Issue #210: The Massive GOP Voter Registration Lead in Florida

Why Florida remains Likely Republican

As I’ve been documenting early voting in Florida for the past two weeks, the GOP has been slowly and steadily building a solid lead in votes cast. After trailing Democrats in mail ballots, Republicans pulled solidly ahead with in-person early voting. As a result, the Republicans have a 11% lead in votes cast; right around 800,000 people.

The massive Republican lead has yielded many questions about “why aren’t Democrats voting?” People remember the disastrous 2022 midterm, which saw Republicans maintain a 14% turnout advantage, leading to a vote cast lead of 12% I documented the 2022 turnout debacle in a series of articles. The final turnout report can be found here.

However, while 2022 gives Democrats rightful fear of a turnout collapse, the reality is that voter turnout is fairly close. The Republicans only hold a 4% lead in turnout. Currently 57.9% of Republicans have showed up, while 53.6% of Democrats have.

Right now the county-by-county turnout gaps are fairly small: outside of several rural counties and Miami-Dade. Go back and read my Saturday article for more discussion on turnout dynamics and Miami-Dade issues. The long story short is, the turnout gap is actually very small; smaller than any previous elections in modern times. Even if it gets a bit larger, the 2020 turnout gap was 6.5%. We are definitely not heading for a 2022 nightmare. That is not the problem…. but I know what is.

Florida’s Red Registration

So if that turnout problems is not the issue, then why is the vote cast gap so large? The answer is simple, the current registration is the most GOP heavy in modern Florida history. Right now Republicans maintain a 8% voter registration lead: just over 1,000,000 voters.

It was only two years ago that Florida’s registration finally flipped to Republicans. The Democrats had been slowly losing ground to Republicans for decades. In my October 2022 breakdown, I went through the history of voter registration shifts in Florida. You can read that here. The article has much more detail in shifting registration over longer times - with a GIF of county-level party registration from 1994 to 2022!

Right now, Florida’s registration stands at just under 14,000,000 active voters. However, it also has 2,300,000 “inactive voters” still on its roll. These voters can cast ballots, but due to flags, like returned mailers or lack of voting activity, they are considered inactive and at risk of being removed from the roll after missing two federal elections. This is the first step in voter roll cleanup that is constant in the process. This inactive roll has 250,000 more Democrats than Republicans. However, as the turnout data below shows, only a small number of the inactive voter list have shown up to vote; with a turnout of just 3%.

The inactive roll, which as I said is built by clerical warnings like returned mail and inactivity, is very high right now due to the massive 2022 turnout issue. However, it also appears clear the inactive roll likely reflects people no longer living in the state or engaged in the process. Therefore, I am sticking to a focus on active voters for looking at the current registration trends in Florida. Also a note, those marked inactive but are voting now will be moved to Active after the election; but that right now is just 75,000 people.

So lets look at how registration has shifted in the last four years.

Registration Changes

So how as Republican registration become so dominant in Florida. First lets look at how the margins changed. The map below shows how county-level registration changed from 2020 to 2024. Over those four years, Republicans made a net margin increase of 8.6%. This was actually a fairly modest gain across the counties, with no county being a big source in terms of radical % changes.

The only areas with sizeable changes were the ancestral Democratic panhandle counties - which as I’ve discussed before - leaned conservative and already voted Republican at the top of the ticket.

The % changes, however, mask the real story of voter registration in Florida. For that, look at the shift from 2020 in terms of raw votes. Statewide, the Republicans have increased their voter roll by 300,000 people. However, the real story is the 900,000 voter DROP for Democrats.

The map below shows counties color coded by the NET gain the Republicans made over Democrats. Every county showed the Republicans either expand a lead they had or narrow a gap they had against the Democrats. Btw this could mean both parties lost voters, but the Republicans just lost less. As the map on the left shows, several counties saw Republicans down in raw voters, but Democrats simply lost more. I’ll delve into the Democratic drop in a few moments.

One thing you may have then spotted by the large Democratic drop is that it means there are fewer active voters right now than in 2020. In fact, Florida is down 570,000 active voters. The county breakdowns are below.

Both Palm Beach and Broward County have 120,000 fewer active voters; with the Tampa Bay coming in around 50,000 each. In terms of growth or fall as a % change, Sumter, the home of the famous Villages retirement community, leads in growth. This makes sense, as the Villages is still the largest growth spot in Florida - the expanding retiree community that now makes up over 75% of Sumter County’s voting strength.

The growth of Sumter does give credence to the narrative of conservatives moving to Florida. Now I have discussed many times before that there is absolutely a voter realignment happening in terms of state-by-state migration. Florida is no longer the destination of Jewish retirees, but rather conservative midwestern retirees. The rise of the Villages and the end of the Southeast Florida retiree Condos, once a major source of Democratic strength, is a reflection of that.

However, a narrative of 100s of thousands of anti-lockdown conservatives flocking to Florida does not really appear in the data. Below is how voters currently on the roll broke down by the year they registered and their party ID.

The 2020 election, no major shock here, saw a massive registration increase, reflecting the last time the state was a true battleground. Post 2020, registration has been fairly steady. Democratic registration is terrible by year, but Republican growth shows no massive spikes. Nothing here indicates a massive influx of people at a level that would radically tilt the balance of the state. Rather it is a steady drumbeat.

Republican registration is modestly up. But the real story is Democrats being so far down. So what is going on here?

What is Happening with Democrats?

The massive Democratic drop in registration has led to some, and I stress some, conspiracies online. Far-left grifters, who are not taken seriously by anyone in campaigns, claim the 900,000 drop is proof of massive voter purges.

The truth is far from that. The reality is that both parties lose voters with time. Many fall into the inactive list, and then fall off altogether. People move and people die. The big thing that drives voter registration is not just population changes, but organized voter registration efforts. At any moment in Florida, hundreds of thousands of eligible citizens are simply not registered or engaged in the process. Campaign efforts, no better realized than with Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, worked to bring in less-reliable voters and register them. These were massive and well-funded field programs.

You can see the impact of these below. In the times just between the August Primary and November general election, Florida would see major registration increases in Presidential years.

The impact of the Obama campaign is especially clear in 2008; where 330,000 new Democrats were added to the voter roll. This was a systematic effort, and yes it was aided by his dynamic candidacy, but don’t underestimate the resources put into it. Even into 2016, where major Democratic organizations did their best to replicate past campaigns, the Democrats netted 70,000 voters over the GOP.

This era of Democratic growth is long gone. In my 2020 Deep Dive Article, I showed how the registration changes from August to October of 2020 saw a NET Republican of 190,000! The GOP gain was a reflection of their strong field program at the time, while Democrats relied on more digital and television, and has little field amid the COVID pandemic. The lack of an organized GOTV and registration ground game mattered a great deal. It still matters now.

The big problem for Democrats is the lack of resources to really engage and register voters in the last several years. I cannot stress this enough, voter registration is an expensive process. I’m not talking about a couple folks with clipboards. I’m talking about the systematic efforts that the Obama campaign and other organizations engage in. In a state like Florida, that organization is needed. That is the type of operation Florida Republicans engage in.

It has not helped as well that major restrictions on voter registration efforts have been implemented by the Florida legislature. The crazy restrictions and penalties, which you can read abut here, make it so that a good-faith volunteer who wants to help can be easily discouraged from getting involved. This means that any real registration efforts need to be hyper-organized by a major organization like a state party. Long gone are the days where I would be walking around with a bunch of registration sheets on the FSU campus trying to sign folks up. The current law, which includes insane penalties like $2,500 per application fines if the form is turned in even one day late, has led to a shuttering of campus registration efforts. Seriously, read that link.

So with restrictive laws hurting third-party efforts. Why hasn’t the Florida Democratic Party done more? Well the problem for Florida Democrats has been two-fold.

• First - Florida being viewed as less of a battleground after the 2020 loss led to a massive dry-up in resources. For example, in 2018, national Democratic groups spent over $50,000,000 in the state. In 2022, they spent less than $5,000,000. Currently in 2024, only a couple million have been spent in the Presidential contest here. No focus = no money.

• Second - As national help dried up, Florida Democrats went through bad leadership that did not resolve until the election of Nikkie Fried in early 2023. It takes more time to rebuild the party than she has had. With all the improvements made, organizing a 8-figure registration drive was never in the cards for this cycle. I was saying as much a year ago.

I’ve discussed this before, but the Democratic Party of Florida is engaged heavily in the elections this year. The party is in much better shape that it was two years ago; when I called on Chairman Manny Diaz to resign. However, the party has had to rebuild and organize on a relative shoe-string. The party and its allies focused on making slow and methodical gains. Democrats flipped the Jacksonville Mayors office, flipped a swingish State House seat in Orlando, and won several school board races against DeSantis in August. Looking at the general, the party has sought to break the Republican supermajority in the House and win back several local contests. I will be discussing these more on Monday. The key here is the party is working to show life and encourage future investment from national groups.

Democratic registration efforts were decent in the short burst from the August Primary to the November General this year. Democrats registered 100,000 new voters. While the Republicans registered more, with 180,000 - this NET gain of 80K is much smaller than the 2020 gain of 190K. Basically, I’ll take this.

Democrats simply have not had the resources to sustain voter registration efforts over the last year. Especially as things must be done perfectly or else risk insane penalties and fines. Florida Democrats put all they could into the last couple months: with focuses on key districts and counties. Whether it was netting votes (like Leon) or keeping the GOP net small (like Orange). As I said, the goal here is to win some down-ballot contests.

Turnout and Vote Cast

Going back to the current voter universe in Florida. It is the registration gap that is leading to such a solid vote lead for Republicans - despite the close turnout. The table below shows active voter registration, vote cast and turnout, over the last twelve years.

As the tables show, Democrats last led in votes cast in the 2012 general election. Republicans were always going to have a vote cast lead. However, that lead is poised to be larger than ever thanks to an insane registration lead. That said, both Democratic and Republican shares of the vote will likely continue to fall. Independents have been increasing their vote share. Republicans and Democrats will likely end in the low 40s and low 30s respectively.

This lead makes a shock upset by Harris very remote. Florida has been Likely Republican since the beginning, and that remains the case now. However, and I’ve said this for two years, the measure of Democratic success is not flipping Florida. The measure is breaking the GOP supermajority and showing that even with limited funds, gains can be made down-ballot. That can encourage national money, which can fund registration drives. Then Florida can properly come back into the national board as a contested swing state.