Let's Talk About Florida

And why the rest of the country should be thanking us

By Bob Morris, columnist

Hello, hungry people.

No matter what side of the political fence you fall on — and these days, it’s a high-voltage, barbed-wire, soaked-in-cyanide fence — there’s one thing that unites our great nation today:

Post-election fatigue.

None of us wants to read another word about WHAT IT ALL MEANS or WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE or HOW SOON CAN WE IMPEACH (fill in the blank.)

***

Be that as it may, forgive me, we need to talk about Florida.

A headline in yesterday’s New York Times read: “Florida: A GOP Bright Spot.”

It ain’t exactly true.

Because if Florida is a GOP bright spot, then the future for Team R looks increasingly dim.

And if, as Gov. Ron “Out-of-the-Gate for ‘28” DeSantis crowed the day after the election, “Florida is the last main anchor standing for Republicans,” then he should stop mixing his metaphors and recognize that the anchor is dragging and our state is adrift.

I’m not saying Florida is surfing the wave to blue statehood, like our good neighbors in Georgia. Heck, we’re not even in purple waters.

But the red tide that has tainted us in recent years? It’s turning kinda pinkish.

***

Let’s remember that it wasn’t all that long ago — 2008 and 2012, to be exact — that Florida went for Obama and Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a comfortable margin.

Then began the “Great Red Migration,” prompted by three things: COVID and DeSantis’s lax masking and vaccine measures; low taxes; and Donald Trump taking up official residency at Mar-A-Lago in 2019. It all led swarms of ultra-right leaning folks to move here. In The Villages (pop. 157,000), a magnet for the MAGA crowd, the head count increased by 67 percent from 2019 through 2025.

Nowadays, registered Republicans outnumber Democrats in Florida by 1.4 million. So you might reasonably expect that any statewide election would be a Republican rout, as it was in 2022 when DeSantis won almost 60 percent of the vote.

Nope.

Bryan Donalds, our new governor, barely got 50 percent of the vote. The race was a sand-dune hanger until the end. The incumbent U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody, who was predicted to win by a 10-12 percent margin, came out only 2 percentage points ahead of Angie Nixon, who is, horrors of horrors, a Democratic socialist.

***

There’s more.

DeSantis and the Florida Legislature did their best to gerrymander Congressional districts to get rid of four Democratic incumbents, in one case creating a district that slithered through seven counties.

Didn’t work.

All four Democrats won, bolstering the now-lopsided U.S. House majority.

And Dems prevailed in enough local races — one big upset: Maitland Mayor John Lowndes defeating two-term incumbent Jason Brodeur for a Florida Senate seat — that they toppled the Republican super-majority that has ruled the Florida Legislature for years.

If you call that a “GOP bright spot,” here’s some advice: Go see an eye doctor.

***
As for Ron DeSantis …

Can I get a big WHEW! of relief, please?

There have been plenty of rumors down here about where he would next inflict himself when his term as governor ends.

The most horrifying one started last year when DeSantis had to fill the U.S. Senate seat of Marco Rubio, now U.S. secretary of state. Lots of folks fully expected DeSantis to appoint himself, since running for president was off the table after he had proved so unpopular on the national stage when going up against Trump in the 2024 Republican primaries. He could just slide into the Senate and play his cards from there. Instead, he tapped Ashley Moody, his attorney general, to fill the seat.

What was the term-limited DeSantis thinking?

Well, maybe he had his eye on an ever cushier seat than the Senate. There was talk that either Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito, or maybe both, would step down from the Supreme Court and that DeSantis had an insider agreement with Trump to fill one of their seats. The appointment would require only a simple majority vote of the Senate for approval. Which looked like a fairly safe bet until . . . well, you know what happened on Tuesday.

The latest rumor: Trump will dump Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and appoint DeSantis in his place.

Will the world be a better place as a result? Beats me. But at least it would get DeSantis out of our hair.

***
The rest of the country should be thanking Florida for the results of the mid-term election.

At least, that’s the opinion of my friend Scott Maxwell, the ever-astute columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. While I don’t think Florida was wholly responsible for the national outcome, or even largely responsible — there were so many solid Democratic candidates and so many sorry, Trump-backed Republican ones — I like Scott’s thinking on the matter.

It all goes back to the “Great Red Migration” mentioned above, which also prompted a goodly number of Florida’s Democratic voters to move elsewhere, along with young people looking for more profitable and compatible pastures.

Writes Scott: “There’s actually an argument to be made that Florida’s migration patterns helped turn the rest of the country blue. Every conservative voter that moved to Florida, after all, was one less who could cast a ballot elsewhere. And every dollar spent getting Republicans across the finish line in Florida was one less dollar that could be spent in states like Ohio, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina, all of which turned blue.”

So, on behalf of my fellow blue voters in Florida, to our compatriots throughout the rest of our great nation, I say: “You’re welcome.”

WinterParkVoiceEditor@gmail.com

This commentary originally appeared on Bob Morris’ Substack. A former newspaper columnist and magazine editor, Bob is author of the Zack Chasteen series of mysteries set in Florida and the Caribbean, along with several non-fiction books and collections of essays. A fourth-generation Floridian, he lives in Winter Park.