'Voter registration has been a disaster': Democrats have lost 330,000 voters in Florida

Democrats are not poised to do well in Florida next week. In fact, it looks like they may not do well in the state for some time. Since the 2020 election, Dems have lost more than 330,000 registered voters in the state while GOP registrations have surged.

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The Florida Division of Elections released its voter registration report for the November election, known as book closing, earlier this month.

Taken with the reports from the general elections in 2020 and 2018, Republicans and no-party-affiliate voters show a steady increase in voter registration.

But from 2020 to 2022, Democrats lost 331,810 voters…

News 6 political analyst and UCF professor Dr. Jim Clark says the problem can be laid at the feet of the Florida Democratic Party.

“It’s really depressing for the Democrats,” Clark said. “There are polls showing (Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis) may carry Orange and Miami-Dade counties, two solidly Democratic counties in the past.”

The result of this large shift in registrations is that the GOP now has a registration advantage in the state for the first time.

As of last month, there were 5.3 million registered Republicans and just under 5 million Democrats in Florida, marking the first time in state history that the GOP will carry a voter advantage on Election Day.

“Voter registration has been a disaster,” said Thomas Kennedy, a Democratic National Committee member in Florida. “Our messaging sucks.”

As bad as that news is, what’s even worse is who Democrats are losing.

Republicans have picked up where Trump left off. More than half of their gains in registered voters can be attributed to the 58,000 new Hispanic voters who checked “Republican” on their forms. Democrats, though, are bleeding support from these communities. The party saw a net loss of more than 46,000 Hispanic voters.

The reversal is made more stunning because Democrats entered the election cycle firmly aware of the trend and set out to address it, promising they would have dedicated staff and outreach focused on the disparate Hispanic communities that are scattered across the state…

It is also worth noting that Republicans saw a slight but sizable uptick of Black registered voters in the past two years while Democrats lost more than 71,000, a quarter of which came from Miami-Dade.

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The result of all of this is that Republicans are in a position to win in Miami-Dade County for the first time in 20 years. The party has picked up 11,000 new voters in the county since 2020 while Democrats have lost nearly 58,000 voters over the same time span.

On top of the registration advantage, the GOP also has a big money advantage. CNN notes that in 2020 Michael Bloomberg committed $100 million to help Biden win Florida. This year there are no outside benefactors coming to rescue the Democrats. Meanwhile, Gov. DeSantis has raised nearly $200 million.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) political operation reported raising $177.4 million through Sept. 9, breaking the gubernatorial fundraising record without adjusting for inflation, a new OpenSecrets analysis of state campaign finance filings found. His reelection campaign has raised over $31.4 million since January 2021, and Friends of Ron DeSantis, his state-level PAC that is not subject to contribution limits, raked in $146 million since January 2019.

The bottom line is that even the Miami Herald doesn’t see much hope for Democrats this year.

The president of the United States is visiting Florida one week before an all-important election. But Joe Biden’s scheduled trip to South Florida on Tuesday feels “meh” — a Hail Mary pass for a Democratic Party that’s expecting the worst after digging itself into a hole over the past years.

Plagued by anemic fundraising, a loss of registered voters and a popular governor who’s done everything conventional wisdom says a governor in a swing state shouldn’t do, Florida’s Democrats are going into Nov. 8 pessimistic. Biden, who’s all but ignored Florida this election season, is expected to campaign with U.S. Rep. Val Demings and Charlie Crist in Miami Gardens and attend a fundraiser for Crist.

It feels a little too late for Democrats to bring out the big guns — if that’s what you call Biden, whose popularity among Floridians is in the tank…

Florida Democrats emerged from an embarrassing election year in 2020 in debt and demoralized. They lost the state to Donald Trump by a greater margin than in 2016, thanks to his growing support among Hispanic voters. Republicans flipped two congressional seats in Miami-Dade…

If Democrats didn’t think things could get worse, well, they have…

Biden’s trip to South Florida will likely not alleviate Democratic anguish leading up to Election Day. We will know more once the results are in, but any Hail Marys might be a little too late to fix a Democratic mess years in the making.

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That’s a pretty downbeat assessment but also a pretty realistic one at this point. Democrats are going to lose bigly in Florida and there’s no reason to think things will improve for them in the state by 2024.

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