Right: Underthink Crist's Florida Primary win
or the Perils of Being Ron
Ron Desantis has spent the past 3 years acting as though he won the governorship of Florida by 10 points and has campaigned for the last 6 months like Republican running in Idaho.
The problem, despite Wikipedia’s notation on the 2022 Florida gubernatorial election that the Democrats last won a governor’s race in the Sunshine State in 1994 (it’s true), is how close the gubernatorial races have been in the last 3 elections or that no Florida governor has won over 50% of the vote since 2006.
The winning percentages in 2010, 2014, and 2018 were 48.9%, 48.1%, and 49.6%. The losers (all Democrats) won 47.7%, 47.1%, and 49.2%.
To save everyone from doing the math, the margins of victory were 2.2%, 2%, and 0.4%. And the raw vote differentials were 61,550 (2010), 64,145 (2014), and 32,463 (2018). Calling DeSantis’s 2018 victory razor thin is a white glove challenge to the engineers as Schick And Bic.
The last governor to break the 50% mark was (then) moderate Republican Charlie Crist1. Crist switched parties shortly after the 2012 election and has been a moderate Democratic congressman from a formerly reliably GOP leaning district2 since 2016.
Before Democrats get too excited, he was also the Democratic nominee for governor in 2014 — the one that received 47.1%. That said, the political dynamics are present in Florida to change the political map nationally for the next several decades.
How?
Well, let’s start with what happened in the general election in 20183.
Ron DeSantis won in a nailbiter against Andrew Gillum in 2018.
There is an old saying about about Florida, “the farther north one goes, the further south it gets.” Conventional Democratic political strategy has been to maximize turnout along the state’s Atlantic coast.
While not wrong per se, it fails to see that there are enough coral colored counties in central and southwestern Florida to make political inroads in counties that lean Right of Center.
Why is that important? Take a look at the Democratic primary map for 20184.
Andrew Gillum, the Mayor of Tallahassee, faced off against Gwen Graham, a one term Member of Congress5 and daughter of former Senator and Governor Bob Graham, Philip Levine, former Miami Beach mayor, and Jeff Greene, a real estate investor.
The real contest, though, was between Gillum (blue on the map) and Graham (green on the map). Gillum beat Graham in the primary by 2%6 with a raw vote margin of 44,682. But Graham did well where Republicans usually do okay (coral colored results).
When Charlie Crist won in 2006, it was with 52.2% of the vote. Since then, as mentioned above, pluralities have taken Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis to the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee. And Rick Scott’s opponents in 2010 (Alex Sink, Florida’s Chief Financial Officer) and 2014 (Charlie Crist) were swimming against very Red currents, politically.
On August 23rd, Charlie Crist won the Florida Democratic primary rather convincingly against Nikki Fried, Florida’s Commissioner of Agriculture, 59.7% to 35.3%.
More importantly is that Crist performed extremely well in central and southwestern Florida.7
While the Democrats seem obsessed with winning in Pennsylvania, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia (judging from my inbox); it’s worth noting that Pennsyvania has a pretty Blue trend going with governors of late (they’ve held the office 16 of the last 20 years), Arizona and Georgia are fairly periwinkle, and the Texas Democratic Party is a few election cycles away from being truly competitive.
Florida, on the other hand, is a purple state that could easily be solid blue; but for the gamesmanship done by the Florida GOP controlled legislature with regard to Amendment 4 (a referendum that would have allowed former felons to get back their rights -- it passed with 65% ).8
Amendment 4 would have restored voting rights to well over 1.5 million Florida adults. And while Ron DeSantis sits in Tallassee, they’ll remain disenfranchised.
Charlie Crist sitting in the governor’s mansion could change that.
Crist won in 2006 with 52.% and won by a a margin of 7.1%. The raw vote differential was 341,556 votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida%27s_13th_congressional_district
By Walk Like an Egyptian (talk) (contribs) - File:Florida Governor Election Results by County, 2014.svg (public domain), CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74228278
By Kart2401real - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87650790
The Florida GOP controlled legislature redistricted her into a far more Republican leaning district and she declined to run for reelection.
Gillum received 34.3% of the votes, Graham, 31.3%, Levine 20.3%, and Greene 10.1%.
By MisterWat3rm3l0n - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=122295489
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/06/republicans-florida-amendment-4-voting-rights