Florida Democrats Face Uphill Political Battle Ahead of 2024
News Analysis
After the 2022 midterm election results, the Republican victory in the Sunshine State was a huge success. Florida Democrats struggle to keep their political relevance going into the 2024 presidential election.
Florida was the nation’s largest swing state and the most unpredictable for many decades. It twice placed first in the presidential election. George W. Bush Barack Obama did the same thing at the White House. George Will, columnist and political commentator suggested in 2019 it would be difficult to find 270 electoral vote paths for any presidential candidate without Florida.
“Florida is incomparably the most important swing state in the country,” Will made an appearance on “The Florida Roundup.”
But this was before the Republican sweep of 2022, when the Sunshine State turned solid red. Democrats lost every statewide election on the ballot.
The 2022 Midterms
With the exception of the 2018 race for Commissioner of Agriculture—in which Democrat Nikki Fried defeated Republican Matt Caldwell by a narrow margin of 50.04 to 49.96 percent—Democrats haven’t won a statewide election in Florida since 2012.
Fried gave up his seat in order to run for the Democrat gubernatorial nomination to challenge incumbent Gov. Ron DeSantis. She was defeated by Charlie Crist (the U.S. Representative at the time). With that victory, Crist—who had defeated Republican challenger Anna Paulina Luna in the 2020 election to represent Florida’s 13th Congressional District—resigned his congressional seat.
The Democrat challenger for Crist’s vacant seat, Eric Lynn, was subsequently defeated by Luna in the 2022 midterms.
But DeSantis was reelected by almost 20 points, and several school boards flipped from majority Democrat to majority Republican, including in Miami-Dade County, which is now the largest school district in the country with a conservative-majority board.
Republicans now hold super-majorities in both houses of Florida’s Legislature, and with Fried gone, there’s not a single Democrat who holds a statewide office.
In one of the most unexpected upsets, Democrat state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith—who was seeking a fourth term in the Florida House of Representatives for the solid blue 49th District—lost to Republican challenger Susan Plasencia, who attacked what she described as Smith’s “wokeism.”
“The problem with Carlos Guillermo Smith is he was going down the path of ultra-wokeness,” John Dowless, the mayor of Edgewood in Orange County and a Republican consultant for Plasencia’s campaign, told The Epoch Times. “It was an ultra-woke ideology that most people don’t agree with. I think most people agree that everyone should have equal opportunity, including those in the LGBTQ community. But he was taking it beyond that, and I think he hung his hat on the Parental Rights bill and went after it with vengeance. He may even be the one who coined the phrase ‘Don’t Say Gay.’ That’s not what the bill said at all. It says stop sexualizing our children.”
Florida’s Democrat Party also has no leader. Manny Diaz, who was defeated in 2022, has been elected the leader of Florida’s Democrat Party. former mayor of Miami who vowed to rebuild Florida’s Democrat Party, resigned as party chair.
In a five-page letter, Diaz blamed the party’s poor ground game And a “long standing, systemic and deeply entrenched culture resistant to change” Which “individual agendas are more important than team; where self-interest dominates and bureaucracies focus on self-preservation.”
Looking ahead
Heading toward 2024, Dowless said he believes Florida’s Democrats will continue their struggle while ignoring why Republicans have been so successful.
“I honestly think that the Democratic Party’s leadership has abandoned their base in the Sunshine State, at least in Miami-Dade, where Hispanic, family-oriented voters live,” Dowless told The Epoch Times, noting the party’s disconnect in trying to force its agenda on Florida’s children. “They don’t understand, you don’t mess with mama bear and her kids.”
Dowless attributed DeSantis’ political success—a decisive reelection victory and growing support for a 2024 presidential run—to his determination to protect parental rights and to maintain Florida’s position as the “place where woke comes to die.”
“The states that are losing populations are being run by Democratic governors,” Dowless stated. “But their pride gets in the way of reason and instead of watching and learning, I think they’re dismissing and trying to diminish the work of DeSantis and conservatism.”
Dowless also pointed out that Florida was named the a href=”https://www.theepochtimes.com/florida-ranked-fastest-growing-state-in-america-us-census-bureau_4947175.html”>fastest-growing State The nation.
“We’ve always been growing because of our weather,” He said. “But when we’re the fastest-growing state in the nation you know it’s gone past weather. In my opinion, there’s only one logical answer and that is DeSantis’ leadership through COVID.”
Dowless expressed his dismay at the refusal of leaders from other states to listen to constituents and refuse to stand against them “woke mob” To protect their children, freedoms, businesses, and jobs.
“It absolutely polarized our leaders in ways I was sad to see,” Dowless lamented. “But it definitely showed the true colors of some of our country’s leaders whether they will support freedom or whether they are going to use fear to force certain ideologies on the voters, and I think that’s what happened.”
“The reason why people want to live in Florida has a lot to do with DeSantis’ leadership,” Dowless stated. “We’re already the third most populous state. For us to take over the lead in new residents is huge.”
DeSantis announced a social media announcement on February 7, 2017.
“In 2018, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by nearly 300,000,” he wrote on Twitter, adding that Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 300,000 by Election Day in 2022.
“Today we can announce that Republicans outnumber Democrats by 400,000. Freedom is here to stay.”
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