This past Tuesday, Democrats continued their surprising streak of seriously awesome victories in this off-year election by winning the Jacksonville, Florida mayoral election in what was considered by many media outlets to be a slight upset. The city of Jacksonville - which many people are unaware... is the largest city in Florida - had only elected a Democrat once in last 3 decades, and had supported Republican candidates in national elections for years. After Ron DeSantis' landslide victory in the 2022 midterms, alongside Marco Rubio's similar margin of re-election, this was a shot in the arm for the dismembered Florida Democratic Party. I don't blame people for the celebratory attitude, but then people took it a liitttle too far. Democrats across the country declared that "Florida is back"; "Florida is purple again." Politico wrote a new story that "Biden could have a "potential lifeline for Florida Democrats."
I have one thing to say:
Stop it. Get some help. Florida is NOT turning blue in 2024. Putting money into Florida for the 2024 election is just as good as taking a wad of Benjamins, and feeding it to an alligator. It's STUPID.
First of all, the mayoral race in Jacksonville was not the spectacular upset that some in the media have convinced ill-informed Democrats. In fact, five out of five pre-election polls of the race showed the Democrat leading over the Republican. Second, Jacksonville is not the Republican bastion people would claim it to be.
In 2018, when Ron DeSantis won his first term to be Florida's governor, he only beat his Democratic opponent by 32,463 votes, or 0.4% of the vote. Pretty close, but a stinging defeat for Democrats in a midterm year where they won the House popular vote by over 8%. In that election, one of the counties targeted by Florida Democrats was Duval County, whose county borders are exactly identical to the boundaries of the city of Jacksonville (think: Duval County = Jacksonville. Exact same thing). Duval County had been a strong red county for years, even in elections where Democrats did well in Florida.
1996: Bill Clinton beats Dole in Florida 48% to 42%.
Dole wins Duval County, 50% to 44%.
2000: Gore "doesn't win" Florida by "537 votes."
Bush wins Duval County, 57% to 41%.
2008: Obama beats McCain in Florida, 51% to 48%.
McCain wins Duval County, 51% to 47%.
2012: Obama beats Romney in Florida, 50% to 49%.
Romney wins Duval County, 51% to 48%.
But in 2016, when Hillary lost Florida to Trump by 1.2 percentage points, Trump only won Duval County by one percentage point. So in 2018, when Democrats thought they had a chance of sweeping Republicans away in Florida, they targeted Duval. And look at what happened:
That's right! Democrats beat Ron DeSantis in Duval County, by a healthy margin of 52-47%. In fact, that's a larger margin of victory in the county than Democrats' victory in Jacksonville last Tuesday. In any election in the 2000s, a Democrat winning in Duval County would've meant a landslide victory. But even this wasn't enough to carry Andrew Gillum to victory, or Bill Nelson to victory in the Senate race.
In 2020, Joe Biden lost Florida by three times the margin that Hillary Clinton lost the state to Trump four years earlier. Despite Biden's faltering performance in Florida, he flipped 3(!) counties from red to blue. One of those counties: Duval County!
Once again, Democrats kept getting better in the city of Jacksonville, with suburban voters turning away from the Trump crazy train. But that simply wasn't enough to counter the should-be-obvious fact that Florida is simply too red to waste our money and time. Now, some Democrats would argue that the only reason Biden lost Florida in 2020 was because he severely underperformed in two Cuban-voter-rich counties: Osceola and Miami-Dade counties. But this doesn't actually stand up to the math.
Biden greatly improved on Hillary Clinton's performance in Florida in basically every other county in the state. But the killer was that Trump took Hillary Clinton's 63% in Miami-Dade, and turned it into just 54% for Biden. But suppose that this didn't happen. What if we gave Joe Biden the exact same margin of victory, adjusted for higher turnout, as Hillary Clinton in Miami-Dade and Osceola? Lets do the math:
Miami-Dade County: (2016)
Hillary Clinton: 63.68%
Donald Trump: 34.07%
Miami-Dade County: (2020)
Total voters: 1,158,918
Joe Biden: 617,864
Donald Trump: 532,833
Florida Margin without Miami-Dade:
Donald Trump: 5,135,898
Joe Biden: 4,679,181
Miami-Dade if Biden repeated Clinton margin:
Joe Biden: 1,158,918*0.6368 = 737,999
Donald Trump: 1,158918*0.3407 = 394,843
New Florida Margin:
Donald Trump: 5,530,741 (49.97%)
Joe Biden: 5,417,180 (48.95%)
_______________________________________
Osceola County: (2016)
Hillary Clinton: 60.95%
Donald Trump: 35.88%
Osceola County: (2020)
Total Voters: 172,784
Joe Biden: 97,297
Donald Trump: 73,480
(Adjusted) Florida Margin without Osceola:
Donald Trump: 5,457,261
Joe Biden: 5,319,883
Osceola if Biden repeated Clinton margin:
Joe Biden: 172,784*0.6095 = 105,311
Donald Trump: 172,784*0.3407 = 58,867
New Florida Margin:
Donald Trump: 5,516,128 (49.84%)
Joe Biden: 5,425,194 (49.02%)
If you got lost in the math, I don't blame you. But TDLR, even if Joe Biden did as well as Clinton did in Cuban-heavy areas, he still loses Florida by 0.82%. Sure, that's close. But Miami-Dade is never going to return to the Obama-era levels. The math is clear: Florida is not turning blue in 2024.
And that's ok. Yes, Jacksonville electing a Democrat as mayor was definitely a finger in the eye for DeSantis. But that doesn't mean Democrats should once again throw away money into an expensive state only to lose it by even more than we did four years ago.
Guess what: Those 30 electoral votes are all going to go to Donald Trump in 2024 regardless of whether he wins the state by 100,000 votes or 1,000,000 votes. So unless Democrats want to waste millions of dollars on a large state like Florida, such a venture is pointless. Here's the deal: When Joe Biden loses Florida in 2024 by double digits, two things will happen, neither of them disastrous:
1. Media outlets will call the state as soon as the polls are closed, and Fox News/Newsmax/OANN might use that to make its viewers think Trump is going to win the election.
2. Trump might do slightly better in the popular vote, which he is still guaranteed to lose.
That's it. It doesn't matter. Florida's house seats are already so gerrymandered that losing the state by 10, 20, or even 30 points won't cause any incumbent House Democrats in Florida to lose re-election, and we probably won't pick up a seat even if we make it close. So please, stop the B.S. and invest money in states we can actually flip from red to blue, like North Carolina and Texas. Florida is a waste...of...time!
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