Don’t Count out Florida in 2020
ERIC BAZAIL-EIMIL: Conventional wisdom suggests that to predict how a state will vote, one should look at the most recent elections and interpret the data to find constant trends between cycles. One should look at the popularity of the statewide elected figures. One should look at party registrations. And so on and so forth.
And if you applied that logic to Florida, you’d come away thinking the state was leaning strongly towards the Republicans in the 2020 election. After all, President Trump carried Florida by almost 2 points in 2016, Democrats lost the Governor’s race, the Senate race, and most of the statewide races. Polls suggest that Gov. DeSantis, as well as Senators Rubio and Scott are well-regarded within the state.
Without context, data is meaningless. This especially holds true for politics.
Bill Nelson losing his Senate race by 0.25% in a Democratic wave year in a “swing state” like Florida seems pretty bad. However, when you note that Nelson failed to hire a campaign manager until March of 2018, ran a campaign deemed by the Miami Herald as “sluggish”, and went up against a Republican nominee who had the wealth to blast Florida’s media market with advertising that cast Nelson as an empty-suit, dated politician your perspective changes. Nelson also had no concrete public image in Florida. This was unlike his former colleague, the legendary Bob Graham, who remains an icon of Florida politics despite being out of elective office for fifteen years.
Add to this a confusing ballot prepared in Broward County (a key county for Democrats to rack up votes in statewide races), and it’s clear that Nelson had the odds majorly stacked against him.
With Andrew Gillum and the Governor’s race, the election was already over in the Spring of 2016, when the then-Mayor of Tallahassee became ensnared in an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation into corruption in the city. The DeSantis campaign seized on this issue, which had repeatedly been raised by supporters of Rep. Gwen Graham and other Democrats in the primary race. Many Florida voters, already weary of the constant corruption in their state capital and the Hillary Clinton email scandal fresh in their minds, took their chances with President Trump’s hand-picked nominee for Governor.
Despite these flaws, Nelson and Gillum lost by just 0.25% and 0.5% respectively! Even with weak candidates at the top of the ticket, Agriculture Commissioner Nominee Nikki Fried scraped out a victory to become the first Democrat elected to a statewide executive position since 2007. In Florida’s 27th District, one of the most-watched seats in the midterm punditry, Democrat Donna Shalala, despite not being a Spanish speaker in a mostly Cuban district, handily defeated Maria Elvira Salazar, an extremely-well known Cuban American TV anchor who had the fervent backing of the retiring popular incumbent Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Right next door in the 26th, Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell defeated Republican Carlos Curbelo, even though Curbelo had outperformed President Trump by 12 points in that same district in 2016.
Even in 2016, when the Republicans won Florida’s 29 Electoral votes and Marco Rubio won re-election, Democrats gained additional seats in Congress, the Florida House, and the Florida Senate.
And the irony, of course, is that the willingness to cast Florida off flies fully in the face of demographic trends. Where Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are expected to lose seats, Florida will find itself with two new Congressional seats following this year’s census, and by extension more votes in the Electoral College. Similarly, Democrats can expect North Carolina, Arizona, and Texas to become bigger, ever-more-promising prizes, especially as these states trend much, much more Democrat.
Plus, let’s not even forget the two biggest wildcards looming over Florida politics right now: Governor DeSantis’s poor response to the COVID-19 outbreak and the passage of Amendment 4, which restored voting rights for almost a million nonviolent felons in the State. Will voters punish President Trump and other Republicans for DeSantis dragging his feet on closing beaches, mobilizing resources, and instituting a state lockdown order, even as cases steadily rose over the last month? Will the new voters created by Amendment 4 manage to get past the restrictions Florida Republicans imposed to limit their registrations? And if so, will they move the needle for the Democrats?
As it always tends to be when it comes to Florida and elections, things are too far from being normal and settled for us to make any definitive calls just yet.
Eric Bazail Elmil is a freshman in the School of Foreign Service studying Latin American and African Politics. When not doing his IR readings, you can often find him obsessing over the weirdness of his home state of Florida and its politics.