that’s going to make Florida even redder
I think that’s the point of DeSantis’ policies, to make it as uncomfortable for typically Democratic voting people to live or do their jobs there as possible. And unfortunately it’s working, and shouldn’t be seen as a negative consequence to the Republicans. For keeping themselves in power, this is gold.
The people who are going to suffer the most from this are the residence of Florida. Even from a schadenfreude pov, those residence aren’t just Republican voters. but people who don’t have the luxury of packing up and leaving. This also includes many disenfranchised voters probably don’t like the state of decay in their state, but can’t do anything to stop it or escape it.
Yeah, unfortunately I have a feeling like the people who saw this coming and got the hell out of Dodge had a lot of overlap with the people best positioned to meaningfully resist.
Absolutely, he’s said it out loud.
Before it becomes blue again #ClimateChange
This is exactly what he wants. Uneducated masses are exploitable and subject to propaganda.
Brain drain or not, they’re about to seize the Senate permanently if enough democratic-leaning people leave the state. Our country will be held hostage by a minority party
That ship already sailed. Florida is fucked.
From 2002-2022, Florida has held six elections for four statewide political offices: governor, attorney general, chief financial officer, and agricultural secretary. Of the 24 combined elections, democrats won two: CFO in 2006 and agricultural secretary in 2018. Dems won two senate races in that same time frame (2006 and 2012 with incumbent Bill Nelson), and two presidential elections (2008 and 2012, with Obama).
The state has been drifting right ever since the early 2010s. That’s been magnified lately.
The best outcome for democrats is they leave Florida in a mass exodus and go to other states that are close. Locking down nearby Georgia and North Carolina would be way more useful. Any gains in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania would be invaluable. Further away, moving Texas left quicker would be great, and Arizona is far from locked down. Adding more house seats (and electoral votes) to blue states would be better too, since Florida is going to stay gerrymandered to reduce voter power as much as possible.
All we’ll get out of Florida is heartbreak. The state is already lost and we should act with that knowledge in hand. Turn it into a republican vote sink so that conservatives leave purple states for it and have the left leave Florida for purple states.
That is a great perspective on the situation. I hadn’t quite realized how lost Florida already was to Democrats, and I agree that blue voters can have a huge impact elsewhere.
Thanks!
One way to put some perspective on this too is with some numbers.
In 2022 every statewide democrat on the ballot got over 3m votes in Florida. In 2020 Biden got over 5m votes. Turnout craters for midterms so this is not atypical.
In 2022 dems lost the NC senate election by 120k votes, the WI senate election by 30k votes, the GA governor by 300k votes, AZ superintendent by 10k votes, WI treasurer by 10k votes, and NV governor by 10k votes… Among many other close elections. There were also absurdly close calls in the elections we won in NV, WI, and AZ all off the top of my head. Texas needs bigger numbers to get over the finish line, but we lost the governor’s race by 900k in 2022 and the senate race by 215k in 2018.
Ignoring Texas and Georgia, all of those lost elections could be flipped with absolutely trivial population shifts out of Florida. I’m not going to pretend that the left is magically going to start leaving Florida in electorally strategic ways (people don’t think like that!), but even just getting 500k FL voters to leave is going to see those trivial shifts start to happen organically anyway.
New York fell 89 residents short of keeping its 27th congressional district in 2020. I cannot for the life of me find the actual numbers for other seats, but Arizona would have had seat 440, California seat 441, Virginia 442, Michigan 444, and New Jersey 445. It wouldn’t have required too huge of a population shift to those states to give them each an additional house seat, and if the exodus was from red states that would be a shift of red->blue in the electoral college and hopefully also the house.
You know it’s bad when a State known for being a mecca for retirees has enough smart people bail that it can dip the interlectual average down farther than all those poor old folks’ fading faculties already do.
It’s not a big, it’s a feature
