Blast From The Past: Elections Are Looking Tight In Florida

TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Days before the midterms, Florida’s chief financial officer and former state GOP chair warned a crowd of GOP voters that the state had become a “target of our ideological opposition.”

“There is nothing, nothing more that the left wants to do than turn this state blue,” Blaise Ingoglia said at a Brooksville campaign rally. “And if Florida goes, so goes the nation.”

In recent Sunshine State elections, this rhetorical flourish would be seen as normal last-minute hyperbole designed to boost turnout. But for the first time since 2018, there are multiple signs — borne out in polling and the partisan breakdown of early voting and voting by mail — that multiple races statewide in GOP-dominated Florida could be incredibly tight.

Republicans have held the governor’s mansion for close to 30 years — and the Legislature even longer than that. Outgoing Gov. Ron DeSantis romped in his reelection battle four years ago. President Donald Trump has won the state three times since 2016. The entire state Cabinet is made up of Republicans, and the GOP holds a supermajority in the Legislature. Currently 20 of the state’s 28 House members are Republican, as are the state’s two senators.

But that dominance could see a sharp challenge Tuesday. Despite dramatically outspending his rival, GOP Rep. Byron Donalds is locked in a tight race for governor with former Rep. David Jolly, the Democratic nominee. It’s not clear if Republicans will flip a handful of Democratic House seats that state GOP lawmakers significantly altered this year due to middecade redistricting.

And in her bid to hold on to her seat, GOP Sen. Ashley Moody does have a bigger lead over Democratic state Rep. Angie Nixon than Donalds does in his race, according to recent polls. But even that contest is closer than expected.

Many Republicans — including DeSantis — have become skittish over GOP turnout. At one point last week, DeSantis posted on social media that he wasn’t satisfied with Republican early voting numbers coming out of Polk County, a ruby-red county along Florida’s important Interstate 4 corridor.

“When I was running four years ago, you could have put hot coals on the ground in front of the polling place, and our people were going to walk over those barefoot,” DeSantis said at an event in Crystal River. “They wanted to vote; it was just a different time. … I definitely think Republicans have some work to do, and you guys just have to get out there and vote.”

A Donalds or Nixon victory would be historic; Florida has never had a Black governor or senator. If Democrats were able to pull out statewide wins — including the race for governor — it will mark a monumental change of fortune for the beleaguered party.

Florida was once the premier battleground state in the nation, including the chaotic 2000 presidential recount that came down to just 537 votes. Barack Obama won the state twice. But ever since DeSantis and Rick Scott barely edged out their Democratic opponents eight years ago, Democrats have lost their voter registration edge and multiple elections across offices.

Fernand Amandi, a senior adviser to the Jolly campaign, said a Democrat winning the governor’s mansion would mark a “tectonic shift in American politics.”

“It means the road to 270 electoral votes would be rerouted through Florida,” Armandi said. He added it would make Jolly the “ultimate new kingmaker” for Democrats.

Hurdles for Republicans, meanwhile, have been mounting: This year’s midterms mark the first time that neither DeSantis nor Trump will be on the ballot in 10 years. Voters routinely cite their focus on economic anxieties over gas prices, inflation and the cost of living. And to try and ensure turnout despite it all, Trump himself has come to Florida twice in the past two weeks, where he has held rallies in reliably Republican counties.

Evan Power, the chair of the Republican Party of Florida, acknowledged in a recent interview with Newsmax that Trump “helps our turnout.”

“I’m confident we will have big wins next week,” Power said. “We just have to turn out every Republican voter possible.”

Donalds said that “whether it's close or it's a blowout doesn't matter to me. We always work hard no matter what the game is. No matter what the game plan is for, you do everything that you can every single day."

He acknowledged the election was tighter than expected, but added: "We are still going to go out and work every single day. We know that we are going to have a lot of Republican voters who are going to show up to the polls over this weekend and on Tuesday.”

Nikki Fried, the Florida Democratic chair, retorted that the need for Trump to campaign in his home state showed that Republicans were worried.

“This is a last-ditch effort to prop up Republican campaigns that are flailing,” Fried said a few hours before Trump’s appearance in Daytona Beach.

The vote Tuesday will be the culmination of an unpredictable and at-times contentious cycle, including Nixon’s upset victory in the Democratic primary and Donalds’ ability to remain the front-runner in the Republican primary despite DeSantis refusing to back him until after the August vote.

Those left at the top of the ticket represent stark contrasts. In the governor’s race, Donalds has vowed to keep Florida’s conservative tilt and remain faithful to the vast array of policy changes put in place by DeSantis. Jolly, a former anti-Trump Republican who only became a Democrat last year after about seven years as an independent, has maintained he will brush aside the “culture wars” of the DeSantis era and instead focus on cost-of-living issues. The two men have also advocated different policies on everything from taxes to insurance, education to data centers.

The dividing line in the Senate race is even wider. Moody, a former state attorney general who was appointed to replace Marco Rubio, has voted consistently to support Trump’s agenda. She approved the president’s tax cuts and on more than a dozen occasions voted against efforts to limit the president’s authority in the war in Iran. Moody, a fierce defender of law enforcement officers, has branded her Democratic opponent as a “radical” given that Nixon joined the Democratic Socialists of America this year, though she disavowed some of its platforms like defunding the police.

Nixon, a state legislator known for her bold floor tactics and an avowed progressive firebrand, has tried to energize young voters and stalwart Democrats as she has assailed Moody over her fealty to Trump and DeSantis, including her role in approving the transfer of funds from a Medicaid settlement that eventually was routed to a political committee controlled by a DeSantis ally.

Nixon, whose background is in union and community organizing, is running on promises to tax billionaires and implement “Medicare for all” and universal childcare. She has been the most active campaigner this season, making numerous stops and media interviews every day in her signature hot pink outfits and traveling in the “Vangie” — a van bearing her image.

In the last three election cycles in Florida, there had not been much intrigue and speculation heading into the final days. This year has brought more suspense.

“How red could Election Day be? That is the multimillion-dollar question," said Matthew Isbell, a Democratic data analyst in Tallahassee. "Either this is a clear sign of a GOP turnout disaster, or it's going to be such a red Election Day that will really make it where future early vote analysis will be pointless."

Kimberly Leonard contributed to this report.