How DeSantis and the GOP Won the Florida Numbers Game

By Michael Smith, Andre Tartar and Christopher Cannon

November 11, 2022, 12:00 PM EST

The seeds for the Republican Party’s sweeping gains across Florida on Tuesday were planted in early 2019, when then newly elected Governor Ron DeSantis pushed for an overhaul of party strategy to get more people registered and voting.

DeSantis had beaten Democratic challenger Andrew Gillum by just 32,463 votes, or a 0.4 percentage point margin. He told Republican leaders that registering more voters was critical to expanding the party’s mandate, triggering a years-long push to build support, according to three senior officials involved in the effort.

On Tuesday, they say, it paid off. DeSantis increased his share of the vote across all of Florida’s 67 counties by a median of 8 percentage points compared with 2018, based on results as of November 10. In Miami, he gained 16.3 points, flipping a long-time Democratic stronghold.

DeSantis beat challenger Charlie Crist by 1.5 million votes, or 46 times the 2018 margin of victory. Senator Marco Rubio upped his county share of the vote by a median of 6.7 points, clinching victory, while Republican House members saw an increase of 6.2 points.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaking to his supporters during an election night watch party in Tampa. Photographer: Giorgio Viera / AFP via Getty Images

“You don’t get these results overnight. It takes time,” said Helen Ferré, DeSantis’s former communications director whom the governor named as Florida’s Republican party chief in 2020. “It was the governor’s initiative to do that.”

Republican committees in every Florida county organized registration drives, adding over 553,000 voters to statewide GOP rolls since 2018, after adjusting for people who died, moved, switched parties or stopped voting, party officials say. By Election Day, the GOP had 292,000 more registered voters than Democrats, state data show, flipping a 257,000-vote Democratic advantage in 2018. In essence, the GOP had overturned a historic Democratic advantage.

Source: Florida Division of Elections (with Aug. 31, 2021 figures accessed using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine); net Republican share is calculated as the Republican share minus the Democratic share of active registered voters

Party officials say they got there by knocking on 2 million doors to try to register people to vote Republican. It didn’t come cheap: DeSantis and the Florida Republican Party spent $89.4 million on advertising alone, according to AdImpact, which tracks political spending.

Early on, the party focused on flipping Miami by pitching Latinos on DeSantis’s pledges to resist government mandates like Covid restrictions. The goal was to appeal to voters whose families fled repressive regimes in countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. “We know that movie, and we know that never ends well,” said Ferré, an immigrant from Nicaragua.

The party also drew new voters from the record net migration of 776,000 people into Florida in the two years ending last July. DeSantis has said that many of those newcomers were drawn by his decision to reopen schools and businesses in July 2020, far earlier than most states, joining the ranks of his supporters.

“We benefited from the flow of people into Florida during the pandemic,” said Ryan Tyson, the governor’s senior political adviser.

“We have beaten Democrats on new registrants for 29 months in a row,” said Tyson, who worked on the voter registration efforts.

By election night, Republicans had swept longtime Democratic strongholds in Miami, Palm Beach and Tampa, helping propel DeSantis to victory with 59.4% of the vote, to Crist’s 40%. In Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county, DeSantis won by 11.3 points, reversing a 21-point loss in 2018.

The election results mean Florida’s governor, two US senators and all cabinet-level statewide positions will be held by Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction, according to the Tallahassee Democrat. The Democratic Party now holds eight state House seats, down from a high of 13 four years ago. Until 1990, Democrats represented a majority of Florida’s House districts.

“Now, we have an historical advantage over Democrats,” Ferré said.

Sources: House results from the Associated Press (2022) and MIT Election Data and Science Lab (prior cycles)

At his victory rally Tuesday night in Tampa, DeSantis described the party’s drive to expand as critical. “It’s clearly apparent that in this election we will have garnered a significant number of votes from people who may not have voted for me four years ago,” he said.

Ferré is already talking to GOP officials about how to apply Florida’s strategies nationwide. “Florida is a blueprint that other Republicans in other states can follow,” she said.

How DeSantis and the GOP Won the Florida Numbers Game

More Voters, More Votes

GOP Dominates State Delegation

How DeSantis and the GOP Won the Florida Numbers Game

Gains Across the Board

More Voters, More Votes

Inroads With Hispanic Voters

GOP Dominates State Delegation