a major misread on which issues would resonate with key voters.

“One size fits all absolutely never works in Florida,” she said.

Boasting 30 Electoral College votes and 28 House seats, Florida is bound to hold major influence over the national election map in 2024. Its population is the third largest of any U.S. state, and growing – but Democratic voter registration isn’t keeping up.

In fact, it’s going down, according to data from the Florida secretary of state’s office. While total registered voters in the state rose by nearly 200,000 to 14.46 million between September 2021 and October 2022, the number of active registered Democrats fell by more than 164,000 to 4,966,873, the data shows. The number of active registered Republican voters, meanwhile, rose to 5,259,406 in the same period — a gain of more than 150,000.

That shift comes as older Americans, who vote more heavily Republican, have in recent years flocked to Florida to retire more than any other state. Some reports also suggest that more Americans were spurred to move to Florida during the coronavirus pandemic, when DeSantis’ highly public opposition to federal social distancing guidelines endeared him to many conservatives.

In this month’s midterms, older Florida voters came out in droves, while young voters stayed home, NBC’s exit polls show. In the governor’s race, 70% of total turnout came from voters age 45 or older. Those voters sided with DeSantis over Democratic former Gov. and Rep. Charlie Crist by well over 20 percentage points. The liberal-leaning 18- to-29-year-old demographic, meanwhile, made up just 11% of the vote.

Florida’s swing-state status was cemented in the 2000 presidential election, in which Republican George W. Bush beat Democrat Al Gore only after extensive, highly controversial recounts in Florida that took…