With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
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.
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