Tuesday’s midterms made it clear: ‘Florida is the blueprint for Republicans to follow.’
A get-out-the-vote effort that sent an army of volunteers to knock on millions of doors across the state, built on the back of a historically-strong-and-getting-stronger party infrastructure.
An influx of new residents who “voted with their feet” to flee blue-state governments that shuttered their businesses and schools for long periods during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A favorable congressional map that had been a political hot-potato earlier in the year.
An opposition party in disarray, and a chief opponent who on his first day as his party’s nominee for governor declared that he didn’t want a large swath of voters to support him.
A certain former president who left a light touch on the state’s most prominent races.
And, maybe most importantly, bold and competent leaders at the top of the ticket with strong records and the ability to communicate their accomplishments and their visions.
Those are just some of the ingredients that led to Republicans dominating Florida’s elections on Tuesday, according to current and former party leaders, campaign staffers, and Republican political consultants who spoke to National Review. While the midterm election was generally a disappointment for Republicans nationwide, Florida was a bright spot. The red wave many expected may not have happened nationally, but in Florida there was a red hurricane.
Governor Ron DeSantis creamed Democrat Charlie Crist by a whopping 19.4-point margin, the biggest win in a Florida governor’s race in 40 years. DeSantis even won in typically blue strongholds, like Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. U.S Senator Marco Rubio won by 16 points, even though his opponent, Val Demings, drastically outspent him. The GOP flipped three U.S. House seats, critical gains in the party’s effort to retake control of the chamber. In the state legislature, Republicans now have House and Senate supermajorities. And Republicans dominated every statewide election – come January, there will be no Democrats elected to statewide office in Florida.
“Florida is the blueprint for Republicans to follow,” Helen Aguirre Ferre, executive director of the Republican Party of Florida told National Review in a prepared statement.
Party leaders and Republican consultants pointed to the performances of DeSantis and Rubio as keys for the GOP’s overall success on Tuesday. Their popularity and position at the top of Republican ballots statewide helped carry down-ballot Republicans to victory.
“Both of these guys have proven themselves to be very competent, very able communicators. And no one has to really question where they stand,” said Mike Haridopolos, a former Florida state senate president who is now a political consultant. DeSantis, he said, “is the unquestioned king of Florida politics right now. His win was something I never would have thought possible even a few months ago. I thought he might win by ten, and that would be a shocking number. The fact that he won by 20 is really remarkable.”
Other party and campaign leaders said they, too, were surprised by the margin.
Policy Achievements and Hurricane Response
DeSantis’s win wasn’t just the byproduct of political celebrity. Rather, it was built on four years of policy achievements around the economy, the environment, education, immigration, public safety, and, most prominently, the governor’s response to Covid-19. Those achievements made messaging around his reelection campaign easier, according to sources close to the effort. People felt like DeSantis had their back, particularly during the pandemic, when governors in blue states were locking down schools, businesses, and churches, and mandating masks.
“The absolute nail in the coffin for the Democrats was the fact that the governor handled that storm so well,” Haridopolos said of Hurricane Ian, which ravaged the state’s southwest coast in late September, destroying homes and businesses, and washing out bridges to the region’s barrier islands, leaving survivors stranded.
DeSantis prioritized temporary fixes to the bridges, and directed state resources to work around the clock to get them done. Access to the Pine Island community was restored in a week, and vehicles were running over a temporary bridge to Sanibel Island by mid-October.
“We made it a priority, and we didn’t just get it done – we got it done quick,” DeSantis said after the Pine Island bridge reopened on October 5.
Earlier this year, DeSantis used his political capital to fight for his preferred electoral maps, vetoing a plan approved by the Republican legislature that would have left the state’s congressional districts largely intact, giving the party only a slight electoral advantage. DeSantis pushed through his own map, which was more favorable to Republicans.
Haridopolos also credited DeSantis for using his political capital to aid down-ballot Republicans, and to endorse conservative candidates in local school-board races. Over the last year, DeSantis made a point of visiting each of Florida’s 67 counties, meeting with grassroots leaders and helping with fundraising efforts.
The Florida Republican Party has been strong in the state for over two decades, dating back to Jeb Bush’s efforts to turn it around and build a strong political machine in the late 1990s. But when DeSantis first ran for governor in 2018, he didn’t have his own built-up infrastructure. He had the backing of then-president Donald Trump. Over the last four years, DeSantis has built that political infrastructure. In this campaign, for example, his wife, Casey, helped mobilize more than a million “Mamas for DeSantis.”
Haridopolos said that political infrastructure, and DeSantis’s willingness to expend political capital to help other Republicans could bounce back and be helpful to him later.
“Should he choose to run for president, obviously there will be a lot of Floridians – even though Donald Trump is very popular here – who might jump on that bandwagon, because he helped them,” Haridopolos said.
Turning Out the Vote
DeSantis volunteers knocked on more than two million doors during his re-election campaign, including targeting Hispanic voters in South Florida, where the Republican Party of Florida has increasingly invested resources in recent years. The state party – operating out of the same building as the DeSantis camp – aided Republican door-knocking and phone bank efforts with detailed data to help candidates identify potential voters who could be motivated to head to the polls.
They had a lot of success turning out voters who typically wouldn’t show up for a midterm election, one party operative said, adding, “You don’t want to waste your time knocking on doors of people who are never going to vote for you.”
Some South Florida Republicans teamed with off-duty firefighters to get voters to the polls. Worried that Hurricane Nicole could move faster than expected and swamp Election Day, Republican operatives contacted grassroots volunteers in the state’s east coast last week and urged them to try to get Republican voters to the polls over the weekend.
Republicans also courted minority voters, including Hispanic voters, who backed DeSantis over Crist. Hispanics in Florida, many of them from Cuba and Venezuela, have been trending Republican for years now, having seen the impact left-wing collectivist governments have had in those countries, and being concerned about the leftward drift of the Democratic Party. “You know what we call people who are Black, white, Hispanic, Asian and are men and women, who come from other countries? You know what we call them in Florida? We call them Americans,” Rubio said after his win on Tuesday.
Over the last several years, DeSantis and other Republican leaders have turned Florida into something of a national model for Republican governance. During his State of the State address in January, DeSantis described Florida as “the freest state” in the nation, and an “escape hatch for those chafing under authoritarian, arbitrary and seemingly never-ending mandates and restrictions.” Florida is where “woke goes to die,” DeSantis said during a victory speech on Tuesday. That, combined with its warm weather and lack of a state income tax, has drawn hundreds of thousands of people to relocate to Florida in recent years.
Ben Torpey, a Republican strategist from Gainesville, Fla., has researched the political affiliations of the people moving to Florida. “In the past three years, you can see that there is a considerable rise in Republicans that are moving here,” he said.
In 2018, when DeSantis was narrowly elected governor, there were more than 250,000 more registered Democrats than registered Republicans in the state. In the fall of 2021, Republicans overtook them. Now, there are 5.3 million Republicans in the state, about 300,000 more than there are registered Democrats, according to Florida Division of Elections data.
“We are no longer a purple state. We’re moving to become a pretty solid red state,” Haridopolos said. “Federalism is voting with your feet. You go to places that share your values. So, clearly people have voted with their feet. They like DeSantis.”
Amazingly Lackluster Opponents
Another benefit for Florida Republicans on Tuesday appears to be the collapse of the Democratic Party in the state. “I have a ton of friends here who are Democrats, and they work for the party, and it’s a circus,” Torpey said. “They can’t get anything done.”
Even when Democrats outnumbered Republicans in Florida, Republicans dominated state government. As a former state senate president, Haridopolos saw it first-hand. “The Democratic Party has been in disarray in Florida really since the Jeb Bush years,” he said.
But even Haridopolos was surprised at the candidates at the top of the Democratic ticket this year. “I mean, Charlie Crist? They don’t have enough of a bench to find a credible candidate to run for governor of the state of Florida?” he said.
Another party leader called Crist “amazingly lackluster.”
Crist, a former Republican turned independent turned Democrat, won his primary over Nikki Fried, the state agriculture commissioner – currently the only Democrat elected to a statewide office – who is best known for wanting to legalize recreational pot in the state. The day after his primary win, Crist visited a St. Petersburg restaurant to pitch his candidacy to diners. “The plan is to win,” he said, but then he puzzlingly rejected support from a wide swath of the state’s voters, insulting them as “haters.”
“Those who support the governor should stay with him and vote for him and I don’t want your vote,” Crist said. “If you have that hate in your heart, keep it there.”
Crist went on to choose as his running mate Karla Hernández-Mats, a teachers’ union boss who opposed school choice, has called for defunding charter schools, and who campaigned to keep Florida schools closed during the pandemic — the kind of leader people were flocking to Florida to get away from. Last month, when commenting on DeSantis’s efforts to bus migrants to blue states and cities, Hernández-Mats took aim at Florida’s lieutenant governor, Jeanette Nuñez, saying offensively that, “Technically she’s considered a Latina, but I think that her Latina card should be revoked.”
While some Florida Republicans benefitted Tuesday from having flawed opponents, Torpey added that he believed the GOP candidates benefited generally from not getting much attention from Trump, who focused more on his acolytes in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Trump did pump up Rubio during a rally in Miami on Sunday.
“One of the big key differences [Tuesday] night for Florida is Trump was not big here. A lot of people are going to hate to hear it,” Torpey said, noting what appears to be an increasing feud between the former president and DeSantis. “It was very clear that DeSantis did not want Trump involved. It’s very clear that Trump did not want to be involved with DeSantis.”
A Republican Roadmap?
While in many ways, particularly on the policy side and in terms of party building, Florida can be a conservative model for other states to follow. But some of what’s happening in the state will be hard to replicate elsewhere. Just like there is only one Trump, and efforts by Republican candidates to emulate him have often failed, there is also just one DeSantis.
“You’re going to have to build yourself a DeSantis Frankenstein in the lab,” Torpey said. “He’s a special individual in the sense of being a leader in the state.”
Haridopolos agreed. “This is a unique individual with a great conservative legislature backing him,” he said. But he added that Republicans nationwide can learn from him.
The party, he said, needs to be on offense on hot-button issues, like abortion. In too many cases across the country, Republicans chose to cautiously concede the issue rather than to define their position and make the case for it, hoping that a red wave would send them to victory. “That same wave that can bring you into office can take you out,” Haridopolos said.
Republicans, he said, need to be bold but not reckless. They need to engage with voters and on issues, and they need to try to win the intellectual battle.
“Define who you are, and when they’re attacking you, have the intellectual talent to argue back that your position is a better one and here’s why. Give examples,” he said. “Don’t just rely on a bumper sticker.”