Democratic Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz warned on “The Chuck ToddCast” Monday that his state is likely to remain Republican for the foreseeable future.
Florida has had more registered Republicans than Democrats since 2021 and currently has over 1.3 million more registered Republicans, according to the Florida Division of Elections. Moskowitz said on the podcast that the COVID-19 pandemic was a turning point for the parties.
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“COVID was a seminal moment in politics,” Moskowitz said. “Even though we had more registered Democrats in Florida when Rick Scott got elected, when [Ron] DeSantis got elected, when Jeb Bush got elected, when Charlie Crist got elected, we still had more Democrats, but we were still electing Republican governors.”
“Now there are 1.2 million more registered Republicans. It’s starting to get to a point that it’s not recoverable, at least not in the short term,” he added. “But I think COVID was a big piece of it … And so I don’t know what the future of the Democratic party holds in Florida. Democrats had power in Florida for 100 plus years. We’re 35 years into Republican rule. We may be here for another 70. But right now, it’s systemic. This is a red state. It’s a systemic red state.”
DeSantis was a fierce critic of lockdowns, school closures and mask mandates, particularly in the classroom. In early May 2020, he began reopening the state, making Florida one of the first to curtail COVID-19 restrictions.
Miami Dade County drastically moved toward Republicans for DeSantis in 2022 and Trump in 2024. DeSantis beat Crist 59% to 40% in 2022 — the biggest blowout in a Florida gubernatorial election in decades, Politico reported. He only narrowly defeated Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum in 2018.
Trump won Florida by about 13% in 2024 after only winning it by 3.3% in 2020. Democrats suspended their door-to-door voter registration efforts during the pandemic, which Trump’s then-Florida campaign director, Susie Wiles, told Politico in September 2020 had been crucial to the Republican party’s surge.
“We did it through the mail, but the main way we had success was at the door, and because the Democrats aren’t meeting people at their doors like our campaign is doing, we are having great success,” Wiles told the outlet.
Florida’s population has grown significantly, with over 400,000 relocating to the state between July 2021 and July 2022, the Washington Examiner reported.
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