Florida is no longer a battleground state that decides presidential elections, but its big and messy politics still says plenty about political parties, American voters and the forces shaping their decisions.
Tuesday’s primaries for Senate and governor were not expected to be especially competitive, yet the dynamics in the races have reflected the restive moment in national politics. And that is what keeps fascinating me about covering elections as a political reporter based in Miami.
Florida, like the rest of the nation, has leaned to the right. But the state’s diverse voters have remained something of a barometer of more mainstream American political sentiment.
They have elected Republicans such as President Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis while also approving liberal ballot measures to restore felons’ voting rights, raise the minimum wage and legalize medical marijuana. In 2024, 57 percent of voters favored a measure that would have guaranteed abortion rights, short of the 60 percent it needed to pass. (Florida banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.)
The lesson for me has been that voters’ views are often more nuanced than they may appear when they elect candidates with an “R” or a “D” next to the name — which may be a microcosm of national voter tendencies.
Capturing that complexity has meant interviewing a Republican state senator from the Miami area who sounded the alarm to her party about backlash over harsh immigration enforcement. It has also meant trailing the canvassers of long-shot progressive candidates as they tried to prove that many Florida voters wanted to embrace their values.
Republicans endorsed by Mr. Trump, such as Byron Donalds in the governor’s race, are charting the course for MAGA’s future. Moderate Democrats like David Jolly in the governor’s race and Alexander Vindman in the Senate race are trying to resuscitate their party’s troubled brand. And progressive underdogs like Angie Nixon in the Senate race and Oliver Larkin and Elijah Manley in two House races have been showing signs of life in a state where such candidates have often not done well.
As in much of the South, many congressional races in Florida will be all but decided in primaries as a result of a new map that Republican state lawmakers gerrymandered in their favor, to add up to four new Republican seats. Only one open seat is considered competitive in the November general election, and it is a district that Mr. Trump won in 2024 by nine percentage points.
A decade or so ago, such a solid Republican lean would have seemed nearly unthinkable. Though Republicans have long dominated in Tallahassee, the state capital, presidential races remained nail-biters. After 2016, though, even those contests leaned more and more in Republicans’ favor.
I’ve been watching and covering the remarkable in Florida evolution for some time. I helped cover my first Florida election in 2008, when I was a cub reporter at The Miami Herald, and then worked my way through more local, state and federal races than I can count. (I still regret not getting to write about the often heated elections to the Florida Keys mosquito control board.) In 2016, I was The Herald’s lead political writer when two Miami Republicans, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, ran for president, giving me a taste of the national campaign trail.
When I joined The New York Times in 2017 as the Miami bureau chief, I gave up covering politics full time. But it remained a major part of my portfolio during those close 2018 and 2020 election cycles. In 2018, the Senate and governor’s races both came down to recounts. Mr. DeSantis, who would go on to become one of the country’s most prominent Republican figures, was first elected governor that year by about 32,000 votes out of the more than 8.1 million votes cast. He would go on to win re-election in 2022 by a margin of 1.5 million votes, a landslide. (He ran for president in 2024.)
During Mr. DeSantis’s eight years in office, voter registrations in Florida have swung from a Democratic edge of about 250,000 to a Republican cushion of more than 1.5 million. That is a structural advantage difficult for Democrats to easily overcome, even as more and more Floridians are registering without party affiliation.
A few months ago, I started covering politics full time again as a national political correspondent for The Times. You know those pictures of meerkats peering out from their holes in the ground? That is how I feel sometimes, peering outside my Florida burrow to explore how candidates, voters and political parties act in other states now more crucial to determining control of Congress and the White House.
When I went to Georgia this spring, for instance, it felt like Florida did a decade ago, the belle of the battleground ball.
The difference is, now I know how quickly that can change.
