Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Florida, But Were Afraid to Ask, v. 2022
Wednesday, October 12, 2022 at 10:09PM To: Interested Parties
From: Steve Schale, Aging and Tired Florida Man with a bad short game
Re: Florida 2022 (I swore I wouldn’t do this again)
Date: October 13, 2022
I wasn’t going to write one of these, until someone recently stopped me on the sidewalk and said “Schale, are you writing anything about the 2022 election cycle?” Ah shit, guess I should.
For the first even-numbered year in my adult life, I am not responsible for even a single Florida political campaign, and it has been glorious. We went on a rare even-numbered vacation – I spent a week in the Philippines visiting with a young man I mentor – I even had time to put out a second layer of mulch in the flower beds (be jealous AJ).
Truthfully, it was one of those summers where I wonder why I didn’t take the foreign service test, become a club pro (assuming I had learned to hit a cut), gone into the family marina business, or opened a bar in Manila. Anything, other than this. But alas, I am stuck. I can basically do this, or become a Walmart greeter, though in fairness, I'd probably be better at the latter.
One thing before we get really into Florida – I will 100% not, under any circumstances, write daily memos. I might write one along the way, but more likely, I'll wait until its over.
There are a few reasons why:
* I spent 4-8 hours a day on those. They nearly killed me, my dogs hated me, and I am now old.
* Voting behavior – in terms of how people vote - has changed so rapidly that I don’t think there is much value in trying to read anything until we are well into early voting.
*. I am not working on a campaign, thus I do not have (nor do I want) access to a daily-updated voter file.
* The Jaguars might be watchable, and I would rather watch them on Sundays than build Excel spreadsheets for you people.
Lastly, and frankly, I don’t know how interesting this cycle will be. Every reporter who has asked me about 2022 for the last 2 years has gotten the same answer: The truth is, there are only so many things you can control. Five of the last seven mid-term cycles have gone nationally against the incumbent President’s party, and the last times an incumbent to lost re-election for Governor was 1990, so history is clearly working against my team. But that alone isn't the biggest issue.
There are a minimum of three things my party needs to fix for the conditions to be ripe to pull off a win: voter registration (if you want my views on this, there are probably 4-5 blog posts on it somewhere in the archives), get right with Hispanics, and find some space to win a few more non-college white voters.
Do I think the Democrats have done one or any of these? In a word, no. (I tried to think of some clever joke about how Trevor fumbled it 5 times against the Eagles, but nothing came to me.)
Do I think Crist or Demings will win? Well, I could go out to Florida’s finest golf course this afternoon, Royal County Leon Hilaman National and shoot 72. I’ve done it before. Even though my last two rounds were in the mid-80s, I think if I worked hard on my game, I believe I do it again (though I need to play more than my current 5-6 rounds a year). But could I do it today? I mean, maybe, though it would require the kind of Cinderella story that would make Carl Spackler truly proud.
One last note: to the dude hanging out in the subterranean dwelling of a relative’s home waiting to tweet “Ignore Schale, he's just a Democrat hack,” before reading this, well no shit sherlock, my last name is Schale (though you don't know me, so you have to call me Steve), I am a Democrat – and I am a proud hack (real hacks know the honorific “hack” is earned, and not given or taken -- and is a term of endearment given by one’s peers). Now go back to your twitter troll basement and read the thing, or get a job, or both.
I try to call balls and strikes when I write these big pieces, though I view the math of winning Florida in terms of how my side would get to a win. And fundamentally, elections are math problems. That is simply how my brain works, at least what is left of it after 26 years in this business.
Damn. 26 years. All of the sudden, Walmart greeter does sound better.
Ok – that’s way more preview than anyone wanted or needed, so let’s get into this thing.
It is important to remember Florida is different, less a state than a geographic distinction, with 22+ million people wrapped inside a border. For many, the state border is the only true common tie.
It is also huge. The distance between the state’s two extremes: Century, FL in the far NW corner of the state and Key West at the far southern extreme, is roughly 840 miles, which by comparison, is about the same distance between the aforementioned Century and Chicago. Coincidentally, 840 miles is also roughly the average amount Blake Bortles would overthrow a wide-open receiver standing 10 yards away from him.
Happy retirement Blake, I had to get in one more.
Some 2/3rds of Florida residents weren’t born in the state, and some 21% weren’t even born inside the United States.
The latter point is worth lingering on for a second – the fact that Florida is home to big populations of Cubans (close to a million), Haitians (over 300K), Colombians, Mexicans, and Jamaicans isn’t a surprise. But what is interesting is there are nearly 50 different nations of origin with more than 10,000 residents in Florida – more than 20 countries represent at least 1% of the foreign-born population – and these populations are huge. Take Filipinos – foreign-born Filipinos are the 15th largest foreign-born population in Florida – yet there are roughly as many foreign-born Filipinos as there are residents of Miami Beach.
Our economy is large enough to be a member of the G20, and our state's favorite professional sports franchise (if you disagree, get your own blog!), the Jacksonville Jaguars, has nearly twice as many playoff wins as the Dallas Cowboys in the last 26 years (thats for you Chip LaMarca), and as many playoff wins as the Lions have had in 92 (Just seeing if you read this Ryan).
People have often called this state a microcosm of America, and I used to fall into that camp. But as I got older, and understood the place better, I’ve come to realize we aren’t a microcosm of anything, but instead, simply we reflect where people came here from.
As was so wonderfully recounted for history in the book Shattered, the first sign I saw of trouble for Clinton in 2016 were the early numbers from Volusia County, which showed Trump substantially over-performing Romney. Why was this a sign? Well Volusia has a large non-college white population that tends to end up in Florida from upper-midwestern swing state, and if she was in trouble in Volusia, she was probably in trouble in the places where people in Volusia came from. I wanted to be wrong -- but I wasn't.
Our Hispanic population also tends to be quite different than the rest of the nation, and equally reflective of their own histories. First, our largest two groups of Hispanics, Cubans and Puerto Ricans, largely had status from the day they arrived – Cubans thanks to protective residency policies, and Puerto Ricans because they are US Citizens (I am still amazed people get this wrong).
Secondly, our foreign-born Hispanic population is largely made up of political exiles, many who came here escaping crime-ridden and socialist regimes – so when a small but exceptionally loud voices on the left, virtually all of said voices who have never seen a competitive race in their lives, throw around idiotic terms like “Democratic socialism” or moronically talk about reducing funding for law enforcement – well, how do you think people who came here for safety and to escape tyranny view those things? (as I scream into the abyss...)
Also, Twitter isn’t real life, and LatinX is not a word anyone actually uses.
OK, i feel better now.
Before this goes completely into a rant, let’s dive in. And if you want to read the 2018 version so you can tweet at me all the things I got wrong, you can do so here.
THE WAFFLE HOUSE CORRIDOR -- NORTH FLORIDA
The old saying in Florida is to go south, you go north, and that still mostly applies to North Florida. For sake of definition, I call everything in the Pensacola, Panama City, Tallahassee, Gainesville, and Jacksonville (DUUUUUVAL) media markets “North Florida.”
Couple things about North Florida.
It is the closest thing to the “south” as you will find in Florida. With exception of the Fort Myers media market, “North Florida” has the highest share of non-Hispanic white voters than any region in the state — and has the largest share of Black voters outside of Miami. In fact, while the region makes up just 18% of the statewide vote, nearly a quarter of all Black voters in the state live between Pensacola and Duval.
Say it with me in unison….DUUUUUUUVAL. Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it.
It is home to the Jaguars, America’s favorite football team and home to the truck stop ranked #1 in the nation a few years back, The Busy Bee in Live Oak.
The region is anchored by the city tied for #2 in the nation in number of Waffle Houses Pensacola (16), and the city tied at #5, Jacksonville (14). As for the latter, the Jacksonville media market is the largest in this region of the state, home to about 1/2 of all North Florida voters, as well as the Democratic nominee for the US Senate Val Demings. To keep this thing under 10,000 words, I will refer you to my 2020 piece on the market, if you want more information.
The state capital is here, Tallahassee, which sits between the state’s ancestral capital of St. Augustine, also the nation’s oldest continuously occupied city, and Pensacola, the capitol of “West Florida” and also the first Florida community to fail miserably at being a settlement.
Interestingly enough, the majority of Florida counties are in these 5 media markets, a throwback to the days when North Florida drove all of Florida’s politics. This played a role in the capital city remaining in Tallahassee, when during the days when the legislature was apportioned by county, instead of by population, they voted to build a new capitol to stop it from being moved to Orlando.
In fact, the new capitol was built with memorial honoring the man who tried to move the capitol to Orlando. It is such glorious pettiness.
OK, getting this back on the rails again — These smaller counties do add up. The top 11 counties by share of the vote DeSantis won in 2018 are in North Florida. These 11 counties gave him a 310K vote margin - more votes than he received in any single county in Florida.
There are pockets of Democrats here. Two college towns: Gainesville and Tallahassee are beacons of blue in an otherwise sea of red — as is Gadsden County, a majority-Black county. Duval County, once a predictably Republican county, was carried by Democrats in 3 statewide races in 2018, and by President Biden in 2020. A few counties in the Panhandle, namely Escambia and Okaloosa voted a little less Republican in 2020, though still overwhelmingly Republican.
Despite pockets of rapid growth, as a region’s growth is not keeping up with some of the larger m3arkets in the state. Sadly, many of the rural counties have seen declining population, as they have not enjoyed some of the same economic prosperity as the larger urban and exurban counties further south.
All of that, and the place remains very consistent: DeSantis carried the area by about the same amount as Scott, and the Presidential candidates of the last 3-4 cycles have all landed in pretty similar spots.
There are ten counties in Florida in the central time zone, and these counties typically account for about 150,000 vote margin for Republicans, so if Republicans have any kind of lead going into 8 EST on Election Night, you can call it.
This thing is already too long, and we are just getting started...
ORLANDO
Students of Florida would recognize this media market as largely the confines of old Florida area known as Mosquito County (yes, there was absolutely a county in Florida named Mosquito). Mosquito County got its name from the Spanish, who named the east coast of Florida Los Mosquitos, for reasons that are obvious to any reasonable Florida Man. Today, the area is known as the First Coast, or the Space Coast, or the Treasure Coast, depending on where you are – none of which are nearly as satisfying to say as Los Mosquitos.
(Side Note: We should rename it this)
In 1830, Mosquito County was home to roughly 800 people, but let’s just say, it has grown a lot over the years.
In 1950, modern day Mosquito County had just over 287,000 people. Today, there are 3,833,531 residents in just the six current counties (Brevard, Lake, Orange, Osceola, Seminole, and Volusia Counties) of that once great political subdivision – and when you add Marion, Flagler, and Sumter to fill out the rest of the Orlando market, total population now tops 4.5 million in the entire market.
To get a sense of just how fast the region is growing compared to the state: Since 1950, the Orlando market has grown from just over 12% of all Florida residents to 21%. In 2022, it could reach 22% of all Florida voters. And that forward momentum shows no sign of slowing down.
The northern terminus of the ole I-4 corridor, it is home to Disney World, Daytona, the Space Coast, the Villages, and Gatorland – where you can still see Florida Man wrestle a gator, the Orlando metro area alone has an economy that would put it in the top 60 global economies.
The market is also the home of Florida legend Blake Bortles, and home to the only time Michael Jordan wore the #12 jersey, scoring 49 wearing the temporary number after his jersey went “missing” while in the custody of the Magic’s stadium. Guess he took that a little personally.
Far more people will vote in the Orlando media market as will vote in the critical US Senate races in New Hampshire and Nevada…combined. And if Orlando’s media market was its own state, it would be no less competitive.
The market was decided by 2 points in both 2018 and just under 3 in 2020, and is a collection of distinctly Team Red and Team Blue counties.
The urban core: Orange, Osceola, and Seminole counties are Team Blue (Seminole joining that category in the last few cycles), while the exurban counties Marion (Ocala), Sumter and Lake (The Villages), located inland, north of Orlando - and Flagler, Volusia, and Brevard along the coast are all increasingly Team Red. All of them are experiencing rapid growth.
You can see every trend that is impacting American politics at play in the market.
Take Seminole County, a suburban county north of Orange County, home to one of the highest percentages of residents with a college degree – and we’ve seen the county go from one of the most hardcore Republican counties in Florida, to a county that is now a light shade of blue. Biden carried Seminole, the first Presidential Democrat since Truman to do so.
Rapid growth of Hispanics drove Orange and Osceola counties from likely Republican to overwhelmingly Democratic – and now, Democratic struggles with Hispanics have seen Republicans successfully work to cut those margins, something we particularly saw in Osceola in 2020.
Democratic struggles with non-college white voters, and senior white voters, have helped the rural and exurban counties go from competitive to massively Republican. If you go back to 2000, Bush won these six exurban counties by 4.5% -- and 20 years later, in 2020, Trump won these counties by 19%. To drive this home further: during the Obama years, where we always just wanted to lose these counties by less than Kerry or Gore, Republicans won these six counties in 2008 and 2012 by 67,000 (rounded) votes and 115,000 votes respectively. Trump blew these margins away, winning them by 211,000 and 246,000.
Another way to look at the increased polarization of the region is through the lens of the 2010 and 2018 Governor’s race. Both races were GOP wins, both were very close: Scott won by 1% in 2010 statewide, and DeSantis won by 0.4% in 2018. Looking at the market, in 2010, Scott won the exurban counties by 11%, and Sink won the urban counties by 5%. Fast forward to 2018, DeSantis won the exurban counties by 18%, the same margin Gillum won the urban counties.
I know what you are thinking, “Schale, this is amazing, but I really want to know even more about Orlando,” so here is the good news, I have several iterations of Orlando specific pieces on my blog – which you can read here, here, or here.
For Republicans, status-quo works for the statewide math. Get all you can get in the exurban counties, and maybe peel off enough Puerto Ricans to keep the margins down in the urban ones. Anything that looks like 2018 or 2020 for DeSantis will almost surely be enough, given Dem struggles in Miami.
For Democrats, a statewide win would require a different map here in the market – starting with clawing back some votes in those exurban areas, while maximizing turnout. Doing the former, as Obama showed in both his wins, pays off dividends in other parts of the state as well. To put it more simply: if a Democrat asked my advice on the #1 thing to do to win statewide – I’d say there were two things – but one of them is figure out how to win this market. Do that, and a whole lot of other things look better.
We’ll get to the second one in a bit.
TAMPA
One of my more favorite moments of the 2008 Obama campaign was a rally at the Yankee’s Spring Training facility in Tampa.
Obama typically walked off stage to Stevie Wonder’s “Signed Sealed Delivered,” but screw that, I argued, we are in a baseball stadium, we should go to another song on the Obama rally track: John Fogerty’s classic love song to baseball’ “Centerfield.” As I quickly learned, it was easier to get a TV ad on the air than it was to change the music line-up, but they signed off on it, and as he walked off stage…
Well, I beat the drum and hold the phone…The sun came out today. We're born again, there's new grass on the field…
For me, the song was a throwback to my youth, going to old Comiskey Park with my family. In 1983, as the White Sox were in the postseason chase (and my Dad teaching me basic math to figure out the daily Magic Number to clinch the division), my family was thinking about escaping the cold and moving to Florida. While we ended up east, my parents initially explored the west coast of Florida – because that is where people from our part of the country moved. I-75 was the artery headed south from the Midwest, carrying with it both people and culture.
Go to a Bears/Bucs game, or Packers/Bucs game anytime in the 80s at the ole Sombrero, and it was obvious who the home team was – and it wasn’t the Bucs. The area felt like home (in fact my sister moved there), and just the Midwest, the region was politically competitive. The saying in those days was “as goes Tampa goes Florida,” and maybe, just maybe, there was a candidate with a beat-up glove, a homemade bat, and a brand new pair of shoes ready to step to the plate.
Rounding third, heading for home, there’s a brown-eyed handsome man. Anyone can understand the way I feel…
Along came Barack Obama, a midwestern guy (and fellow White Sox fan) with midwestern sensibilities, the rare candidate who had found the voice to rally younger voters and voters of color, while still demonstrating broad appeal to non-college white Midwesterners. He understood you could both talk about raising everyone up while understanding voters liked tax cuts and a strong national defense. There was no place in Florida better to test the Obama theory of the case than Tampa, the largest media market in the state, the southern half of the oft-discussed I-4 corridor - and home to 24% of the electorate in a typical election.
And it worked. Bush won the Tampa market in 2004 by nearly 160,000 votes, and four years later, we won it – albeit narrowly, but a win is a win. In the re-elect, we lost it by a respectable 40,000 votes. In the meantime, Obama easily won states like Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio twice – and won Indiana in 2008.
Four years later, Trump flipped the script, winning the market by 190K votes, and in 2020, increasing his margin to 215K votes. And, back to the reflectivity theory, Trump also won every single one of those battleground states that Obama had won twice, and while Biden narrowly took back Wisconsin and Michigan back in 2020, two other Obama states, Iowa and Ohio weren’t even remotely competitive.
You get the picture.
DeSantis won by such a small margin in 2018 that you can point to a lot of things as “the thing” that defined the win. The truth is, when you win or lose by a small margin, both everything was the reason, and nothing was the reason. But two things really stand out. One was Miami Dade (more on this latter), but the other was Gillum’s inability to manage the margins in suburban and exurban Florida.
I'd argue it was more the latter than the former, and that if you really dig into it, he lost Florida the same way Clinton did.
To this point, let’s compare how the last 3 Democratic nominees for Governor: Alex Sink, Charlie Crist, and Andrew Gillum performed in the four counties immediately west and north of Tampa: Citrus, Hernando, Pasco, and Pinellas.
These four counties share several commonalities: they all have a median age older than the state average, three of them have college-degree attainment rates below the state average (and the fourth is basically right on the state average), and the each are substantially less diverse than the state average.
In other words, they are home to the exact demographic that Democrats have struggled with of late.
In 2010, these counties were basically a push – Scott won them by about 7,000 votes, or a margin of about 1%. Four years later, Crist won these four counties by 26,000 votes – or about 4%, then in 2018 – two years after Trump changed the math in this region, DeSantis carried the same counties by 68,000 votes – or almost 9% - a shift of 94,000 votes occurred in just these four Florida counties, in a race that DeSantis won by 32K votes.
While the areas south and east of Tampa, namely Polk, Manatee, and Sarasota have a different look and feel than the four mentioned above, the story is the same – a substantial shift from McCain/Romney to Trump, then in the Governor’s race, a Rick Scott 36,000 vote margin in 2014 grows to 76,000 in 2018 - again, a change in three counties greater than the entire statewide margin
I have a lot of opinions about why, and how this happened – but I’ve already written 3,500 words and this thing isn’t done yet, so I’ll save it for another time. Odds are better than not that DeSantis will only grow these margins – and if he does, it will be a very very short night, since these counties report fast and early.
For Democrats to have a shot in the future, those margins must come back to 2008-2014 type numbers. A certain former State Senator and White Sox fan from Chicago did it before. Maybe a few more should follow that roadmap…
Put me in Coach, I’m ready to Play. Today. Look at me, I can be, centerfield…
Man that was a great day.
FORT MYERS
In the last few of these, I combined Tampa and Fort Myers, mostly for simplicity, but since this blog is already way too long – and since I doubt there will be a 2024 version, it seems fair to give Fort Myers a moment in the sun.
The Fort Myers market, roughly 7% of the statewide vote, consists of three coastal counties: Charlotte, Lee, and Collier (from north to south), and three inland counties, all part of an area of Florida known as the Heartland: Desoto, Glades, and Hendry (also north to south), and over the last several political cycles, its performance has been exceptionally stable. Trump won it by 23.2% in 2016, and 22.3% in 2020. Scott won it by 23.2% in 2010, 22.8% in 2014, and DeSantis carried it by 24.9%.
While universally Republican, the region is not easily typecast. It is also midwestern in orientation, and less diverse than the state as a whole. It can feel like two different states: the coastal side of I-75 is typically developed, wealthier (though not universally), and frankly, whiter. West of I-75 is old Florida, cattle ranches, citrus farms, Florida panthers, alligators and pythons. It is also home to some of the largest migrant communities in Florida – Collier, for example, one of the wealthier counties in Florida, is nearly 30% Hispanic by population (though not by voters).
Joe Biden, while losing Florida by a larger margin in 2020 than 2016, improved on his 2016 margins in 28 counties – 20 of which were on the coast. Just like the rest of Florida, Biden slightly improved on his 2016 margins in the 3 coastal counties, while losing ground in the 3 internal ones. I wouldn’t be surprised if 2022 follows suit – nor would I be surprised if DeSantis grows in all six counties. Either way, this is a vote gold mine for Republicans.
One thing to note – I don’t expect the hurricane, as devastating as it is, to have a huge impact on the election. We experienced this in North Florida in 2018, and when the dust settled, voter participation rates in the most impacted areas were down slightly, but not significantly. Florida has seen this movie before – and I expect we’ll see a similar outcome in 2018.
One last thing: for my friends who are not in Florida, when the cameras leave after a hurricane, the donations often stop. The Ian rebuild will take years, so please stay engaged and help after the cameras leave. Besides money, the best way to help is to come down when it is time, to spend money in the region and help get small businesses back on their feet. From the Everglades to the coast, it is a truly beautiful part of the state.
WEST PALM BEACH AND MIAMI
In 2012, the actor Jason Alexander reached out to the campaign. He wanted to come to Florida to help out the Obama re-elect. For him, this wasn’t looking for the campaign to gift him a Florida trip, rather, Alexander, who played George Costanza on Seinfeld, was driving down as part of one of his several times a year trips to the state. While he was there, he just wanted to pitch in.
Why, you might ask, was Jason Alexander a frequent visitor to Florida?
Well, just like in the show, his parents – former residents of New Jersey – retired to a condo complex in Coconut Creek, a town in Bard County, between West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. And of course, they lived in – if you are old enough to remember the show – a large condo community full of retirees from the northeast, all living their best life in places like Delray Beach, Boca Raton, Pompano Beach, or in Alexander’s case, Coconut Creek.
While Del Boca Vista itself is not real, it very much based on real places. Massive condo communities like it dot basically every community in Palm Beach and Broward Counties, and for years were home to retired transplants, almost exclusively from the northeast, who brought with them everything from delis to politics. In doing so, they created a liberal enclave in southeast Florida.
Condo complexes like Century Village dominated the region’s politics for decades, with condo bosses like the famous (or infamous) Armando “Trinchi” Trinchitella (for you kids, that was 100% a real person), commanding attention from Democratic candidates ranging from President to local city council, or dare I say, even the board seats in Phase III. The storylines of the political drama and condo commandos of Del Boca Vista are very much rooted in Alexander’s family experience.
In the past, I have broken this section up into West Palm and Miami, but I have never cared for the way the media markets break up the southeastern part of the state. Frankly, large parts of Broward culturally feel a lot more like Palm Beach, and other parts feel a lot like Miami, particularly as mortality shrinks the size of one demographic, with it being replaced by a rapidly diversifying population from all corners of the globe.
Take the ole Seinfeld era Del Boca Vista – if we were to take Jason back there today, he’d find a mix of people like his late mother, with a whole lot of, often younger, Hispanic, and Caribbean families. And just like these changes are impacting places ike the mythical Boca Del Vista, they are also changing the region's politics.
Let’s look at the region, home to 30% of likely voters in Florida.
The northern edge of the Palm Beach media market are three coastal counties: Indian River, St. Lucie, and Martin Counties. To get a sense of the orientation of these areas, according to the Facebook map of baseball fandom, the top two baseball teams in terms of fans in these counties are the Yankees, and the Red Sox. Despite being 100-120 miles from two MLB stadiums, no Florida team can count more than 13% of county baseball fans as their #1 choice. Indian River and Martin are reliably Republican, and there is an argument St. Lucie is now the state’s bellwether, to the extent there is one. More on this later.
Inland, the market takes in Okeechobee County, a county better fit to the Heartland region that includes the counties west of it that we talked about in the Fort Myers piece. Like those counties, it is old Florida, rural, agriculturally focused, reliably Republican – and getting even more so. In fact, of the top 10 counties that got more Trump between 2016 and 2020, 5 of them are in the Florida Heartland, including Okeechobee.
Then going south, the area turns urban, with Florida’s three most populous counties stacked right on top of each other. Palm Beach County, the furthest north, at 1.5 million, followed by Broward, which will soon top 2 million, and Dade, home to 2.7 million residents. 29% of Florida residents call one of these three counties home – and in terms of voters, it is about 26%.
But, the region is actually shrinking a bit in compared to the state as a whole. As recently as the 80s, these three counties made up 33% of all residents – falling to 31% in 2000, to now 29% in the last census. This is in part because there are places where the area is just completely built out. Drive down the Sawgrass Expressway in Broward and you’ll see it is quite literally the urban boundary in places – Everglades to the west, and humanity all the way east to the ocean. There is just more room to grow further north in Florida.
This has had a practical impact on the region’s political influence as well. In the closely contested 2000 election, these three counties made up 27.5% of all the votes cast for President. In 2020, that number was 26% - with that vote share, mostly (but not completely) shifting to the Orlando area. The practical impact for my party is obvious: a growing share of my party’s voting base is coming from a shrinking population base. Now is not the piece to get into that, so just add it to the list of things my side must deal with.
* The three counties are different in very real ways. Palm Beach in many ways is a bridge between the rest of Florida, as the population base gets more diverse and interesting as you move south.
* The median age of the county is higher (45) than the state average (42), while the other two are younger than the state.
* It is less diverse than the counties south. 36% of registered voters in Palm Beach come from communities of color, compared to 59% of Broward, and 83% of Dade.
It also has the smallest foreign-born population. Nationally, the foreign-born population is about 13%. In Florida, it is just north of 21%. In Palm Beach, it is 27%, compared to 36% in Broward, and 54% in Dade.
Palm Beach is generally a reliable Democratic county, but increasingly is not an overwhelming Democratic county. Go back to the Bush v Gore days, and Gore won Palm Beach by some 117K votes, which was a 27% win – then fast forward to 2016, were Clinton won by 15, or 2020, where Trump won by 12.
The same story occurs at the Governors level, where Crist won the county by 20 in 2014, which fell to 17% for Gillum in 2018.
The county is an interesting place. It has one of the highest shares of population with a college degree, but even within this statistic, you will find places like Boca Raton, where north of 50% of adults have a college degree, to towns like Lake Worth, just 15 minutes up the road, where nearly 25% of adults don’t even have a high school diploma. There is a rapidly growing Hispanic population, and a rapidly growing Caribbean Black population – groups who are often replacing the “Costanzas” in the south county condo complexes.
Moving south, Broward County – once known as the 6th borough of New York, is increasingly diverse. In 2008, the share of voters in Broward who came from communities of color was 43%. Today it is 59%. Further evidence of this evolution: In the past 14 years, the number of Hispanic and Asian voters has doubled, Black voters are up 50%, and the number of non-Hispanic white voters has dropped 70,000. It is not the same county it was, even during those days of the Obama wins.
For the last decade, diversity had been the Democrats’ friend in Broward. From 2010 to 2018, the Democratic margins steadily increased, following the trend of large of Black and Hispanic voters in the electorate. But in 2020, that number came back down – Biden carrying Broward by 29.8% -- still a massive 285,000 vote margin – but nearly 5.5% less than Clinton did. The reasons: Republican gains with Hispanics, and with Black voters – particularly Caribbean Black voters. Of the counties where Trump improved his vote share, Broward saw the 7th largest vote share gain for Trump from 2016 to 2020. Had Biden simply replicated Clinton’s margins, he would have won Broward by 50,000 more votes.
DeSantis lost Broward by 36.5%. He will lose it by less in 2022, but by just how much less will be good read on just how much work there is to do from my side of the aisle.
Next up, Dade County. Frequent readers of this blog will know I look at Dade as more of a city-state that happens to be in Florida than it really is a county in Florida. Dade has its own economic, political, and media ecosystem. Arguably the most diverse major city in the world, in many ways, it has become what New York was in the early 20thcentury for migrants coming to America. Less than 25% of residents speak English as their only language, and while Spanish is the primary language, it is far from the only non-English language spoken.
There are massive communities of foreign-born residents, many with their own ecosystems, and for most of the last twenty-years, all the political momentum in the county was trending Democratic – so much so, that it was threatening to upset the balance of power in Florida. For example, in 2004, Kerry won Dade by 40,000 votes. Eight years later, Obama won it by 180,000. Four years after that, Clinton won it by nearly 30 points, or 290,000 votes.
***But there was a warning flare that night, or at least a reminder, when Patrick Murphy's margin was 18 points closer over Rubio than Clinton's was over Trump. Sure, Rubio is a hometown hero, but at the same time, for the corner of my party that believes there are no swing or ticket-splitting voters -- right there in Dade, roughly 100,000 voters selected Rubio and Clinton.
The same thing happened at the Governor’s race level. After Jeb Bush won the county in 02, Democrat Jim Davis carried it by low single digits in 2006, Sink grew the margin to 12 in 2010, and Crist to nearly 20 in 2014.
But then something happened. The Democratic forward momentum stopped. Rather than seeing growth in 2018, Gillum’s vote share basically matched Crist from 14. Congressional re-elections were closer than expected, and down-ballot waves didn’t materialize. If there was a canary in the coal mine, it was this.
Which took us to 2020. Donald Trump lost Dade County by 7 points – after losing it by 29. A Democratic margin of 290,000 votes fell to just over 70,000. Had Biden even reached the 2012 Obama margins, he would have won the county by another 180,000 votes – and combine that with the Broward issues, and 2020 all the sudden looks a lot closer.
If DeSantis sees the same 22-point shift that Trump saw, he’ll become the first Republican candidate since Jeb Bush to win the county. Is that likely? Let’s put it this way, given the spending disparity down there right now, it is hardly out of the question.
From my Dem hack lens, I ranted about this at the beginning, so I won’t make you sit through it again, other than to say I believe much of this was preventable, and if you can read a tone of annoyance in my voice, well, you'd be right.
Finally, we have the Conch Republic, known as Monroe County in Florida. During Governor Graham’s first term, the Keys seceded from the United States, causing Graham to respond by blockading US #1, limiting supplies to the Keys. While historians can argue whether Graham let them off easy, tensions did ease, and the blockade lifted. However, some in the Keys argue they never fully returned to the states, even though we still allow them to vote in Florida.
These days, the 40,000 or so residents of the Conch Republic who will vote in the Florida elections lean ever slightly Republican. But alas, given how beautiful their nation is, we’ll let them stay.
Before we move on to the conclusion, earlier, I said if a mythical Democratic candidate asked my advice on what to really work on getting right to be successful, I said Orlando, plus one more: Miami-Dade and Broward. Figuring out the bridge back with voters who were trending our way is critical, not just for Florida chances, but in states with similarly growing diverse populations.
Time to crash land this blog...
First, thank you for reading. I know this is a lot. It is far longer than I wanted, but it honestly, it could have been 2-3 times as long.
Since 2020, I have been asked a billion times if I think Trevor Lawrence is the answer for the Jaguars – and maybe a million times about Florida in 2022 and beyond.
Let’s save the first one for another time.
On the second question, I have always answered it the same way.
Elections are, at their core, math problems. In Florida, you build a puzzle from lots of parts. For Democrats, that puzzle requires a big chunk of Hispanics, large turnout and support from Black voters, and keeping margins down among whites in exurban counties. I’ve yet to see anyone – nor have I been able to find – a compelling case the math is there. Frankly, given the Dade issues for Democrats – even if everything else stays the same, it is hard for me to see either one winning by margins less than Trump did in 2020.
Maybe Crist or Demings catches fire and something happens in the next few weeks to change the trajectory, but just like my odds of going out and breaking par at Hilaman this afternoon (now with a broken toe since I started this piece), the odds are not in their favor.
Talking like a Dem hack again, I don’t think the current Democratic problems here are unique to Florida. Democrats have made gains nationally with college-educated white voters, and that shows up in the results in Florida. But Republicans have made gains nationally with non-college white voters, Hispanic and Black voters – and these populations are a whole lot bigger in Florida – and a lot of other key states. The result – a state that has trended Republican. Moreover, these gains will impact a lot of races around the country. If Republicans don’t win back the Senate in 2022, given the 2024 map, they likely will then – unless some of these trends change.
At the same time, given my general belief that we always read too much into everything in politics, I think my Republican friends who believe Florida can’t be competitive again and my Democratic friends who agree are both wrong. Politics is cyclical, and God knows I remember how everyone predicted – including most Democrats -- after Bush beat Kerry by 6 points that Democrats would never win Florida again – only to watch Dems win 3 of the next 6 statewides, and elect Barack Obama here twice.
And if my party can't figure out the math of how to win Florida, well, the good news is I am a Jaguars fan, so I am clinically incapable of feeling pain anymore.
Some will criticize this piece for being too long, and well, they are right. Others will say I didn't mention the Dolphins, which is true, but if you are the team the Jaguars beats to break a 20 game losing streak, are you truly worthy of a mention?
I also know I didn't talk enough about voter registration, or population growth, but really - this is already 7,000 words, and God knows I've written about registration plenty in the past But particularly on the latter - recent migration trends, those who have read this thing for 12 years now know I have never bought into anything being the thing, because in a state of 21 million people, and 15 million voters, it is hard for anyone thing to actually be the thing.
That and nothing is permanent in life, or politics, well except for the median voter theory. That is real, even if Twitter disagrees.
And for my Democratic friends looking for the silver bullet out of this, I remind you of the words of my good friend Kevin Sweeny, "the secret is, well, there is no secret. work works."
I've enjoyed writing these over the years. Maybe I'll write one in 2024, maybe Mark will want to go play the MENA Tour and need a looper, maybe I'll go climb Kilimanjaro, or maybe I'll rent a Kia and tour Waffle Houses instead that year. Who knows, but until then, thanks again for reading. I do truly appreciate it.