Republicans now hold a slight voter registration edge over Democrats, just another sign that the state is moving away from its two-decade-old reputation as the nation’s largest battleground state.
It’s also more bad news for Democrats as they try to knock off rising national GOP star Gov. Ron DeSantis next year.
Voter registration data collected by the state and shared with POLITICO shows that there are now 6,035 more voters registered as Republicans than Democrats out of 14.3 million active registered voters. Each party has more than 5.1 million voters.
“This is a milestone moment in Florida’s history,” said Helen Aguirre Ferré, executive director of the Republican Party of Florida.
Democrats — who once had solid control at all levels of elected office until Republicans won the Legislature and governor’s mansion in the ‘90s — held a substantial edge in voter registration just a few years ago.
During the 2010 midterms, amid the tea party wave and the election of Rick Scott to governor, Democrats had a nearly 568,000 voter advantage. That fell to 264,000 in 2018 when DeSantis barely defeated former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum by more than 32,000 votes to become the state’s 46th governor. Democrats also were ahead of Republicans by more than 134,000 registered voters last year when President Donald Trump comfortably defeated Joe Biden in the state.
DeSantis, who has pushed the Republican Party of Florida to expand its registration efforts and even contributed $2 million to the effort, correctly predicted earlier this month that his party had overtaken Democrats, a factor he attributed in part to people migrating to Florida due to anti-lockdown, anti-mandate policies he pushed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“You are seeing people move to states that value freedom,” DeSantis said during a breakfast speech at the National Conference of State Legislatures on Nov. 5. He also joked if Republicans had not been leaving New Jersey that they would have beaten Gov. Phil Murphy.
A breakdown of the most recent voter data shows that nearly 50 percent of all white voters in the state are registered Republican, while nearly 78 percent of Black voters are registered Democrats. Republicans also hold an advantage among older votes — those aged 55 and up. That trend flips among young… (Read more)
Sponsored Links
Comments are closed.