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naraburns  nihil supernum  22hr ago (text post)   12871 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

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Sorry to not answer your question, but what's up with Florida?

Florida was THE swing state until quite recently. Obama won in 2012. And now Trump is going to win by 12 points !?

Is it just that conservatives are fleeing the corruption and taxes of Illinois and New York for the sunnier shores of Florida? Or is it DeSantis coattails?

More sinister explanation: Retirees are living in Florida for tax residency, but then voting (D) in their original home states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin now that Florida is no longer in play.

A) A lot of people moving here/retirees from Blue states that increase the Republican voteshare.

B) Desantis is a terrifyingly competent governor, from day 1. Even Dems notice that he keeps the state in tiptop shape.

C) As part of B), Desantis cleaned up the problem counties when it came to voting, which probably eliminated whatever fraud there was.

I explain here.

A couple guesses / theories.

For one, Florida was the Covid refugee state for a lot of the New York / North East lockdown dissidents, when covid-driven migrations largely trailed the election. New York saw a lot of out-migration during the lockdowns as part of a broader emegration trend, and despite the stereotypes / theories that people go back to voting for what they just left, there's a separate dynamic in that the discontents are the first to go and the most to go. A flip side to this, in turn, was emigration of Florida democrats to other places. LGBT-aligned Democratics reportedly (though I've never found strong numbers) left the state in significant numbers during various culture war fights for friendlier ideological neighbors. Culture war national media fights like the 'Don't Say Gay' fights had their own impacts to local voter pools.

Second, the Cuba lobby has stopped being competitive and strongly dislikes the Biden Administration's policies and became straight up [R]. The linked article from Responsible Statecraft casts that as a failure of the lobby rather than of the democratic party, but the issue is that the 'Cuba Lobby' isn't really just Cubans anymore- it also has substantial crossover with the Venezuela block, where most Venezuelans who've fled over the last two decades have ended up (other than Texas) in Flordia. Now, obviously the illegal migrants themselves aren't the voting block, but rather the legal resident / citizen families, and communities. There is a substantial and under-appreciated (or unheard) hispanic anti-socialist block, where anything that comes across as pro-latin-american-left is looked at with suspicion.

You can see here from Florida voting data that third-generation migrants in particular are considerably more likely to vote for Republican than Democrat, even though Democrats have slight leads on first and second generation migrants. That reads to me in Florida as Cuban and Cuban-adjacent migrants in particular, incorporated into the cuban political machine.

A third point is that since 2012 DeSantis broke the back of the local Florida Democratic Party while building a much stronger voter registration base. One of the things the Florida Republicans have done is functionally limit the role of out-of-state registration/mobilization groups, which limits the ability of the Democratic national party aparatus and various activist groups to substitute for Florida Democratic Party shortfalls.

In short, a FDP doom-loop where a loss of Democratic organizers led to fewer voters led to less ability to organize leading to worse results leading to dispirited partisans leading to more emigration leading to less mobilization ability, even as the Republicans had a win-loop of increasing Cuban-support, sympathetic immigration, and organizational advantages that built upon each other.

Less sinister explanation: retirees move to Florida, vote red there and not in their home states, making Florida redder and NY/NJ bluer.

But that's not different than it was in 2000. It's not a cumulative effect since the retirees die.

The split by age wasn't as large, and Florida has gotten older over time.

I looked it up (thanks Perplexity!).

It looks like Florida was 3.4 years older than the US average in 2000 and 4.5 years older in 2020.

So you are right. But no way this swings the electorate by 12 points !

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