TALLAHASSEE — Florida is now officially a red state.
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 younger voters. Among those under the age of 30, 37.5 percent are registered as independents while 36.8 percent are registered as Democrats. Nearly 26 percent of those under 30 are registered Republicans.
Democratic activists and observers for years have bemoaned the voter registration efforts of the party, and top Democrats have consistently promised to reverse the trend.
Manny Diaz, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, has contended that some local election supervisors are playing “shell games” with the voter registration numbers by moving a disproportionate number from active status to inactive.
Under Florida law, voters are considered active if they vote, request a mail-in ballot or update their voter registration information. They are placed on the inactive list if they do not respond to address confirmation notices from local supervisors and can eventually be removed from the voter rolls.
The most recent data shows there are slightly more than 961,000 inactive voters — of which more than 343,000 are Democrats versus more than 275,000 Republicans. But just this past month the number of voters being shifted over to inactive status was nearly even — 10,668 Republicans and 12,145 Democrats. Democrats, however, remain suspicious of the number of voters designated as inactive in many counties that are controlled by GOP election officials.
“At the end of the day all eligible voters can walk into a polling place and vote, not just active voters, and Democrats still hold the lead in eligible voters,” said Jose Parra, a spokesperson for the Florida Democratic Party, on Wednesday. “Republicans have been playing shell games with our voters by disproportionately moving massive numbers of people who can still vote to inactive status and have purged many others from the list altogether.”
Diaz has also insisted recently that Florida remains a competitive state for Democrats because the state’s voters in recent years have approved hiking the minimum wage, legalizing medical marijuana and restoring voting rights to felons.
Ryan Tyson, a GOP consultant who regularly tracks voter registration numbers, said that the data showed that more new voters had signed up as Republicans versus Democrats 18 out of the last 19 months.
“The reality is that the state is changing,” Tyson said.
